The shortest route to freedom

“The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means (whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be). It’s scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less. This is an extremely threatening conclusion. It suggests that the vast majority of us aren’t just putting our dreams on ice – we’re killing them.”

I chanced across this 2002 article by Po Bronson, ostensibly an overview of his book What should I do with my life? (a book that profiles the careers of fifty interesting people and extrapolates prescriptions on how to tap inner callings). The article contains some insightful passages and is worth a read.

There are further sample chapters at the author’s tie-in webpage.

One thing I notice from Mr. Bronson’s profiles, is that most people who make breakthroughs about how they want to spend their life, start with a fallow period during which they contemplate the big question. One person spends six months in bed after a car accident, planning the changes he’d like to make once he’s back in the game. Another person deliberately quits her high-pressure job to spend three years mulling over the prospects of what she really wanted to do all along.

To me, this helps to confirm that the escape from depressing commitments is the first step toward committing yourself to something useful and that you’ll act deliberately when you’re good and ready. If dissatisfied, take the plunge and escape. You’ll soon find yourself making plans.

The Machine Stops

If we ever launch an anthology of classic literature with an Escapological flavour (which we might!), E. M. Forster’s short story, ‘The Machine Stops’ would be at the forefront.

The story describes a future society in which—natural resources having been squandered—the citizens live inside a gigantic life-giving machine. In the tradition of such tales, a man grows tired of this simulated life and seeks escape.

You can read the story online or enjoy a public domain audiobook version. There’s even a faithful 1960s television adaptation:

Thanks to Tim for the recommendation.

Cave dwellings, a Lego house and UFO ranches

They’re probably (though not necessarily) outside the budget of most Escapologists, but this shortlist of interesting homes certainly inspires one to think creatively about living solutions.

“Steal from your exploiters”

Thanks to Reggie for introducing us to the work of King Missile, especially to their hilarious and provocative, “Take stuff from work” song:

Take stuff from work.
It’s the best way to feel better about your job.
Never buy pens or pencils or paper.
Take ’em from work.
Rubber bands, paper clips, memo pads, folders-take ’em from work.
It’s the best way to feel better about your low pay and appalling working conditions.
Take an ashtray-they got plenty.
Take coat hangers.
Take a, take a trash can.
Why buy a file cabinet?
Why buy a phone?
Why buy a personal computer or word processor?
Take ’em from work.
I took a whole desk from the last place I worked.
They never noticed and it looks great in my apartment.
Take an electric pencil sharpener.
Take a case of white-out; you might need it one day.
It’s your duty as an oppressed worker to steal from your exploiters.
It’s gonna be an outstanding day.
Take stuff from work.
And goof off on the company time.
I wrote this at work.
They’re paying me to write about stuff I steal from them.
Life is good.

How to Disappear

Escapologista, Fabian Kruse has reposted his nice essay about mobile self-employment and geo-arbitrage, ‘How to Disappear’. If you enjoy this essay, his website, ‘The Friendly Anarchist’ is always worth a look and you can read another of his works in Issue Three.

Rework

Neil points me in the direction of a new book called Rework. Indeed, it looks useful to Escapologists interested in overhauling their work ethic. Plenty of free sample downloads available at the tie-in website.

Roald Dahl: submission versus creativity

I’m reading Roald Dahl’s memoirs, Boy and Going Solo. Towards the end of Boy, he writes about his first regimented job as a salesperson for the Shell Corporation, for which he must wear a suit and sell kerosine:

I enjoyed it, I really did. I began to realise how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with foxed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scald him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is pretty great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whiskey than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

To be an employee is to choose the path of least resistance. Self-motivation isn’t easy but absolute freedom is the ultimate consolation.

Are you Tricky Dick?

Sorry to bang on about the evils of mainstream media, but we can only allow so much space for it in our printed publication. Besides, it’s interesting and important, innit?

Here’s a brilliant six-and-a-half-minute documentary film by Adam Curtis, explaining how “all of us have become Richard Nixon”, that is, paranoid, anxious and terrified of elites:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxV3_bG1EHA]

Travelling Light

As an online companion to the “How to Travel” feature in our pending third issue, our travel correspondent has prepared a New Escapologist Minimalist Packing List.

Of course, the staunchest Minimalist would leave home with little more than passport, money and tickets (“PMT” – a useful mnemonic) but Tim has developed a tried-and-tested checklist that covers all bases.

"The story of broad decline is simply untrue"

Further to my last post and to Brian Dean’s New Escapologist article, I’d like to direct you to two articles from this week’s Economist:

“In homing in on the cosier parts of the Britain of yesteryear, it is easy to ignore the horrors that have gone. Straight white men are especially vulnerable to this sort of amnesia. Such forgetfulness can be partly blamed on a dominant national press that tends to report the grotesque exceptions not the blander rule. But politicians have connived in this.”Read more.

“crime overall has dropped by 45% since its peak in 1995 […] Looking more carefully, the big fall in brutality has been in domestic violence, which has dropped by a staggering 70%. This sort of upbeat, wonkish analysis enrages those who insist that, for ordinary people, Britain is a more frightening place than it once was, whatever official statistics might say.”Read more.

All being well, New Escapologist Issue 3 will be printed and shipped next week. It’s a hundred-page monster featuring our best writing to date. If you’ve not pre-ordered, you can do so here.