Ask yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity, just start taking action, using what you have, who you know, who you are.
Take it from me. New Escapologist‘s eudaemonology (science of happiness) editor, Neil Scott, knows an awful lot about productivity, satisfaction and mindfulness.
This document, then, is a kind of holy grail: everything Neil has learned about productivity and lifehacking in the past seven years.
Buy the all-new Issue Nine in print or on PDF here.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount here.
Buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue here.
There are a million ways to sell yourself out
A comic strip with an Escapological theme.
Drawn by Gavin Aung Than. Spake by the hilarious, principled and all-round wonderful Bill Watterson.
Buy the all-new Issue Nine in print or on PDF here.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount here.
Buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue here.
Neil Gaiman on Books
Coincidentally, I’m posting this on the day of the London Anarchist Bookfair, where New Escapologist is being represented.
I’d like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
This is Neil Gaiman on the joys of reading, the importance of libraries and books, and the value of escapism.
(Escapism is different to Escapology, remember, but Neil Gaiman in the above passage shows that it provides the faculty to see that your life or the world in which you live does not necessarily have to be the way it is — or any given way for that matter).
I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.
There’s a lot to like in this essay (originally a lecture).
We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
Finally:
We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.
Buy the all-new Issue Nine in print or on PDF here.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount here.
Buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue here.
The Tabloid Incident
I was struck today by the strangeness of the word “tabloid”. I was reading an essay on the Web and I think I may have been expecting the word “tablet”.
“Tabloid” struck me as more futuristic-sounding than “tablet” and for a tiny moment I wondered what a tabloid might actually be. Some kind of new interface? A clever bit of portable tech? Astronaut food in pill-form?
Of course not. It’s a tabloid. An ink-and-paper publication, usually about celebrities and fashion and UFOs. My weird outsider life means I haven’t seen a tabloid newspaper for years and I’d sort of forgotten about them.
It was exactly like how I once struggled to convince myself that coca-cola was a real thing.
I think I’m properly beginning to identify with the protagonist of that novel, À rebours.
Buy the all-new Issue Nine in print or on PDF here.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount here.
Buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue here.
Blurb 9
This is what the blurb looks like on the back cover of Issue Nine.
Buy the all-new Issue Nine in print or on PDF here.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount here.
Buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue here.
Professionalism
What, precisely, is professionalism?
In the rather good movie Berberian Sound Studio, an unpleasant film director defines it for us:
Gilderoy, let me just tell you what it is to be a professional. It’s very simple. You cooperate, you don’t question. You don’t argue. You don’t look at your watch. You just do the work you’re told to do and keep your personal opinion where it belongs. Am I clear?
Very!
Buy the all-new Issue Nine in print or on PDF here.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount here.
Buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue here.
Issue Nine
Finally! Issue 9 of New Escapologist is ready to go. The theme is money. The title is “Take the Money and Run”. This is what the cover looks like.
Highlights of the issue include a short piece by Dice Man Luke Rhinehart; an interview with philosopher Joseph Heath; a short story by comedian Ian Macpherson; top-drawer humour from Robert Wringham; and articles by blog giants Jacob Lund Fisker and Mr. Money Mustache.
To whet your appetite, here’s the table of contents:
It’s a massive 92 pages of nicely-typeset money-themed Escapological marvels.
Buy it now! Available in print and PDF.
Subscriber copies and pre-orders are already flying the nest.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount.
Or buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue.
One More Freeman
I’ll be making much less for a little while, but I don’t mind that at all, because I become immediately freed from paying the dozens of insidious costs of a steady corporate paycheck — the anti-creative cubicular environment, the dark and fearful mood that descends every Sunday evening, the treadmill of forgettable tasks that have nothing to do with my values, and the attitude of total subordination that’s required to stay employed, to name only a few.
And although they’re not strictly forbidden by living as a fifty-hour-a-week employee, certain pursuits had become a lot more difficult. Since I’m already using my evenings and weekends to run a blog, maintain a few friendships, and keep my home and clothing clean, “electives” like exercising, reading, and conducting creative experiments never find a consistent space to flourish as habits.
Congratulations are due to friend David of Raptitude who escapes the everyday grind on October 11th.
Operation Save-and-Quit
You’re right to think seriously of quitting. You badly need a complete break, with time to think. And that won’t be possible immediately.
I was delighted to see the Guardian careers advisor (and his readers) encouraging someone to take the money and run.
You have £100,000 savings. Either quit outright now, or ask your boss if there’s a possibility of a six-month sabbatical if you feel that all you need is time off rather than a change of lifestyle. The technical sector is still doing well: if you have the experience and drive you say you have, you’ll have no problems finding another job once you’ve taken a break.
Pre-order Issue Nine in print or on PDF today.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount.
Or buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue.
Happy 20th Birthday, The Idler!
Where do you get your ideas from? If you’re working all day, it kind of kills a lot. So daydreaming is a productive activity. It’s also about visualising your ideal world, both the kind of world you live in and also who you want to hang around with and what you want to spend your time doing. My ideal world, which I’ve been thinking about for 10 years, is the film world, where I can make films and watch movies and be around creative people.
When I was 17, I remember thinking, ‘My whole life is anticipation, everything I’m doing in school is to serve some future purpose.’ All people would say is, ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’ Wait – you mean we’re not people right now? You’re being moulded to be a little drone-worker in the system.
Thus spake Dazed and Confused filmmaker Richard Linklater, interviewed by a young Idler in 1994.
The Idler has come of age and, to celebrate, they’re releasing a collection of fifty interviews with fabulous bohemians and idle thinkers from the magazine’s capacious archive. You can order a copy here.
There’s also a smashing sample from the volume in the Independent today.
The Idler was, of course, a major part of the inspiration for New Escapologist. Their editor, Tom, also gave us some good breaks by recommending us to his readership, by allowing me write for his magazine, and doing an event with us in Glasgow. Since it began in 1993, the Idler has evolved into a high-quality annual of joyful, counter-cultural essays and an entire enterprise in the form of the Idler Academy. Long may they flourish! But effortlessly.
Pre-order Issue Nine in print or on PDF today.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount.
Or buy the complete back catalogue on PDF, with £1 off the price of each issue.
