Solitude, Compassion, Friendship, Introspection, Contemplation
Here’s the author Elif Shafak on Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2021), a book we also liked and reviewed at length in New Escapologist Issue 16.
It is a fascinating take on how and why we need to resist the relentless demands of our hyper-information society. It reminds us that our value as human beings is not dependent on our productivity levels or amount of consumption on any given day. It recognises that solitude, compassion, friendship, introspection, contemplation – all these universal and ancient qualities – are inalienable rights. Inviting readers to become better observers, better listeners, it encourages us to slow down. To pay more attention to the seemingly small, “insignificant things”, reconnect with each other, with nature and with ourselves. In a world where there is constant clamour, too much rigidity, polarisation and tribalism, this book shows us that you can be gentle, calm, nuanced and still be political, attending to the local, to the humble, and to what makes us human.
She’s right, you know. Not just about Odell’s book but about things of value in life.
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The Outdated World of Work
In the news:
An “anxious generation” of young people is struggling to adapt to the outdated world of work, according to the government’s jobs adviser.
Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary, will say this week in a report that businesses must adapt by offering more flexibility and mental health support for young people to stave off an “economic catastrophe.”
It’s interesting. We’ve finally been heard. It has taken generations of objecting to work but Gen Z might have finally broken through and pushed over the line the idea that Wage Slavery isn’t all it cracked up to be.
That the UK government are worried about “economic catastrophe” tells us an interesting thing. That they know we can say no. That they know we can walk away, escape. If we did this en-masse, there probably would be an economic catastrophe. And there should be one really. We need to stop growing, stop fretting about GDP, and start measuring value differently.
“Almost 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds,” the article says, or “about one in eight” are “not in education, employment or training” because they’ve secured doctor’s orders to stay at home.
Said jobs advisor has observed: “a rising tide of mental ill-health, anxiety, depression [and] neurodiversity” is driving the abandonment of economic inactivity.
Not to imply than a single one of these kids is faking mental ill-health (who could possibly feel mentally well given the squandered world they stand to inherit?) but, you know, one probably could. Escape route identified! Wibble.
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Like Rose Petals
The more we engage with real things the more we can remember that we are not machines.
The machine does not want you to have the full set of stimuli or emotions. Real life has such a rich variety of experience.
Thus spake blogger Alastair Johnston who, in a rage against the machine, says some beautiful things about his dog, Benson.
The dog lovers amongst you will be able to deduce that he’s a Whippet from his photograph. You can recognise his breed by his bony shape, long legs, pointy head and beautiful curves over his back and under his flattened but enlarged chest. He’s quite a goer.
But what you can’t do is hear the whining he makes when he’s desperate for a walk or his “happy growl”, which sometimes scares people, but in reality means he’s full of joy and really pleased with you. You cannot feel how soft his ears are, like rose petals, and perfect to stroke during stressful times.
Remember the real. Go to live music. Read real books. See real paintings. Hear real birdsong. Feel the connection to other people, other creatures, other times.
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No Schedule, No Plan
I’ve always been a traveller. Not full time or all the time, but every ten years or so my feet start itching and I want to quit the job, flat and place I’m in and head off somewhere entirely new.
This comes from Fergie, someone I used to work with in real life. We sometimes snuck off for forbidden pints at lunchtime, and she was the one person in the office I could talk to about escape. We were both heavily depressed, I think, but at least we’d both seen other parts of the world. You could hold that inside yourself when listening to the thrum-thrum of the photocopier and the glubble-glubble of the watercooler.
Apparently her itch to “head off” happens every ten years. I expect that’s natural and actually true of everyone, only it takes someone like Fergie — someone who sees that the bars of the cage are largely imaginary — to actually act on it.
Today she posted a nice long rumination on her various escapes, starting with an impromptu trip to America in the ’90s:
Exciting, terrifying, I almost chickened out at the airport. Once there, I adored the freedom. No schedule, no plan. A couple of days in New York then heading to the Greyhound station with my backpack and seeing where the buses went. This was back in pre-internet days when you couldn’t spend hours and days poring over websites to see where you might want to go, which buses go there, when they leave and arrive. You couldn’t scrutinise online maps and book accommodation. Instead, you’d have a Lonely Planet guidebook – mine likely covered the entire USA – and a long distance phone number to call a hostel ahead.
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Time is Running Out for Issue 18
Just a quick note to say I’m running out of Issue 18. If you’d like a copy in print, now’s the time to strike!
In Issue 18: The Time of Your Life, we look at time: how to spend it, what to do with it, how to win it back from The Man. We interview August Lamm who is working to set up her own print magazine and offline community in New York, and Dickon Edwards who is a ‘90s indie heart-throb, dandy and diarist who has barely worked a day in his life. Hero. Heather Delaney writes about her American van life, Jon Ransom escapes jury duty, Steve Light finds freedom in curbing his ambitions, and Robert Wringham (that’s me!) vows to escape death or die trying. We review Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, Albertine Saranzin’s Astragal, and Clare Baglin’s On the Clock. The Idler’s Tom Hodgkinson finds a cheap alternative to the pub, Apala Chowdhury goes dancing, and Journal Club looks into research on work-related deaths.
What an issue. 88 very high-quality pages, none of which has been replicated online.
In the old days (Issue 1-13), we used a print-on-demand system and we’d keep our back issues available indefinitely. The model since Issue 14, however, has involved selling all stock. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
This is fine and all and the reasons for it are sound, but whenever we sell out there’s a lot of people asking “why can’t I get X issue?”
So strike now or forever hold your peace! Issue 19 is coming soon.
Letter to the Editor: It Creeps
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader D writes:
It creeps up on you.
Despite several years of decluttering, reducing soulless consumer purchases, and making progress toward escaping The Trap, the “Beast of Consumerism” must have appeared from nowhere and compelled my purchase of some expensive fishing gear that I have never truly required, nor will likely ever use. In total, I spent more than enough money for a roundtrip flight to a far-off destination. Sigh. To make matters worse, I missed the refund cut-off.
After a brief period of self-loathing over a couple of pints, I acknowledged this is part of the long-term process of deleting the Consumerism program from my biological software. Errors will inevitably occur. Now, I’m off to list the items on eBay to recover some of my funds. Perhaps I needed this wasteful episode to remind me of that which is more important, like my forthcoming birthday trip to Spain.
Unrelated to the above, please know that I regularly ask my neighbourhood bookshops if they carry New Escapologist (they don’t currently), to which I politely frown when they respond “no, sorry”. My guerrilla marketing strategy on behalf of your publication is well underway.
Let me know if you want to buy some unused fishing gear.
Toodles!
New Escapologist is not a marketplace for your junk, Reader D! But seriously, congratulations on your moment of self-discovery. The price of freedom is constant vigilance against this kind of thing.
I’ve just done a rare “weeding” exercise of my book collection here at Escape Towers. I was a bit ruthless and I now how have about 20 books to sell to a local second-hand bookshop. With the brain work done, all that stands between me and a lighter load is the actual schlep to the bookshop. I’ll make a nice walk of it.
Arbeit Nervt
Arbeir Nert (Work Sucks) by German elecropunks, Deichkind.
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.
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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.
Radically Different
Here’s Derek Sivers, a prominent advocate for a nicer Internet, on his recent escape to the woods:
Last month, I moved into my new home in the woods. There’s no internet and no phone service here. It’s so productive.
It doesn’t have to be productive, Derek, but go on…
At first I thought I couldn’t move in without internet. But now I prefer it this way.
My thoughts feel more independent. I explore my own ideas deeper before looking for other perspectives.
Now you’re talking.
Derek spends 23 hours a day offline. Think about that for a moment.
It would certainly be an interesting experiment. As ever, I restate my opinion that the Internet is not the problem so long as you escape the shitter side of it, but to escape digital reality to such an extent, I think, would be to choose a radically different sense of consciousness. It would be as worth doing as, say, magic mushrooms, right?
Listen to me. “Radically different.” As if the Internet was always with us.
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