The Mountains Are Calling and I Must Go
As seen at The Passenger Press in Glasgow today:
The Passenger Press sells lovely hand-printed greetings cards and posters. We’ve bought some of their work before at zine fairs and online.
The quote was familiar so I looked it up when I got home. It’s from mountaineer John Muir. An informative article at Adventure Journal explains:
we should consider the full quote, which appears in an 1873 letter from Muir to his sister: âThe mountains are calling & I must go & I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.â These words reveal a man who saw responsibility and purpose as well as pleasure in the mountains. Muir was a master observer who enjoyed the constant work of understanding nature.
I think that’s great and the sentiment is even more Escapological than I first thought. Obviously, “the mountains are calling and I must go” is a great thing to say as you stand up and walk out of a pointless work meeting. But it’s also about conducting yourself with decorum in real life, finding enthusiasm and intensity inside yourself and remaining true to it.
We happened upon The Passenger Press after delivering copies of my book, The Good Life for Wage Slaves to Good Press two doors along on the same street; why not get a copy in person if you happen to be nearby?
Dreamer John:
“Soz”
A sad case of abuse in a private care home made the news this morning. It’s quite upsetting so please don’t feel that you need to read about it but, essentially, the nursing and cleaning staff of a care facility were caught in the act of tormenting and physically assaulting one of their vulnerable charges.
This blog is obviously not a place to talk about such things but we do like to rail against the corporate machine, and what caught my attention in this respect was the corporate care home provider’s official response:
[our treatment of the patient] fell far short of the standards of care we provide our residents every day. We would like to again apologise to Mrs King and her family, and reassure our community that these actions were committed by rogue individuals.
As a learning organisation, in the wake of [hidden camera] footage being brought to us we have further strengthened our complaints process and our safeguarding policy.
We remain committed to doing everything we can to deliver the highest quality care, and to ensuring peace of mind for the residents who make their home with us, and their loved ones.
Fell short of standards of care? A learning organisation? Remain committed to delivering the highest quality care? How are they not ashamed to spout such mealy corporate drivel in such a grave context?
Even in more trivial circumstances, it’s insulting to be offered such an unfeeling, inhumane apology by the mouthpiece of a brand. It’s a technical apology as a matter of process, an output statement of quasi-legalese from an absent party, a false dial tone disconnected from emotion, contrition, or a desire to achieve anything useful in reality.
When a cancelled train leaves me stranded in the middle of the countryside with only an expensive vending machine for company or I’m on a flight that’s been sitting on the Dublin tarmac for two hours, a pre-recorded voice will sometimes come from a loudspeaker to say that “we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.” I see red when that happens and it’s not even that important. “May cause” indeed.
I’ve sometimes wondered if corporations aren’t perfectly aware of how offensive a phoney apology can be and that it’s precisely why they do it: after all, the employees of a railway company or an airline feel insulted every day — underpaid, disrespected — and, since they have no meaningful interface with the company that makes their daily lives a misery, they take it out on customers in this passive-aggressive way. Saying “we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause” in the midst of a crisis will obviously infuriate. They might as well just say “Soz.”
In the harrowing case of the care home, it’s impossible to accept such a feeble public statement and I hope there are consequences.
How can the words “our shocking acts of brutality” not be part of their statement? Or “the Zimbardo effect clearly being experienced by our staff will be addressed by trained counselors immediately.” Or how about something along the lines of “naturally, we will reduce our nightmare factory to rubble like the Fred West house”?
Maybe I’m asking too much. But you can still sound professional in a sincere apology. And how could you not want to apologise sincerely in a case like this? How can you not want to make real amends for real betrayal and hurt instead of resorting to such skidmarked claptrap as “fell far short of the standards of care” and then pinning the blame on the “rogue individuals” who you formally recruited and trained and paid?
I’d say this is a good example of why care homes shouldn’t be under the control of market forces, but unfortunately they aren’t the only ones guilty of meekly peddling bullshit in the face of grave accusations. Look at the wording of the Care Commission inspection report according to the Guardian:
[they] cut its rating from “good” to “requires improvement”.
and:
[the] “leaders and the culture they created did not always support the delivery of high-quality, person-centred care.”
“Leaders” is obviously the first word that should make the vomit reach your tonsils, but didn’t it strike anyone that “requires improvement” and “did not always support the delivery of high-quality person-centred care” are brutally offensive euphemisms?
My dislike of corporate language is not a knee-jerk or a purely aesthetic one. I’ve come to accept that some businessy terms like “direction of travel” can be quite useful. It’s also possible that certain distancing techniques can keep the emotional heat out of a conversation where rational decisions need to be made. But it can also be used in a cowardly way to obfuscate and to resist responsibility: you can’t come out to the angry and grieving relatives of an abused dementia patient with simpering phrases like “requires improvement” when you should be grovelling to make up for grotesque malpractice.
According to the Guardian, most of the abusive staff have been fired or allowed to resign (shouldn’t they have been referred to the police?) except for one who was put on a training course. This particular staff member was described by the company as a “committed and values-driven leader”. Jesus fucking Christ.
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For further railing against corporate double-speak, try The Good Life for Wage Slaves and Escape Everything! (now available in paperback as I’m Out).
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 67. Napoli
The “what I did on my holidays” entries to this diary are never the best ones. I think that’s because I write them from a mild sense of obligation; since there’s effort involved in travel, I might as well get something (a post!) out of it. Not a great motivation for writing really. Or maybe it’s because I think the eventfulness of a travel experience will translate to a good entry, but it doesn’t. As someone against eventful writing, I should know this.
I’ve always tried, however, to relate these entries back to Escapological lessons beyond the simple “free movement” theme of travel: the attitudes inspired by travel that might be more generally helpful in life, the ways another society can look and how we might emulate that ideal. I think I’m starting from that point of view this time so maybe my Naples entry will be better than, say, this slightly empty one about Berlin.
So we went to Naples. We stayed in the Spanish Quarter, which is part of the crumbly historic side of town. There’s a fancier side of town up on the mountain, which has lovely tree-lined streets and feels more like Paris or Rome, but we had decided to stay in the thick of life. Travel guides to Naples tend to start with “don’t be afraid of Naples’ reputation for crime,” which people also say about Glasgow, which is where I live. So I wasn’t afraid at all.
On Quiet Quitting and the Sunday Scaries
Readers have been telling me about Quiet Quitting and, now, the Sunday Scaries.
I didn’t have much to say about Quiet Quitting because (a) I didn’t know there was any alternative to it and (b) because it’s a stupid name.
Quiet Quitting is apparently the idea of attending your work as usual but “checking out” and doing as little as possible with minimal enthusiasm. You probably meet your contractual demands well enough not to get fired, you turn up to meetings, but you generally just drift through the day in a zombie-like haze. I’m pretty sure that’s nothing new and is in fact most people’s experience of office life. It’s basic survival because to engage in the crap you’re supposed to be doing is mental death. And nobody decides to Quiet Quit; it just happens automatically because of boredom and being asked to do things against your will.
The name, “Quiet Quitting,” annoys me because reporting to work in a zombie state is anything but quitting. It’s doing what you’re told no matter what. If only I were the Mayor of Naming Things, this would be called “The Obvious Result of Wage Slavery” while “Quiet Quitting” would be reserved for the act of finding the guts to leave your job without ceremony or fuss.
So that’s Quiet Quitting dealt with. What next? Oh yes. The Sunday Scaries. This is the experience of feeling anxious on the weekend about returning to work on Monday. Once again, it’s not new and the name is stupid. The name is stupid because it’s willfully infantile (with a similar numb-nut cadence to “the terrible twos” or “sporty forty” or to those banal workaday hashtags like #ThursdayThoughts) and therefore makes light of something ruinous to our quality of life.
The bottom line is that if you’re off work and not currently on the clock, you should be able to live freely in those scarce and hard won moments. But that’s impossible because the psychic toll of work is so great. Having a job is like having someone standing behind you all the time and clanging two iron poles together: you can’t relax under those circumstances. You think about work all the time: at weekends, at night, on vacation, at Christmas, on your birthday, on a hot date, on the toilet, and in your dreams.
The Sunday Scaries have at least been investigated somewhat and the finding is that they:
regularly affect more than two-thirds of Britons who report work stresses, lack of sleep and looming to-do lists as the primary causes of anxiety before the start of the working week.
The worst affected were young adults with 74% of those aged 18-24 experiencing what psychologists call âheightened anticipatory anxietyâ as the weekend comes to a close.
So almost everyone then. Well done, Civilisation. We’ve built a world where almost nobody can enjoy their hard-earned downtime for fear of being cattle-prodded back to work again. We’re not compensated for this stress and we shouldn’t have to endure it.
When they experience the Sunday Scaries, people apparently resort to social media, TV, and comfort eating: all things that exacerbate the problem of low quality of life and delay any hope of escape.
A psychologist who probably means well says that instead of wasting your time and brain in these ways, you should:
try getting active, which can help you to burn off nervous energy, writing down or keeping a diary of what you are doing and how you feel at different times to help identify what’s causing anxiety and what you need to do to help manage it. Small things can make a big difference to our mental wellbeing.
Anything but try to change your actual circumstances. Anything but try to escape your job or the consumer treadmill that benefits from your misery.
Luckily, the UK government is on hand to help. Yes, the same government who want to increase work and crack down on “slacking.” So they have a ridiculous (and naturally very cheap) campaign in which people can visit a website for:
a personalised âmind planâ giving tips to help deal with stress and anxiety.
Allow me to be the first to say, “ew, gross.”
This government aren’t there to help you, folks. They’re there to cajole you back into the workforce and, when you complain about the misery of it, they’ll find a cheap way to shut you up.
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Tired of hearing the same old crap? Read The Good Life for Wage Slaves for survival tips and then learn to escape with Escape Everything! (aka I’m Out).
A Whole World Out There
This is from Lauren Elkin’s FlĂąneuse, a good book about walking in cities and its relationship with personal freedom:
There was a whole world out there and I didn’t have to live in America simply because I was born there. I could live anywhere I liked.
This was an epiphany. One rainy night over a pasta dinner with my flatmate, we contemplated the enormity of it. We can go anywhere, we can do anything, we told each other.
She goes on to say “but it wasn’t true” because there are complications with visas and borders, challenges around finding income when you live abroad.
As someone who has had the same epiphany and then struggled through the same problems, I’d say it’s better to contemplate the enormity of your freedom in adventurous good faith than to deny it in bad faith just because it can be difficult.
To start with, you can go to a lot of places for six months without any kind of visa woe. Like Rolf Potts, you can save a battery of wealth from perfectly conventional employment and use it to escape for just a little while or to buy time while you figure out how to escape more permanently. You can travel across multiple countries in Europe or states in America in a state of constant motion without worrying about visas at all. Other places, where visas are a problem, you can still work intelligently and patiently to, you know, get the visa.
Elkin herself is an American who lived in France for several years as an academic. She went “home” to New York when her Paris work contract was not renewed, but she still lived abroad legitimately for years. She lived in Toyko for a while too, under the spousal sponsorship of her partner who was offered a job in finance there.
Getting a visa for my Canadian partner to live with me in the UK was an anxiety-producing nightmare but (a) the UK is particularly troublesome on that front (I had less difficulty with my visa in the other direction), (b) we were asking for rather a lot compared to someone who just wants to live abroad for a year or so, and (c) we won in the end.
I do not deny the awfulness (awfulness!) of the artificial barriers to moving around freely–like Rutger Bregman, I’d prefer to see a borderless or soft-bordered world–and we all know that many of those barriers are getting less and less permeable. But to assume you’re not free to live wherever you want and do whatever you want is to live in bad faith. Do it! Be fleet of foot! Walk through walls!
My partner and I, when moving around between the UK and Canada, did everything by the book, but you could just go somewhere anyway if you feel bold enough. Millions of people move around the skin of the planet illegally or by bending the rules. Momus lived in Japan for years by going back and forth on renewed tourist visas. When one of his visas was coming to an end, he’d go to Europe to work for awhile or go travelling to somewhere like Korea, returning to his girlfriend’s apartment in Japan on a fresh tourist visa for another six months. It came to an end eventually but nothing bad happened to him. And even now he remains a British citizen living in Paris and Berlin without much care for formalities. Heroic.
(Lauren Elkin’s book is great, by the way. I might say more on it sometime but for now I’ll just say that it’s a great addition to any flaneur’s personal library).
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For tales of visa woe, please try The Good Life for Wage Slaves. For more positive exercises in good faith and meditations on the enormity of human freedom, try Escape Everything! (a.k.a. I’m Out).
Economic Bullying at its Finest
[The UK’s chancellor] Kwasi Kwarteng will tighten benefit rules for part-time workers, requiring them to work longer hours or take steps to increase their earnings.
Just as the world wakes up to the bounty of a 4-day week, the UK government decides to crack down on part-time work by reducing the financial support available to low-income households.
I’ve said in my books and in New Escapologist that most people don’t work by consent but are “economically bullied” into it. I’ve sometimes wondered if that expression is too much, but here is a government who fully admits to this withdrawal of support being an attempt to “grow the labour supply.” Which is a nice way of saying “let’s starve them out.”
They want to trim our means to escape overwork so that they can “fill vacancies” and get back to growing the economy. Without getting into the weeds over whether this can even work or not, whether the current part-time workforce is fit or qualified to fill this apparent abundance of vacancies, it’s a clear example of the sort of economic bullying I’ve been talking about.
To deal with the “problem” posed by the Great Resignation, of people taking charge of their own destinies as best they can within the confines of The Trap, the government are removing a line of recourse. As of next week, people will only be able to work part-time on the government’s increasingly authoritarian terms. As if it weren’t hard enough already to stay alive in any way other than a full-time job.
There’s many reasons to work part-time and it would be nice if the leaders of one of the world’s richest countries would recognise this. Maybe your mental health cannot support the burden of full-time work. Maybe your physical health can’t either. Maybe you want to use your time to build your own business (inventing your own “vacancies” and “growing the economy” on your own terms). Not that there’s anything wrong with idleness, but we know that most part-time workers have something else going on.
The government’s attack on part-time workers is consistent with the current (and general) Conservative idea that the UK’s economic problems are the result of regular people not toiling hard enough. It has nothing to do with decades of Tory corruption or their costly mismanagement of the pandemic or their gradual destruction of public assets, naturally. And nothing to do with many working-class people already working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
It’s perfectly convenient for them to peddle the lie that we’re not working hard enough. They have little interest in improving the world (or even in “building back better” or “levelling up” or whatever they’re trying to fob us off with now) and plenty of interest in serving themselves and their friends in business. I honestly try to see the case for right-wing ideas, but what is the point of even having a civilisation if you’re not going to let it serve the majority? What is the point of sucking up all the money to serve the 1%? What is the use of shoving almost everyone into pointless consumer economy work that exacerbates the climate crisis? What’s the endgame?
Blocking an important route to part-time work is at odds with the way the world is now alert to more humane modes of work, such as WFH and the 4-day week.
“Economic Bullying” is the correct term and this is economic bullying at its finest. And now that I’ve learned not to mince my words, let me say that if you live in the UK (or England really), I strongly advise you to vote these cunts out as soon as the opportunity arises.
Major Success in 4-Day Week Campaign Trials
From the BBC:
Many UK firms taking part in a four-day working week trial have said they will keep it in place after the pilot ends.
More than 70 firms are taking part in the scheme where employees get 100% pay for 80% of their normal hours worked.
At the halfway point in a six-month trial, data shows that productivity has been maintained or improved at the majority of firms.
I suppose it’s possible that the firms who signed up to the trial were already predisposed to the benefits of a shorter work week. But this does feel positive, doesn’t it? That people might be waking up to the deleterious health effects of full-time jobs and the ridiculous demands they put on life. Maybe the taboo is broken at last? Maybe we can be honest about the cost of full-time work?
[The campaigners] said that employees had benefitted from lower commuting and childcare costs and claimed that a parent with two children would save ÂŁ3,232.40 on average per year or roughly ÂŁ269.36 per month.
Why has it taken so long, folks? Why? Why? Why? The sums could be done on the back of an envelope but instead we need to have practical trials and lightbulb moments in the year 2022. But, hey, we’re getting there. We’re getting there.
Tired of the everyday grind? There’s a shoulder to cry on in The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
What Would Beyonce Do?
“They work me so damn hard,” BeyoncĂ© sings on the track. “They work my nerves / That’s why I cannot sleep at night.” The song also includes lines such as “release ya job, release the time,” which are originally from “Explode,” a 2014 song by Big Freedia.
For some reason, the willfully po-faced analysis of pop music lyrics never fails to make me laugh. Simon Singh’s scientific dismemberment of Katie Melua’s Nine Million Bicycles springs to mind, as does Richard Herring’s egalitarian dissection of Avril Lavigne’s Sk8ter Boi.
Thanks go then to Reader V for putting us onto the Wall Street Journal’s journalistic button-holing of economists for their views of BeyoncĂ©’s recent anti-work anthem in which she describes quitting a job:
On one hand, there are bullish economists such as Brad DeLong who argue that BeyoncĂ©’s advice is essentially sound. “Yes, if you are going to jump, now is definitely the time to jump,” says the University of California, Berkeley economics professor, who was deputy assistant Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration. “And now is the time to make sure your boss knows that you could and might jump.”
But on the other hand:
“I’d say this is not a good time to quit your job without a plan,” says Jennifer Doleac, associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University. “In an economic downturn, most employers will stop hiring employees before they start firing existing employees, so going into a recession without a job is extremely risky,” she says. “Simply quitting without finding a new source of income is not an option for most people who are not BeyoncĂ©.”
So act of your own free will, oh listener to pop music, but, let’s face it, “WWBD” is always a relatively useful touchstone.
Backroom Antics
I enjoyed this anecdote about some failed workplace mischief at the blog of writer John Hoare:
If the [sales] reps could bring in [promotional items] like pens, maybe they could bring in something a little bigger. Like, say, a wall clock, branded with their companyâs logo. I could put them all on the wall of the order office, and we could get an international time zones thing going. LONDON â PARIS â NEW YORK, and the like.
I believe we got to a grand total of two clocks on the wall before it was stopped from above. No reason given; certainly no worries about bribery, however idiotic that would have been when it came to clocks. Just a general air of “Obviously, we arenât going to do that.”
I tried to have a little bit of fun in what could be a fairly boring job, and it was immediately stamped down on with no explanation. Because who would want to enjoy themselves at work?
Reader, I laughed the laughter of recognition. I’ve experienced many similar defeats in trying to have a micron of fun (or reclaim a modicum of dignity) in dreary jobs. The chain-breaking incident comes to mind but there was also the chess game:
I had a student job in retail and I put a small magnetic chess board in the stockroom. A co-worker and I would move a piece whenever one of us went in there, enjoying a gradual game of chess over the course of the weekend.
Most of the time, I’d go for some stock, take a glimpse at the board, see that my opponent hadn’t moved yet, and continue to idly cook my next move in the back of my brain while working. Pretty low-level fun really.
Mind you, I was working at the cash register one time and I saw my opponent emerge from the stockroom with a smug look on his face, trying not to meet my gaze lest I see that he’d done something clever or even cheated. His smug face and slinking demeanor were very funny to me so I had to bottle up my laughter in front of my customer.
Our chess games were eventually busted when a supervisor found the board. I was surprised by her attitude because I was on friendly terms with her. “It’s bloody cheeky,” she said angrily, though her attitude seemed to be one of disappointment in a trusted underling. More specifically, I think she was afraid of getting in trouble with her bosses for it. I just felt bewildered. I didn’t see the problem.
Who could care that we had a chess board in the stockroom? It mattered not a jot. It was just a small way of having fun against a backdrop of grunt work.
If I’d actually laughed in front of the customer that time, I could have said “I’ve been slowly playing chess with a colleague in the stockroom; I’ve just seen him looking like he thinks he’s made a good move but I’ll get him for it later.” And they’d either laugh along at how adorable we were or, more likely, think nothing of it at all. Nobody expects shop a part-time assistant to be completely formal.
I suppose now that my supervisor lived in terror of something in her jurisdiction not being right, all minor infractions potentially building towards dismissal. Capitalism’s done a real number on us, hasn’t it? Can’t even play sideshow chess or put a bunch of clocks on a wall without fear of someone getting the boot.
For more tales of attempted workplace survival try my book The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
