No more mindless submission
Perhaps one day, my system of asceticism and refusal to submit to drudgery will prove hubristic and will blow up in my face like a comedy cigar. If that happens, I’ll have to go back to the day job, tail between my legs. But even in these unlikely circumstances, against which I have taken precautions, I will at least have enjoyed some (fit, healthy, youthful) years of freedom and will have something interesting with which to regale my colleagues at the water cooler.
Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme kindly allowed me to write a guest entry at his blog: “No more mindless submission“. The post is ostensibly my personal escape story but contains what I hope is a breakdown of useful practices.
What comes after escape?
We occasionally hear about lottery winners who continue to work in spite of their millions. Moreover, we probably all have relatives who’ve spent so much of their lives in a state of manic servitude that they can’t face their hard-earned retirement. There’s a destructive idea that to be unemployed is to somehow lose dignity or pride.
So what do we do once we’ve turned our backs on the Protestant Work Ethic?
Work on your own projects. I don’t know what you like to do. Maybe it’s drawing, maybe it’s growing your own potatoes. It helps to find a passion. Whatever it is, the post-escape life is your chance to indulge yourself without work getting in the way. Try something you’ve never done before: football fans could consider bonsai and computer programmers might try building a tree house.
Read. It’s fun, stimulating, private and costs very little (or nothing if you use a public library). It has a very low impact on the environment and doesn’t contribute to other people’s misery. Read enduring classics over fashionable fluff, but don’t base your reading choices on obligation. Read for pleasure and to expand your mind. I set up a reading list at the beginning of the year but I know this is an unusually disciplined approach and is not for everyone.
Walk. Some friends and I walked from Parc La Fontaine to Westmount Public Library yesterday. Without work or studies to dictate our actions, we didn’t have to save time by getting into a car or a bus. Instead we set out early and walked. I saw parts of the city I’d never seen before (including a district which looked so much like Glasgow, I thought I’d found a wormhole back to my old town) and got some exercise to counteract the knish we ate for lunch halfway.
Travel. Your budget for this may be limited but there will be interesting travel options for within your own country or local area. Americans only have to hop on a train to visit other states and Europeans have amazing opportunities to other countries for very little money. If money allows it, why not visit the place you’ve always wanted to see (or better yet, somewhere you you might not even want to see)?
Be with real friends. When you work or study, the company you keep is dictated by situation alone. Whether or not you would socialise with colleagues after work, you still spend most of your time with them. In the post-escape life, your relationships must be maintained more deliberately. The result is that you spend time only with people who matter, people whose opinions you value and people whose company you genuinely enjoy. I’m crossing an ocean next month with the main intention of seeing my parents, Neil, Laura, Dan and Tim.
Tackle an issue. If you’ve been bothered by a political issue, environmental problem or social inequality, now is the time to stand up and challenge it. Write letters, join initiatives, start a thinktank. You have the gift of time.
Cultivate your life. Instead of tolerating the environment in which you live (including the environment inside your head), you now have the time to improve it bit by bit. Like a statue waiting in a block of marble, the good life hides within the glut of possessions and activities.
Learn to do nothing. Embrace nothingness. Meditate. Learn to be quiet and to appreciate silence. Learn to exist without consuming or producing.
Live. Each day lived outside the systems of oppression (debt, work, consumption) is a day well spent. Your only masterpiece is the life you lead. Each day spent deliberately is a vote against drudgery.
Feminism and Escapology
The following is a guest post from Holly Meier. Holly co-runs a Feminist blog called Tiffany and Amber and the jolly funny zine, The Pigeon Press.
Nothing gets my pulse racing like a nice intersection, and I’ve recently realised that feminism, which is easily the thing I love most in the world, shares many an aim with the philosophy of Escapology. Now, at first glance this may not appear to be the case. After all, every single article in the last issue of the New Escapologist was penned by a man. But feminist Escapologists out there (are you out there?) need not despair! When you get to thinking, they’re kind of the same. Let’s take a closer look, in list form.
1. Anti-consumerism
Escapology has it that when we buy less stuff, we reduce the burden of needing to earn so much, and thus the need to be tied to a depressing job and/or location. Now, we all know that women constitute the group to whom the single biggest, most useless, and most damaging amount of stuff is marketed, through the beauty (and other) industries that constantly tell us we are fat, ugly, stinky, and generally repulsive in every way imaginable, and that this sorry state can only be corrected by the constant purchase and use of a bewildering array of shit from eyelash curlers to weightloss pills.
Interview with Everett Bogue
I conducted an email interview yesterday with Everett Bogue from Far Beyond the Stars, a blog dedicated to minimalism and location independence (two topics we address in Issue Three). Here are Everett’s generous responses to my questions:
Do you believe freedom is the natural state or a modern privilege?
Freedom is a choice, one that we’ve been brainwashed out of taking by advertising and factory culture. We’re taught to conform, we’re taught to buy until we fill our oversized houses. All people have to do is make the choice to stop consuming and freedom becomes an easily grasped reality.
Strive to do and to be, not to own
Few would consider freedom unimportant. We value liberty and the right to live with minimal restrictions, yet we typically dedicate our lives to acquiring permanent residence and a cache of possessions. Instead of dedicating our efforts to travel, we tend to focus upon mortgage. By shedding some material worth and tempering our desire for goods we can use our financial and intellectual resources more wisely and follow the mobile ideal.
I’d almost forgotten to report that we published a capsule guide to the minimalist mindset over at Alain de Botton’s School of Life blog.
The first half is new material written by myself and the second half is an abridged version of Timothy Eyre’s “How to Live Minimally” in Issue Three. I think it’s pretty (and appropriately) concise. Enjoy!
Never forget
Never forget the things from which you’re escaping.
I walked past an office building in downtown Montreal this evening. I was on my way to meet my girlfriend for a family meal, which we would follow by attending a magazine launch party. Inside the office, meanwhile, the desk jockeys were working overtime beneath florescent lighting.
No more of that for me, thanks. I felt immediately grateful for the fact I was on the outside of the stone wall and not on the inside any more.
Some things I do not miss:
– Clock watching
– Commuting
– Unsuitable working environment
– Pointlessly frequent fire drills and other health-and-safety obstacles
– Being unable to enter a productive (or leisurely) mood when recovering from a day’s work
– Mindless submission to tasks that do not matter
– Representing an organisation in which you have no interest
– Being an apologist for other people’s bad decisions
– Petty office politics
– Counterproductive cross-business politics
– Staring into a computer screen for 80% of the time
– Pointless meetings
– Frequent and demeaning training exercises
– The dreaded early rises
These are just a few of things I do not miss. I’m sure there are others.
Even when I worked though, I found ways around a lot of these things:
– I’d find ways to work from home whenever possible
– I’d volunteer to attend conferences so I didn’t have to sit at my desk all of the time
– I’d wear an immaculate suit almost as if to satirise office etiquette
– I took an hour-long lunch break every day instead of eating at my desk
– I moved my home to within a ten-minute walk of the office so I didn’t have to commute so far or rise so early
Interestingly, few of my colleagues took these measures even when I was providing a precedent. They seemed more content to complain about the conditions that were being imposed upon them without realising that even within the framework of their office life there were small freedoms to be found. Why did they not take them? Did they prefer to complain? Were they the victims of peer pressure or Bad Faith?
On Living Well
Spending 40 years of my life working just to buy stuff seems a bit extreme to me. Yet working that much is the norm in the US. It is so ubiquitous that spending all day away from home does not factor into people’s “comfort calculations”—only leather seats and oversized furniture do. However, living is about what you do, not what you have.
Jacob Lund Fisker runs a truly amazing website called Early Retirement Extreme. The site disseminates ideas around the maxim that life is too short to squander on mindless drudgery. Instead he recommends sage financial prudence: frugality, asceticism and sensible investment.
Any one of Jacob’s posts is worth a read and I’d encourage anyone to buy his upcoming book as soon as it’s available. To get you started, I’d point you at this recent post or this concise manifesto. You’ll soon be hooked. In fact, I’m reading the whole website from the first post.
It’s entirely possible to eliminate the need for pointless graft.
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 11.
Last weekend, we attended the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, taking along a stall from which to sell copies of our little publication.
Anarchists of different stripes had come from far and wide, and plenty of likeminded and interested members of the public came along to see what we were up to. I don’t think I’ve seen an Anarchist event so well organised and well attended. Inspiring all round.
I have to hand it to the non-Anarchist members of the public for showing up in such impressive numbers. When I mention Anarchy to new friends, I’m often met with bemusement: either such a bold political stance seems out of place on such a mild-mannered individual as myself or the very concept of Anarchy in the modern day seems absurd to the average person. Yet here we were.
The fact that so many non-Anarchists attended the event meant that we (and presumably the other stall-holders and presenters) weren’t preaching exclusively to the choir. I spoke to plenty of people with conventional jobs who were beginning to consider various escape routes.
The New Escapologist stall sat between an American electro/punk band called Realicide and a semi-ironic Québécoise organisation called Front d’action stupide. I’m very glad I sat with the people I did because they were excellent company for the duration of the weekend, trading horror movie and music recommendations and discussing the nomadic lifestyle.
As the first morning progressed and I spoke to more and more people, I began to develop a sort of sales pitch for the magazine. I found myself describing the magazine as “a humour periodical from England” (at once explaining my accent to the largely Canadian audience and slightly adjusting their expectation that we’re a hardened political organisation) but that we offer “sincere advice and discourse on the art of living and how to escape the mindless drudgery of conventional career life”. I told them that we’re “pro-laziness and anti-work and we ask people to consider working less in favour of a low-impact, post-consumerist lifestyle”.
Whenever I used the expression “mindless drudgery” in my pitch, the Mohican-topped Robert Inhuman would chime in from the next stall with “As opposed to mindful drudgery!” knowing very well how much hard work has to go into producing zines and making money from indie exploits.
“Mindful drudgery” reminds me of my friend Tim who inverted the popular “Spiritual but not religious” maxim to “Religious but not spiritual”, admitting that he enjoys ritual and adhering to a strict code of ethics but refuses to believe in a spirit or to give himself over to a poorly-defined cause.
I’m glad I managed to explain the magazine so concisely: partly for the practical reason that I’d only have around two minutes with any potential reader, but also because I worry about Einstein’s words of wisdom: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. Did I definitely understand the nature of our harebrained scheme? It was now evident that I did.
We had been asked to work out of the zine room as opposed to the main books hall, which was fine, but I worried that our high cover price (by comparison to typical zines) would result in a lack of interest. I reduced our price as much as reasonably possible and told people that “we’re dedicated to making things of quality and have a pretty unique style of typography.” This technique proved fruitful and we managed to sell almost our entire stock over the course of the weekend.
On the second day, I was joined by Samara, our illustrations editor and frequent contributor, who had fun doodling personalised sketches on the reverse side of her business cards for people to take away. We also gave away sample content from Issue Three in the form of a new pamphlet designed by our usual typesetter, Tim.
People were invited to write their email addresses on a specially designated part of our tablecloth so that they could join our mailing list. In fact, they could write whatever notes or recommendations they liked on the same tablecloth. It was funny how many people commented on this idea but as a minimalist it seemed natural to me: I didn’t want to keep the tablecloth after the event and I didn’t want to have a bundle of note papers to cart sift through later. The contents of the tablecloth are now safely typed up into my computer.
I didn’t take any photographs beyond one of our own stall because I met a rough reception from a staunch off-gridder when photographing the crowded main hall, but I see that a few have made it onto Flickr.
Thanks to everyone at the bookfair for putting together such an impressive event. Whenever I organise a comedy show or an Escapology event, people always seem amazed that someone acheived something beyond the norm, yet these are always far smaller affairs than this one. Kudos to all.
I’d love to do another event like this soon. The next one I can identify as having a similar flavour is Expozine, for which I will be sure to register but doesn’t happen until November. If anyone has recommendations of similar events (anywhere in the world), we’d love to hear about them.
Rich Dad
It’s not exactly a sparkling new resource, but richdad.com (companion website to the brilliant book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad) contains some great ways of looking at money and economics.
The site demonstrates differences in how the conventional middle class (or ‘Poor Dad’) have evolved to think about money and how successful business types (‘Rich Dad’) think about it. It’s a matter of looking at the same thing from a different perspective. You just have to throw out a few conventional habits in favour of some smarter ones.
For example, the middle class ethic is to work for money, while the wise ‘Rich Dads’ knows how to make money work for them. Poor Dad sees his property as assets while Rich Dad sees them as liabilities. “Understanding the difference in attitudes,” the site says, “is essential to taking the first steps to financial freedom.”
An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 10.
Life is good here in Montreal. I spend most of my time leisurely cooking in our little kitchen or reading George Orwell books in the sunny park. (We should hit 30°C this week!)
You don’t need much money for either of these activities: just a few quid for dinner ingredients and the occasional bus fare to the library. The good life is there if you want it. You just have to stop buying pointless stuff and quit your job as soon as you can.
Much like the protagonist in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, however, I’ve not been able to stop my mind from drifting periodically into the vulgar world of money.
The preoccupation is partly due to an idle interest in economics but also—less comfortably—an abstract and groundless fear that a life without significant income is somehow sinful or unsustainable and that my good life here and now is tantamount to hubris. I know my fears are the result of growing up in an environment in which the Protestant Work Ethic reigned over all of us; and I know very well that I can live here for a long time without sucking up to the money god. Yet there is a nagging homunculus on my shoulder insisting that I should be doing something more lucrative.
I usually deal with this by playing Louis Armstrong’s version of, “Lazybones” loud enough to drown out the homunculus’ ridiculous witterings:
Hey there lazybones, lyin’ in the sun, how you gonna get your day’s work done?
What day’s work, man? I’m too busy baskin’ in the noonday sun.
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