No Loyalty!
Thanks to contributor Andy for sending us this:
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Strike back by reading New Escapologist Issue 19 and/or by anonymously mocking your useless workplace in our Workplace Woes section.
Unusually Free to Make Uncommon Choices
Here are some choice cuts — with a bit of a through-line — from The Day the World Stops Shopping (2021) by JB MacKinnon:
On the free will that comes with minimalism:
Classical economic theory holds that consumers know what is best for themselves and act rationally in their self interest, a perspective that remains influential today. Paradoxically, it is anti-consumers, not mainstream ones, who come closest to this ideal: they are more likely to make active, informed choices … are less swayed by advertising and fads, and are less likely to feel trapped in consumption or to [try to] use it as a means of escape.
It’s a false means of escape: a delicious and enjoyable one usually, but it’s important to remember the difference between escapism and Escapology. Focus on what matters.
Many people perceive living simply as limiting; [but downshifter Syd Fredrickson] said it has always made her feel unusually free to make uncommon choices, question conformity, act spontaneously and express herself through her words and appearance. All her adult life she has watched people around her pursue careers they didn’t like or stay in jobs they hated because they would not risk ending up with a lower income. “They would say their lives were all hollow and crazy… They just thought it was too scary to do something else,” she said.
Sound familiar?
On how non-consumers might spend their time:
[Even though we need collective action at the policy level to actually save the planet,] it is still reasonable to reduce your consumption for personal reasons alone. [And] there are many more roles that individuals can play. A world that stops shopping needs new products and services, new theories of how an economy can function, new ways of making meaning in our lives, new models for doing business, new habits, new policies, new protest movements, new infrastructure. As Kris De Decker said, “We need to rethink everything.”
In other words, when you reduce your interest in materialist consumption you don’t merely absent your money and time from the system but you also open up some of the bandwidth needed for the Great Project of rethinking everything. Isn’t that cool?
On innovation vs. the profit motive:
Traditional economists have long claimed that innovation is driven by the profit motive, but that, too, does not appear to be the way that it actually works. [The research of Eric von Hippel] found that many innovations don’t even originate in businesses, but rather among everyday people, who often share their ideas freely. … The inventor [or hobbyist] takes satisfaction not from making money but from creating something useful and gaining standing in the community. Similarly, scientists themselves tend to invent the scientific instruments that are most important to the advancement of science, often profiting little or not at all from their inventions.
New Escapologist is written, decorated, and published by such people. Get it here.
GLUE
Big thanks to our distributor, Ra & Olly, for taking Escape Everything! to the GLUE Bookfair at London’s ICA this week.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 is available to order NOW! NOW! NOW!
90%
Every so often, I seek recent data to back up my claim that nobody really likes to work.
The latest Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report finds that 90% of UK workers are unhappy.
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Strike back by reading New Escapologist Issue 19 and/or by anonymously grassing up your useless workplace to our Workplace Woes desk.
Uhura
From an unmade Star Trek episode written by Jeff Lint, related to us by Steve Aylett:
Lint describes a series of hypervivid visuals to be superimposed over Kirk’s sweating face — he undergoes a sort of 2001 Stargate experience unachievable by weekly television budgets of the time. McCoy sees the treacly release of enzymes in redemption orgies of polarity breakdown, all matter flushing with an eternal blush of realisation. Spock, eyebrow raised, watches fiery loops reconnecting in escalating scales … Scottie, with orthogonal schematic blossoms flurrying over his face, begins laughing and shouts that the ship can handle anything. Uhura calmly gives Kirk a week’s notice, her thoughts elsewhere.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 is available to order THIS VERY MINUTE!
Wanted: Your Letters and Woes
Issue 20 of New Escapologist is slowly entering production (Issue 19 is still fresh and tasty) and we need some more Letters to the Editor and Workplace Woes.
Workplace Woes is an opportunity for readers to anonymously let off steam about their jobs, past or present.
Letters to the Editor is a place to tell your escape story in brief, to talk about your unusual or creative living conditions, to recommend a book or a film to your fellow Escapologists, to suggest proven money-saving tips, or to say something about an item from a previous issue.
Please keep your Letters and Woes to 300 words or fewer (or allow yourself to overrun on the understanding they’ll probably be trimmed). Items for either format can be funny or anger-inducing or informative or all of the above.
It’s always particularly nice to receive Woes from the worlds of retail or hospitality or from the outdoorsy professions (e.g. from farming or the construction industry), but if your story is simply office-based then that’s good too!
Thanks everyone. Over to you.
Would a Less Consumerist Society be Better?
Deep inside a book called The Day the World Stops Shopping by J. B. MacKinnon, the people you and I call Escapologists are cited as anecdotal evidence by a professor of Finance called Aswath Damodaran:
The idea that a less consumerist society would be better stems from the fact that everyone today knows somebody who stepped off the money-in, money-out treadmill, simplified their life and ended up happier.
That’s us! We’re setting the example! We’re making them think!
But would everyone stepping off the treadmill really make for a better society? Mackinnon, a journalist, looks to the fall of the Soviet Empire:
What is most extraordinary about the collapse is that civilisation did not, in fact, come to an end. We find neither massive starvation nor strikes and food riots, neither the destruction of society nor its explosion.
and:
92 per cent of the nation’s potato harvest came from dachas and gardens … By night, people would enjoy the fruits of their labour, playing cards, debating and drinking. In this extreme economic catastrophe, they were seized by the strange exhilaration of disaster. There were endless parties in the dachas. … There was hardship but also excitement,” [said someone who was there], “it was like they’d been let out of prison.”
A better life? Well, according to that one guy it was like being let out of prison.
JB Mackinnon is not saying that the fall of the Soviet Empire was a right old hoot. He’s saying that, even in such an extreme example, a mass exit from consumer society was not the end of the world. Today, in the West, nobody is planning to take away our consumer privileges in such a sudden and total way. It’s just an illustration that maybe, we can do perfectly well with less in pursuit of better lives individually and to save the world collectively.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
Reggie Perrin at 50
Today sees the 50th Anniversary of the first broadcast of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.
The classic BBC sitcom charts the antics of a middle-aged office worker who snaps, will take no more, and escapes.
Reggie was the original Escapologist and I used to watch the series over breakfast when plotting my escape.
You can watch watch the series and read the original books by David Nobbs.
EDIT: From a Radio Times item this afternoon about RP’s enduring appeal:
Adapted by David Nobbs from his own novels, [the series] saw Perrin reacting with escalating eccentricity to the madness of middle management … Dictating rude letters, having hippo hallucinations, pumping loganberry essence into the river where his boss is fishing. Things like that.
Ronnie Barker said of the source novel that he laughed 283 times and cried twice, and there is a darkness to the premise – after all, the lead character is driven to the point of faking his own death in order to reinvent himself. The phrase “doing a Reggie Perrin” soon entered common parlance.
[Screenwriter Simon Nye says:] “We love any character who questions the status quo or shines a new light on the way we live our lives. Reggie Perrin does that, despite just wanting a normal life full of love, sane relationships and honesty. Maybe we are all a bit Reggie, all aware that modern life is basically absurd and makes fools of us all.”
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
The A4 Project
Brushing my teeth last night, I started to wonder about how to continue New Escapologist should it become unsustainable after Issue 21. (See the August newsletter to hear about the financial challenge).
One solution is to return to the magazine’s origins and to print it for free on stolen office paper.
Alas, I don’t have access to an office or its paper anymore, but it occurred to me (while flossing) that I could ask OUR READERS to steal office paper and send it to me, ideally through their workplace outgoing mail.
Maybe people could even pay for their copy in stolen office paper. The patrons (those who currently spend a couple of hundred quid when we launch a four-issue Kickstarter) could be the people who send the most stolen office paper, but even those who send just a few sheets of stolen office paper would receive their copy for free.
Some people would still need to pay for their copy with money, as I’d still like to receive some some recompense for my time and also to pay for the stamps.
Is this a good idea? There’s the obvious legal/moral objection in encouraging theft, but I find that I don’t care very much about that. Come after me, employers, I dare you. Another concern is the decline in quality (I enjoy making a good-looking product worth its space on a bookshelf), but this could be outweighed by the appeal of the mischief. The main show stopper is that I’d need to pay for a Mailbox so that I don’t have to give my home address to the type of dubious character (that’s you, madam) who is willing to steal paper from work and send it to me. Could be fun though, eh?
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Here’s where to tip me and New Escapologist before it comes to this.
New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
6.7 Million US Men 🌭
From Jon Ronson’s new book, The Castle:
By 2022, one in six US men aged between 25 and 54 wasn’t working. But within that statistic was a more startling one: two‑thirds of those men weren’t even looking for jobs. That’s 6.7 million US men, and countless more around the world, who’ve just … bowed out.
Result!
I was aghast.
What? Why?
Why had those men opted out of society? What havoc was that purposelessness wreaking on their inner lives, and on the lives of their loved ones – partners, parents, children? And given that some of them would inevitably grow sick of a life in the shadows – of a life of male nothingness – what might happen next?
Oh! I can help you there. They haven’t opted out of society. They just don’t have jobs.
You see, a lot of us (and not just men but all genders) are looking for alternatives to humiliating life-draining drudgery that doesn’t even pay the bills anymore.
In fact, given the numbers you’re citing here, I’d say an alternative system is emerging. Society isn’t “jobs.” No longer indulging the job market is hardly to live “a life in the shadows.”
Do you know who you sound like, Jon? You sound like this guy.
We’re doing a rational cost/benefit of the jobs available to us and — on finding them wanting, often after giving several good years to them — using our imaginations to come up with something new.
These quotations come from a promotional excerpt of The Castle, but I’ve also read the book. The book’s not by any means a stinker, but I have issues with it and one of them is the reactionary attitude to changes in the world of work.
It’s okay to look askance at trends in automation or zillennial demotivation or problems with the pension system, but you’re supposed to interrogate the issues first — to understand them — before deciding a position. It clearly interests Jon that so many people have rejected conventional employment as a way to live, but his questions are fevered and rhetorical when they should be genuine, more journalistic journeys towards answers. He says things like “how do they live? How do they eat?” without really trying to find out.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
