Escapology: A Third Way

Thanks to New Escapologist contributor Andy for drawing our attention to this excellent long read by Gen-Z writer Martin Dolan. It contains some brilliant Workplace Woe and a great review of the recent antiwork literature coming out of radical and leftwing academic presses.

I’m hardly the first person to feel anxious about spending my day doing seemingly arbitrary tasks. So much ink has been spilled on workplace angst that it’s become something of a cottage industry, from the countless pop psychologists hawking ways to Win Friends and Influence People to the nearly equal number of critics of such self-help gurus among thinkers and academics on the left.

Ooh! Ooh! That’s me! I’m all of those things!

The through line of these books is clear—between hustle culture, the gig economy, AI-proselytizing fraudsters and the deregulation-obsessed neoliberals eager to bankroll them, there’s a lot of bullshit in the contemporary American workplace. And yet besides the few remaining infographic warriors who think the point of democratic socialism should be to abolish work altogether, there’s an unspoken defeatist consensus about what options workers have: you can fight to organize your labor, or else give in to the system.

I could never in a quadrillion years be described an “infographic warrior” (I’ve never knowingly made an infographic and I choose flight over a fight every day) but I do think the point of democratic socialism would be to abolish work. Or, rather, abolish for wage slavery. It should make basic dignity into an inalienable human right not dependent on full-time work.

The “unspoken defeatist consensus” meanwhile is something I’ve noticed too and I offer a third way. Escape the system.

I’m frustrated by how these left thinkers seem implicitly to dismiss the possibility of fulfilling work altogether—at least until after we’ve gotten rid of capitalism.

Well, it’s not that fulfilling work can’t be found until after capitalism, but that the most fulfilling work available now takes part fully or partially outside of today’s capitalist structures. I’m thinking about voluntary sector work, charity work, care, certain corners of academia, my own survival-level artistic practice. We can create our own niches. Money doesn’t = “capitalism,” remember. Industry can be organised along socialist or cooperative or other recognised lines.

For those workers not already involved in politics, or for young people who are sympathetic to the cause while simultaneously trying to get a foothold in their economic lives, they offer little guidance about how to approach the bulk of the day, from nine to five. Because even if you spend your evenings trying to change the world, what do you tell yourself to make it through your shift?

writing off the average American worker as either a naïve dupe or an embattled burnout is reductive, an easy intellectual out. It skirts the messier question: Even if the contemporary economy is inherently exploitative, does the left have anything constructive to say about finding meaningful work within it anyway?

I wrote that book. It’s called The Good Life for Wage Slaves. I feel so unseen.

I do wonder why New Escapologist and my spin-off books are so untalked about when (in my opinion and by Martin Dolan’s identification of what’s “missing” on the Bullshit Left) they offer a great deal. I wish I could shout a bit louder sometimes to get noticed, but I don’t want to do the social media time. And it’s not like my sales numbers are in the toilet. People do buy my books.

Anyway, Dolan rates Elizabeth Anderson as a writer who has squared the circle of modern work:

Anderson’s notion of the progressive work ethic might just be more compellingly “countercultural” than yet another broadside against the absurdity of having a job under capitalism. Her ideas channel the structural frustration of the bullshit-jobs left while holding on to the notion that work can be more than a scam or a chore. It grants permission to groan about bad, unfulfilling work without conceding that all work is always bad.

Sounds good. But Anderson also confesses to being Work Ethic-added herself:

I do not only work to live, but live to work. I confess that these dispositions impel me to a poor work/life balance. But they have also rewarded me with meaningful, interesting work, immense autonomy, and honored achievements as well as financial security. Yet I aim to criticize the work ethic for what it has become: an ideological rationalization for the stigmatization and deprivation of the poor, the precarity of the working classes, and the dominion of capital interests over all other interests of humanity.

This absolutely does not make her a hypocrite and it does not compromise what she’s saying. That even she isn’t free is evidence of the Work Ethic’s pervasiveness, its searching tentacles seeking out every uncolonised space. But it does mean she works inside The Trap. She’s a hologram talking to other holograms.

While I don’t want to double down on anything too hard or be closed minded, Escapology really is a workable third way.

Just leave the holodeck. Walk away. I love my “work” just as Anderson does, but it’s only an outcropping — one of several visible fruiting bodies — from a well-designed life.

If I find myself writing for one of my books at 2am, it’s not because I’m an ambitious go-getter or because my identity depends on hard work or because I’m trying to get ahead of other people. It’s just because the muse has struck at a strange hour and, thanks to not having to be up in the morning if I don’t want to be, I can act insanely if I want to. Most of the time, I don’t want to. I just go to bed. Or read a book. Or talk to my wife. Or write to a friend.

*

Escapology. I swear, it’s what’s for dinner. If you don’t have a copy of Escape Everything! you can pre-order the strictly-limited tenth anniversary edition here and buy The Good Life for Wage Slaves here.