A Promotion or Worse
Meanwhile, in New Zealand again:
Auckland ad man Joshua Jack said he sensed the bad news when he received an email from his agency employer telling him they needed to have a meeting to discuss his role this week. “I thought, it’s either a promotion or worse. I thought it was best to bring in a professional — so I paid $200 and hired a clown.”
As a clown myself, I would hereby like to offer my services to employed New Escapologist readers. $200 NZD plus travel expenses. I’ll sit with you, silently (my style of clowning), in a meeting. I’ll wear a sharp suit and a red nose.
The clown mimed crying as Jack’s employers slid the redundancy paperwork across the table and created a balloon unicorn and poodle to lighten the mood.
“It was sort of noisy, him making balloon animals, so we did have to tell him to be quiet from time to time.”
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New Escapologist Issue 18 is now available to order for prompt shipping in November.
When It Suddenly Occurred to Me
I love hearing about an epiphany: when people remember the moment they snapped, the precise second they decided enough was enough.
Here’s a beauty from the poet Michael Shann:
September 1989, Liverpool. I was 22 and had just begun an accountancy course that would guarantee a secure career in NHS finance for the next 40 years. It all felt wrong. I should have been in a lecture but was walking up Ranelagh Street towards the Adelphi Hotel when it suddenly occurred to me. I’m a poet.
It’s perfect. He remembers the place, the idea, the feeling:
It struck me with such a blow of truth and clarity that I walked straight down Lime Street to the Central Library, found a place at one of the big reading tables and wrote my first poem.
Did you spot the truly unusual part? It’s the part where he did something about it.
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New Escapologist Issue 18 is now available to order for prompt shipping in November.
Dream Job
Heather Delaney is a fibre artist who also runs a blog about her nomadic lifestyle.
“Quit your job,” she says, “sell your stuff, make your life yours.” We couldn’t agree more.
Here’s one of her recent artworks, a weaving of one of our favourite antiwork sentiments. It’s a suggestion of what to say when you’re asked about your “dream job”:
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The Escape of Mark Russell
Thanks to Reader C for drawing our attention to the story of Mark Russell who cashed in his Pokémon cards in a successful bid for escape.
With the money, he quit his job in PR to travel New Zealand in a camper van.
As a result of the windfall … he’s been able to buy the 2019 ex-rental Carado RV, while boosting the bank accounts of his family. He’s quit fulltime work, packing in corporate life for rolling countryside.
The inspiration to travel — pay attention, kids — came not from sudden wealth but from reading:
“Many years ago, I was captivated by the book Blue Highways [by William Least Heat-Moon], a story about his journey around the back roads of the United States, and I guess that’s what I’m doing here,” says Russell.
Mark now spends his time (over 100 days now) experiencing beauty and talking to fellow travellers. And, naturally, he reflects that:
your working life may not have been as important as you thought at the time.
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I Never Heard From Them Again
Did leaving in a viral blaze of glory hamper his ability to get another job? Not in the slightest. Soon after leaving, DeFrancesco began working in a museum. He says the incident has “honestly never come up” in job interviews since. In fact, he says it might be something to “put on the résumé”.
This is Joey DeFrancesco speaking, 15 years after making headlines for quitting his crappy hotel job with the help of of brass band.
For anyone wondering if quitting a job suddenly or spectacularly or on a whim might ruin their future job prospects, this is clear evidence that you need not worry. The world of work wants you.
There’s a lengthy piece in the Guardian today (on Monday morning, naturally) about people who quit their jobs loudly and outrageously.
Believe it or not, I don’t encourage this. I encourage quitting for sure, but I find this sort of spectacle a bit nauseating and it might scare or upset the people you’re leaving behind – most of whom are there under duress, just as you were.
It’s better to send a dignified email, work your notice, explain politely why you’re leaving, and deposit one last paycheque before scarpering.
Still, it’s important to remember that walking out doesn’t defy the laws of physics. You can just go:
“Two months [notice]? You’re lucky if I give you fucking two weeks. I gave you two hours, babe. I’m leaving now.”
But even the quiet dignity of an “I quit” email can instil a wonderful feeling of liberty:
After the email was sent, her boss tried to call her. She didn’t pick up the phone. “I never heard from them again,” she says. After Carly left the office for the final time, she felt euphoric. “I could have stripped my clothes off and run naked all the way home. The anxiety and stress I had been feeling all vanished,” she says.
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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
Wine Cellar
I stumbled upon this quote (from a Sapiens-reading tech bro but let’s be nice) about treating your home library not as a “TBR” (another blasted inbox) but as a wine cellar:
Think not of the books you’ve bought as a “to be read” pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.
Perfect.
There are other areas of life that could benefit from being seen as wine cellars.
I, however, am uniquely bad at wine cellaring. I try to generate surpluses of long-life foodstuffs like jams and preserves, tins of sardines, honey, olive oils, and, yes, wines. For the right time, the right place, the right mood. But I just scoff them.
My thinking is: they’re there to be eaten or drank, so why not eat or drink them now? And so it goes on. Forever.
Let it never be said that there’s a fine line between Escapologist and prepper. I could never stock a bunker adequately, even if I meant to. You’d just find me in there after the fallout’s cleared, dead and fat. “He died doing what he loved,” you could tell the obit people, “napping.”
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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
Other Dutchies
After posting about Netherlands’ four-day week just now, I remembered two other things I’ve been meaning to share.
One is Sebbiebikes, the website of a young Dutch national who is:
cycling from Amsterdam to Japan. to get there, i cross around 25 borders. but wait, this is such a privilege, as my passport is among the strongest in the world! so: why do you need this sheer luck to be able to see the world? the answer lies in many places, but the core is: borders. so, while i’m biking for 2.5 years, i’ll learn about borders. why are they here? how do they work? and (how) can we get rid of them?
A passport from Netherlands is the world’s fourth strongest (a British passport is only the sixth, by the way), providing access to 188 countries. But why should this be the case? Why are certain borders impassable to certain people, simply because of the accident of where they were born?
I think that’s an excellent question and one that presents an entire research question for someone who believes in international freedom. That’s sort-of what Seb is doing, except he’s not doing it as an academic. He’s on the road, on his bike, to learn about borders in practice, blogging as he goes. I think that’s cool. He’s currently in Damascus.
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The other thing I’ve been meaning to mention is a YouTube channel called Not Just Bikes. The Escapological element lies in how Jason Slaughter, the Canadian behind the channel, sat down at his engineer’s drafting table to work out the best possible place for his family to live. For them it was Amsterdam. So they moved. YOU can move.
Jason’s channel is also fun if you’re interested in public transport or urban planning, and if you have hundreds of hours to spend learning about the world’s train and bus systems.
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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
Dutch Courage
Instead of merely guessing about the advantages and disadvantages of the four-day week, suggests the Financial Times, why not look to a country who already does it? The Netherlands has practically arrived there by stealth.
Netherlands has become one of my favourite countries to visit. It’s also the only country I ever visit. What I mean is, I often visit “Paris” but not really “France.” The city is usually the draw for me, not the country. With Netherlands, however, I love Amsterdam, Utrecht, Delft and Rotterdam. And I like to travel between them on excellent, clean and pleasant Dutch trains. It seems I’m fond, for once, of the country.
Average working weekly hours for people aged 20 to 64 in their main job are just 32.1, the shortest in the EU … It has also become increasingly common for full-time workers to compress their hours into four days rather than spread them over five, says Bert Colijn, an economist at Dutch bank ING. “The four-day work week has become very, very common,” he told me.
Honestly, if your country was as nice as the Netherlands, was so darn functional, and so filled with worthwhile things to do, you’d probably work fewer days too. Because there are things other than work to occupy your time. Or maybe it’s the other way around: maybe working fewer days has made for a happier, prouder, better engaged citizenry who are only too happy to contribute.
Colijn’s view is that the Netherlands is, in theory, holding itself back by working fewer hours. On the other hand, he adds, “I also wouldn’t want to propose any dystopian society where everyone is working more than Korean hours, just because it increases GDP.”
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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
Hair on the Sauce Bottle
From today’s Guardian:
Forty years ago, a small group of students and university dropouts living rough had a novel idea. What if they pooled meagre savings and jobless benefits for a modest terrace house, rather than rent a run-down flat?
They raised a deposit for a ÂŁ3,200 mortgage on a neglected two-bedroom property in the Victorian terraces of west Hull, running down to the quayside of a once-thriving fishing port, from where boats used to trawl the north Atlantic.
ÂŁ3,200 in today’s money is ÂŁ9,969. That is not enough for a deposit on a Victorian terrace today, even in stinking Hull. According to my quick research and calculations, you’d need a minimum of ÂŁ19,500. Which is fairly disgusting.
But maybe it’s still doable. Young people of an Escapological mindset could scrape ÂŁ20k together, right?
The article doesn’t say how many students were involved in the original pool. There are four people in the top photograph. The house had two bedrooms, so let’s assume there were indeed four people. This could leave two couples in each bedroom, with the option of using a downstairs room as a bedroom in the event of not everyone in the quartet being part of a couple.
So four people kicking in ÂŁ5,000 would give you a decent-ish deposit of ÂŁ20,000.
So it’s probably still an option. Think about it, kids. Pool your resources. Draw up an agreement to keep everyone safe. Cohabit.
Their enthusiasm for punk bands – the Clash, the Specials and New Model Army – belied a determination to work the system rather than fight the class war.
That’s Escapology, that is. Flight, not fight. You can fight later if you want to.
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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
Treating Ourselves as a Mere Means to an End
Why do we all hate work so much? And why does it seem to have only got worse in the modern era? Well, according to philosopher Byung-Chul Han, our psychological attitude towards work and productivity has fundamentally shifted in a disastrous direction for our mental health, our happiness, and our long-term fulfilment.
From a video book review of The Burnout Society (2015) by Byung-Chul Han.
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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
