Inherent Value

Philosopher Julian Baggini has a nice harrumph about why so many things today — from art and singing to sex and nature — are marketed as “means to ends” instead of in their own right.

He laments an art gallery pass, which twists the arm of potential art lovers not by pointing out the inherent beauty of paintings but by the hours it’ll statistically add to the end of your life thanks to art’s scientifically-quantified destressing power.

I wonder what advocates of this logic imagine people will do with the extra longevity? Art won’t appeal anymore if it has no inherent value.

I have seen countless other examples of all the things that are good in life being promoted not for their own sake but for the material benefits they bring. This instrumentalisation has become normalised so insidiously that we don’t even notice that it is odd, let alone wrong. Nor do we seem to be aware of quite how pervasive it is. Yet its effects are profound, leading us to lose sight again and again of what is truly of value in life.

I’ve noticed it too. “Listen to birdsong to reduce your stress levels.” How about just “listen to birdsong”? Why wouldn’t you want to listen to birdsong?

Intrinsic human goods include all the things that make life worth living without need of any further justification. To ask of them: “What’s the point?” would be to miss the point. They are the point.

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There’s a day left on our Kickstarter to get Escape Everything! back into print. Thanks to the 60 people who have pledged so far.

Every Reason to Hate Cars

This is a lot like my anti-car essay back in Issue 3 (later filleted for the Idler), BUT MORE SO.

It’s based on a very good academic paper called Car Harm (2024).

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The Kickstarter has made target (thank you), but will remain open for 10 more days. The new book will probably be an exclusive for bookshops and not available on the site, so this might be your one chance to snaffle it up. Go! Go!

Vast and Calm

The artist Landis Blair, normally based in busy Chicago, has retreated for a few days to a cabin in remote Wisconsin.

In his newsletter he writes:

[I revisited] a number of the principles and ideas of […] the magazine and newsletter New Escapologist, which showcases writings and wisdom about escaping the daily grind.

and:

in spite of feeling like I was physically and mentally moving far more slowly through my days, I was in fact getting more work done than I have in a long time. […] I can’t help wondering whether part of this shift in perspective was due to the expansive view of the frozen lake that I saw every time I looked up from my work. Seeing something so vast and calm seemed to put everything into perspective. This book I was agonizing over really didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. And if something like that lake, which is far grander and more important than anything I will ever accomplish, can exist with such calm, it is hard not to absorb some of that energy and begin to act in a like manner.

Ah, lovely-lovely.

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The Kickstarter has made target (thank you), but will remain open for 11 more days. The new book will probably be an exclusive for bookshops and not available on the site, so this might be your one chance to snaffle it up. Go! Go!

I Finally Stopped Delaying

I took a six month sabbatical from work and halfway through that sabbatical, I quit my job. I started to live in the moment instead of the future. I went swimming in a local lake. I read books. I walked by the canal. I visited a friend in Devon. I started writing my newsletter. I ran in the park. I took magic lessons. And I finally stopped delaying all the things I was waiting to do and started doing them.

In turn, I stopped delaying my life.

New Escapologist contributor Tom Grundy has put together a very nice PDF called How to Work Your Way.

After a nice intro (where the quote above came from), Tom interviews six people with unusual ideas about work. “Every one of them left their corporate jobs,” says Tom. I’m one of those people!

Tom cautions us that this isn’t a book about how to quit your job, but rather a guide to the “invisible scripts” that can hold you back when you’re trying to decide what to do with your life. Check it out, it’s good.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 (containing Tom Grundy’s column as well as others) is available now.

Landfill

apart from the fear that I’ll one day have a use for the thing I’m binning, the thought of anything going into landfill weighs heavily on my soul.

Adrian “Urinal” Chiles writes amusingly about decluttering today.

Don’t worry too much about the landfill thing, Adrian. Do your best to intercept the passage to landfill but remember that (a) all things are destined for landfill except for those that remain aboveground when the asteroid hits, and (b) everything is already landfill.

“Waste” happens not at the end of a manufactured thing’s life, in landfill, but at the start of its life when raw materials are extracted from the Earth.

Nobody seems to get this. It is my contribution to the eco/bins/minimalism conversation.

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The Kickstarter has made target (thank you), but will remain open for two more weeks. The new book will probably be an exclusive for bookshops and not available on the site, so this might be your one chance to snaffle it up. Go! Go!