Velo Flaneur
Here’s a pleasant blog from a mellow escapee.
It’s by the artist formerly known as Reader M in fact. Fergie’s Journal of Life in the Slow Lane charts quiet adventures in gardening, cycling and general unusedness during early retirement in a foreign land. Lovely stuff.
Letter to the Editor: Grind Culture
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Robert,
With regards to your take on LinkedIn and Jaron Lanier. I’m a big fan of Lanier and I read his books but I think he’s wrong on LinkedIn. Sure it can help people find work, but it’s designed with lots of psychological tricks to make you feed it.
Features like “x people have looked at your profile” try to make you pay for LinkedIn Plus or whatever it’s called. Trying to get you to “complete your profile” by nagging. And have you ever tried to find how to quit it?
It also encourages shallow correspondence and lazy people connecting and spamming you with whatever service they think you should buy.
All a bit “grind culture,” shallow and non-human. It’s the opposite of the old Web and what blogs seemed to have, and why I hope they’ll have a resurgence.
Reader A.
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You’re right of course, A. Your “grind culture” is inherent to most social media (by which I mean moaning about overload or showing off about dubious white-collar successes) but LinkedIn is solely towards work. I suppose I saw it as a way of connecting employers to CVs, which is marginally useful, but if users are encouraged to fart out a perpetually-scrolling litany of humblebrags, it can “get in bin” as they say.
Death to all social media! So far as online life goes, it’s email, blogs and forums for me.
The current chatter about Twitter suggests that people really will go back to some of those methods, though I recently heard a young pop star describe email as “so toxic” and she does all her talking though Instagram and WhatsApp. I suppose she means that email can all too easily pile up and become unmanageable, but aren’t social media posts and messages practically infinite? At least with email you can unsubscribe from things you don’t like and just change your address if it comes to the worst. You’re less likely to be trolled by email than on social media and your email client probably isn’t Facebook (or Meta or whatever they’re calling themselves now) like those two platforms are, which is surely as toxic as it comes if we’re talking social responsibility. I don’t really know what she meant by “toxic” but I hope she’s an outlier and that the cool kids get on board with alternatives to the mega-platforms.
“Dox Your Boss!”
A friend was (justifiably) complaining to me about her job this morning. In the past, when she’s done this, I’ve tried to offer solutions to her problems but I’ve learned that she really just means to blow off steam.
Because I’ve been thinking about the new format of the magazine, it occurred to me that we could run a “workplace woes” column where readers can write in with their toil complaints, not for advice, but for pure catharsis.
Naturally, it would all have to be anonymous (much like the letters to the editor I sometimes run at the blog) but the notion to name and shame the worst employers admittedly crossed my mind as well. We could call it “Dox Your Boss!”
Of course this is a joke, a mad thought. Do not, under any circumstances, “dox your boss.” Even if it would be deeply satisfying.
We could do the “workplace woes” thing though, eh? Even I’d find that useful and I’m self-employed.
Tired of the everyday grind? Try The Good Life for Wage Slaves or I’m Out, both of which are available now in paperback.
The Big Mac Index
I’ve often wondered if the early- to mid-Twentieth Century wasn’t the best possible time to be alive despite all the war.
As well as being aesthetically superior to our own cheapo resource-poor moment, you really could live well with less.
Anecdotally, I think of my grandparents whose homespun “waste not want not” philosophy allowed them to shun professional labour for about fifty years. I write about them a little in The Good Life for Wage Slaves, but both of my grandparents had low-responsibility pre-War jobs (rent collector, motorcycle engineer) when they were young that they would eventually look upon fondly. They both had War Effort jobs for three or four years and that was it pretty much it. They rented their little house with pension and odd job money, lived cheerful lives of unambitious pottering and occasional holidays in Tenby in Wales and were seemingly content, even happy.
There’s the story of a penniless Patti Smith (as told in Just Kids) finding 50 cents (two quarters) in Central Park. It was enough money for someone to painlessly lose but it was also enough for Patti to buy breakfast (at least $30 in today’s money) for herself and Robert Mapplethorpe.
And there are fictional accounts such as It’s a Wonderful Life in which the poor migrant Mancini family pay off their mortgage over 4 years, and The Secret Garden in which the money Mary Lennox would have spent on a child’s bucket and spade was enough to feed a family for (I think) a week.
So far so much anecdote. But apparently my suspicions are correct! The phenomenon is called Purchasing Power Decline and there’s something called the Big Mac Index to prove it.
Your basic wage slave of 1980 (the year of The Shining, The Blues Brothers, Raging Bull and The Empire Strikes Back) earned six Big Macs an hour. We, by comparison (in the year whose cultural productions you’ve never heard of and never will) don’t even earn one.
The relationship between work and reward is broken. Depressing? Yes. But on the other hand, there’s never been a more cost-effective time (because you’re not losing anything) to put your feet up. Take it easy, I say, and enjoy the spoils of the last century.
Letter to the Editor: I Hoarded Insulin Before Jumping Ship
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Hello Robert,
As someone who decided to finally give up any pretense of work and to take up full-time idling just one month ago, I’d love it you brought back the magazine.
I worked full time for 43 years at various jobs including roadie, sound engineer, archaeologist, barman, and then 25 years as a web developer. I can safely say I came to hate all of my jobs after a short honeymoon period each time I changed careers.
It was by reading your books, and Tom Hodgkinson’s books and magazine, that made me realize that, with a bit of effort and luck, I could pack in work at last.
With my family’s support I did it last month and I have never been happier! We moved to the US ten years ago from Scotland. We currently have no health insurance, which is a worry for me as a diabetic. I hoarded insulin for ages before jumping ship and my wife will be eligible for coverage before Christmas so my only worry will be over soon.
Thank you for your books and magazine. They were very inspiring and I really do hope you relaunch the mag. I will be one of the first subscribers!
All the best,
Reader M, wintry Indiana 😀
Get yer atoms here, missus: treat yourself to a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
Four US States Vote to Ban Slavery… 159 Years After Abolition
I’ve been thinking about prison. Not because I have plans to end up there, nor because I’m a great and empathetic guy. I’ve been watching Orange is the New Black is all, usually in the hours set aside for my important literary work.
It’s insane that we send people to prison at all, let alone in such needlessly horrible conditions sometimes, but let’s talk about one specific element of prison before I end up on a poorly-informed high horse. A particular prison issue I’ve been thinking about turns out to be topical.
We probably all know from general osmosis that American prisoners are given grunt work to do. Printing car license plates is a classic, right? Sewing mail bags is another. But those particular tasks are probably pop-cultural cliches in 2022 and you just know there’s other jobs done by American inmates for peanuts or for no money at all.
That there might be some sort of sweatshop-adjacent scam going on in US and other prisons has obviously occurred to me before but I never quite grasped the significance of that thought, probably because I’m a selfish hipster idiot, or maybe because its just too dark and shameful to contemplate.
This is the news story I’m talking about:
SLAVERY WAS ON the ballot in five states on Tuesday, with four of them — Alabama, Tennessee, Vermont, and Oregon — approving constitutional amendments to abolish the use of involuntary labor as a form of punishment. The fifth, Louisiana, rejected the measure after the Democratic state lawmaker who proposed it wound up telling voters to oppose it over an issue with the wording on the ballot.
It turns out that there’s a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, the famous constitutional rule abolishing slavery in the US in 1864. Apparently it’s fine to make billions of dollars from “involuntary labour” if the workers have been imprisoned. Hmm.
It’s interesting that when we hear about slavery in the press, it’s usually about rogue individuals or in an historic context or in a country where human rights concerns already widely reported, and not about the two million people currently incarcerated in Free World slammers.
I won’t say anything more for now because I don’t know enough about the issues (I’ve just reserved two books on the subject at the library though!) and I am, of course, not an American. But, y’know, bloody hell.
Remembering. And Asking “What Next?”
Imagine if Capitalism was just switched off one day. If the government just decided to admit that money isn’t real and the whole thing was being called off. Debts written off, no more payday, Absolute Jubilee. Landlords wouldn’t need to suck the lifeblood out of tenants any more because their own upholstered lives wouldn’t be dependent on wealth. Supermarkets wouldn’t charge anymore and could just become food distribution centres, under the benign new management of community organisers. We could all escape our bullshit jobs and do nice things (valuable cultural things, important altruistic things) for no pay instead.
Obviously this will never ever happen and, if it did, all sorts of forgotten and ignored problems would scuttle out of the cracks. It was an idle fantasy arrived at today while thinking about… Twitter again. Sorry.
I don’t think Twitter is really going to disappear, though lots of people seem to. And if it does go, what will people do when they find that they’re finally free?
Freedom from social media as we know it could really be the consequence, I think. Twitter is probably the last of the true mega-platforms, isn’t it? TikTok has more users but it seems less infrastructurally important because, unlike Twitter, it’s just a bit of fun. Nobody’s pestering me to join TikTok and nobody thinks I’m eccentric or a Luddite for not being on it. Shops don’t tend to have TikTok emblems in their windows like they do for Facebook and Twitter. Nobody says “oh, you have to be on TikTok!” It doesn’t seem to have the “necessary evil” strongarm nudge power of Facebook and Twitter. With ease, you can ignore it.
It seems that, were Twitter to shut down or vanish behind a paywall, you could get away with having absolutely no social media in your life at all. Nobody would expect it.
So what will happen when the age of “necessary evil” social media, of Big Social to coin an obnoxious phrase, is over? To start with, journalists might have to re-learn some old tricks; to actually ask penetrating questions instead of scraping Twitter for secondhand hot takes.
Many will continue in their “pivot to video” by embracing TikTok and whatever comes (or has come, probably) after it. But it will be diminishing returns as these platforms become sillier and less essential.
Others will return to a period of Internet time before the algorithms took over: platforms called dreamwidth and cohost are being mentioned and they look just like Livejournal. That would be nice. I still believe that the Internet is not the problem, only that the mega-platforms are damaging free will.
And maybe we can regress en masse even further to pre-Internet ideas. I for one am hoping to set up a small publishing press (real paper!) with a friend next year. New Escapologist might be back in paper too. Move over bits, atoms are back!
The death of Twitter obviously wouldn’t be as big as the death of money but there would be a similar sense of walking out into freedom again (a freedom that was there all along, really), of squinting in the sunlight and feeling its warmth on your skin (but was it always so warm?), of remembering, and asking “what next?”
Get yer atoms here, missus: treat yourself to a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 68. Reading Massive Books.
I just finished reading Stephen King’s It. Why??! Why did I do it?
Well, it was Halloween.
It’s also been on my bucket list for a long time. I liked Stephen King’s books as a teen, though whenever I revisit him as an adult I’m usually a bit underwhelmed. Still, I didn’t want to die without having read It. I think I wanted to honor something my younger self would have wanted.
As a teen, I did a strange thing with It. I saved it. I knew it was the special “Spine Kingler,” up there with Misery and The Shining but purportedly epic, and I was enjoying the experience of looking forward to it. How lower middle-class is that? It’s like saving the juiciest sausage on your plate til last.
This turned out to be a mistake because I’d probably have really enjoyed It when I was 17. As an adult? Not so much.
There’s a good book in It but it’s swamped by hundreds (hundreds!) of pages of inessential, indigestible crap. It was a slog. And there was no “Camino de Santiago”-style epiphany to found in the long distance struggle.
It took me a month to kill it off. I kept thinking of the three or four short novels I could have been reading instead. Urgh. With four short novels, even if you don’t love them all, there’s something to be found in the diversity of experience.
The It paperback I read is 1,166 pages long. I have no problem with long books but this one didn’t warrant its girth. I didn’t savor the experience like a final sausage. It was an ordeal. But I wanted to slay that dragon because it felt like too much of a shame not to read It while I’m here on Earth.
There’s a lesson here about bucket lists, isn’t there?
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After the It ordeal, I’m glad to have slain the dragon, but my overwhelming feeling now is one of malnutrition. It’s time for a superfood salad: a strict diet of Fitzcarraldo Editions for a few weeks.
I’m half-joking, but I do have three unread ones on the shelf and they will contain multitudes.
Indeed, I just started on Moyra Davey’s Index Cards and it’s already a breathe of fresh air simply by virtue of being something else.
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Random bookish thought:
There’s a similarity between travel and reading: knowing that you’ll probably never be here again.
You might re-read the same book or make a return trip but the chances are against. There’s always another book, another place to go.
One book leads to another, seldom back.
Given my experience with It, I wonder if I’ll ever do the Great American Roadtrip for example. It would be a shame not to, but for the investment of money and time I could probably go to eight short novel destinations in Europe.
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Mischief versus Integrity at New Escapologist
If we were to bring New Escapologist back as a printed magazine (which I often toy with but might be serious about this time!), I’d like to return to the central gag: that it’s a highly improbable magazine for “Escapologists.”
I’m always amused by impossibly niche magazine titles like Cigar Aficionado, Total Carp, and Potato Storage International, all of which are real!
New Escapologist (whose title has the perfectly conventional structure of New Scientist, New Internationalist, the New Statesman, New European, New Woman) would be the perfectly conventional magazine for a very niche community.
I wanted imaginative people to see it and think of Houdini with his playfully shackled feet up as he reads the latest dispatches in escape artistry. And for the less imaginative to boggle, “Where is the market for something like this?”
Maybe I nurtured a hope that we’d feature in the “guest publications” bit on Have I Got News for You.
However, somewhere between the pilot issue in 2007 (which also suffered from the premise-detracting complication of trying to resemble an in-flight magazine) and Issue Two in 2008, I became enamored with the bookish self-published era of the Idler magazine. They in turn were inspired by the self-publishing ethos of William Morris and perhaps also Bill Drummond. I admired (and continue to admire) the slightly anticapitalist ethic of publishing meaty essays instead of ephemeral magazine-quality material like product reviews and op-ed columns. I liked that they had perfect-bound spines and would look nice on the shelf.
For better or worse, the aspiration to integrity trumped my more natural sense of mischief.
So! If we were to bring the magazine back from the dead next year, my vision would be in part to return to that basic gag of a super-niche magazine for Escapologists.
We could still have meaningful essays in the form of feature articles and we could still solicit interviews with “prominent citizens” like we used to, but we could also have things like book reviews, letters to the editor, the latest in personal escape tactics, a travel column, a non-boring finance section, an escapological agony aunt, and all that sort of thing.
What do you think, oh gentle reader? Would you like to see a more magaziney New Escapologist true to its roots in 2023? Or a continuation of the Victorian-looking essay format? Or should I leave it buried forever? Leave a comment here or drop me an email if you have feelings.
If I really decide to run with this, I’ll post a more in-depth survey to collect your opinions. But some comments now would certainly help to stoke the embers and bud-nip any problems (like mixed metaphors?) upstream. Thanks in advance.
The Fool’s Journey: A Chat with Milo
Friend Milo posted a great video this week about his self-employment fails. It’s very funny and honest.
I like to mention failed escapes every now and then. It’s important to build the prospect of failure into your escape plan so you can hit the road with eyes open. And of course it generally helps to think about how you’d cope if everything went banana-shaped.
Personally, I don’t mind the prospect of failure (which is lucky really) and I always feel that if you have to go back to the office, tail between your legs, at least you’d have had an adventure and stories worth telling at the water cooler. Maybe that’s just my personal idiot optimism.
I had a few questions for Milo based on this vid. So lets ask them why not?
You said you feel proud of trying, which is good. On balance, do you think your time in self-employment was a worthwhile personal adventure? Was there value in simply attempting escape?
Oh yes, it was definitely worthwhile. I learnt a lot about myself. And I learnt a lot about what not to do if I were to attempt it again!
I’ve had a less stable and financially secure existence than if I’d stayed where I was (being made involuntarily redundant in 2020 for example) but I currently have a well paid and interesting job and more importantly, I’m a wiser person overall.
In the end, I definitely don’t regret what happened. It was all part of the process.
Now that you’re back to work, do you feel like a hero or a fool or a bit of both? What do your colleagues make of your antics?
The one disadvantage of having changed my profession a couple of times now, is that I’ve stayed in a relatively junior role compared to many colleagues who are a similar age to me, or even significantly younger. But I’m pretty sure my colleagues don’t give a damn, and I’m far from the only employee to have gone off on career tangents.
I have felt pretty embarrassed about the whole thing though, primarily because I shared my plans publicly and they didn’t quite work out. So I then had to admit my ‘failure’ publicly, albeit to a small audience. So in that sense, I did feel a bit of a fool. I think the Midlife Crisis Diaries videos are partly a way of coming to terms with this embarrassment, which still lingers even several years later. Ironically here I am airing my midlife crisis in a public forum, so perhaps I will never learn!
However, the Fool’s journey in Tarot terms is not a negative thing. It’s quite a positive card in fact, which signifies a leap of faith and an open, playful attitude to life. It’s similar in some ways to the Joseph Campbell’s concept of “answering the call to adventure.”
When you escaped, did you think it was forever or were you already managing your expectations?
I certainly hoped it was going to be long-term. But although I was somewhat arrogant in that regard, I also had the awareness, and the accompanying anxiety, that it might not work out. I was taking a leap into the unknown, so I genuinely wasn’t sure one way or the other.
You quit drinking and found a therapist to do the personal work. Do you think you’d have done those things if you’d stayed employed?
Great question. Not having a 9-5 definitely gave me the gift of extra time to do the work on myself that I needed to do, and also to recover from burnout after ten years of balancing a fairly dreary day job with a ton of (mostly unpaid) extracurricular creative efforts. Plus yes, detox from over-indulgence with the booze. In retrospect, that was a real gift to myself.
Could you have had more success (or simply more fun) if you’d gone all in on your music or filmmaking instead of corporate copywriting?
Possibly, yes. I definitely think I should have given myself six months for a bit of low-pressure creative exploration, instead of diving right into freelance copywriting. Having said that, I imagine I would have eventually come up against the same internal barriers and limitations regardless of what route I took.
I’ve come full circle in some regards, in that I now see the importance of having creative projects that are in the service of my own muse, rather than someone else’s business goals or with the pressure of needing to make a living from them. My biggest regret is that I not only went back to working full-time, but that I stopped doing creative stuff outside of my paid work, and in particular that I let my blog die a slow death. (I’m hoping to resuscitate this somewhat by publishing occasional updates on my substack newsletter which I’ll be launching soon).
You got that big tax bill surprise, which suggests you were making good money. Did you ever try to go super-frugal so that you wouldn’t even need to pay tax?
Believe me, there were frugal times during the four years I was freelancing. But I was on a bit of a mission to prove to myself that I didn’t have to be a starving artist.
I had initially wanted to be an arts journalist, but I’d gotten frustrated by not being paid for my work. For example, I did a significant amount of work for a local magazine in my spare time, but because it was unpaid, it didn’t provide a route out of the day job. I’d also lived on very low wages for a long time, so by the time I started earning a reasonable amount I didn’t want to go backwards in that regard. I turned to copywriting, because I thought I could at least be paid fairly.
That was one of the reasons (as well as narcissism obviously) why I made my story of “ditching the day job” public; I thought it might be helpful to show that being creative doesn’t have to mean being poor. Of course, that backfired somewhat!
I think that one of the main reasons I didn’t succeed though, was not because I wasn’t frugal enough, but because I didn’t charge nearly enough for my copywriting services, due to a lack of confidence. I even had a client tell me I was undercharging them. But I had no clue how much to charge and wasn’t smart enough to reach out to other successful freelancers for mentorship or advice. So, I hope others in the same situation can at least learn something from my mishaps.
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Keep an eye on Milo’s website (and/or the New Escapologist Twitter account) for when his Substack goes live.
