Other Dutchies

After posting about Netherlands’ four-day week just now, I remembered two other things I’ve been meaning to share.

One is Sebbiebikes, the website of a young Dutch national who is:

cycling from Amsterdam to Japan. to get there, i cross around 25 borders. but wait, this is such a privilege, as my passport is among the strongest in the world! so: why do you need this sheer luck to be able to see the world? the answer lies in many places, but the core is: borders. so, while i’m biking for 2.5 years, i’ll learn about borders. why are they here? how do they work? and (how) can we get rid of them?

A passport from Netherlands is the world’s fourth strongest (a British passport is only the sixth, by the way), providing access to 188 countries. But why should this be the case? Why are certain borders impassable to certain people, simply because of the accident of where they were born?

I think that’s an excellent question and one that presents an entire research question for someone who believes in international freedom. That’s sort-of what Seb is doing, except he’s not doing it as an academic. He’s on the road, on his bike, to learn about borders in practice, blogging as he goes. I think that’s cool. He’s currently in Damascus.

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The other thing I’ve been meaning to mention is a YouTube channel called Not Just Bikes. The Escapological element lies in how Jason Slaughter, the Canadian behind the channel, sat down at his engineer’s drafting table to work out the best possible place for his family to live. For them it was Amsterdam. So they moved. YOU can move.

Jason’s channel is also fun if you’re interested in public transport or urban planning, and if have hundreds of hours to spend learning about the world’s train and bus systems.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.

Dutch Courage

Instead of merely guessing about the advantages and disadvantages of the four-day week, suggests the Financial Times, why not look to a country who already does it? The Netherlands has practically arrived there by stealth.

Netherlands has become one of my favourite countries to visit. It’s also the only country I ever visit. What I mean is, I often visit “Paris” but not really “France.” The city is usually the draw for me, not the country. With Netherlands, however, I love Amsterdam, Utrecht, Delft and Rotterdam. And I like to travel between them on excellent, clean and pleasant Dutch trains. It seems I’m fond, for once, of the country.

Average working weekly hours for people aged 20 to 64 in their main job are just 32.1, the shortest in the EU … It has also become increasingly common for full-time workers to compress their hours into four days rather than spread them over five, says Bert Colijn, an economist at Dutch bank ING. “The four-day work week has become very, very common,” he told me.

Honestly, if your country was as nice as the Netherlands, was so darn functional, and so filled with worthwhile things to do, you’d probably work fewer days too. Because there are things other than work to occupy your time. Or maybe it’s the other way around: maybe working fewer days has made for a happier, prouder, better engaged citizenry who are only too happy to contribute.

Colijn’s view is that the Netherlands is, in theory, holding itself back by working fewer hours. On the other hand, he adds, “I also wouldn’t want to propose any dystopian society where everyone is working more than Korean hours, just because it increases GDP.”

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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.

Hair on the Sauce Bottle

From today’s Guardian:

Forty years ago, a small group of students and university dropouts living rough had a novel idea. What if they pooled meagre savings and jobless benefits for a modest terrace house, rather than rent a run-down flat?

They raised a deposit for a £3,200 mortgage on a neglected two-bedroom property in the Victorian terraces of west Hull, running down to the quayside of a once-thriving fishing port, from where boats used to trawl the north Atlantic.

£3,200 in today’s money is £9,969. That is not enough for a deposit on a Victorian terrace today, even in stinking Hull. According to my quick research and calculations, you’d need a minimum of £19,500. Which is fairly disgusting.

But maybe it’s still doable. Young people of an Escapological mindset could scrape £20k together, right?

The article doesn’t say how many students were involved in the original pool. There are four people in the top photograph. The house had two bedrooms, so let’s assume there were indeed four people. This could leave two couples in each bedroom, with the option of using a downstairs room as a bedroom in the event of not everyone in the quartet being part of a couple.

So four people kicking in £5,000 would give you a decent-ish deposit of £20,000.

So it’s probably still an option. Think about it, kids. Pool your resources. Draw up an agreement to keep everyone safe. Cohabit.

Their enthusiasm for punk bands – the Clash, the Specials and New Model Army – belied a determination to work the system rather than fight the class war.

That’s Escapology, that is. Flight, not fight. You can fight later if you want to.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.

Treating Ourselves as a Mere Means to an End

Why do we all hate work so much? And why does it seem to have only got worse in the modern era? Well, according to philosopher Byung-Chul Han, our psychological attitude towards work and productivity has fundamentally shifted in a disastrous direction for our mental health, our happiness, and our long-term fulfilment.

From a video book review of The Burnout Society (2015) by Byung-Chul Han.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.

If I Blew it or Not

This is from Lou Sullivan whose diaries I’ve been reading. His dying father gives him some advice:

there’s only one thing he wants to say and that’s “[Lou,] do what you want to do and don’t give a fuck! Whatever anyone else says, just do what you want to do!” (And I just wanted to say, yeah dad, you should know, you waited too long to do what you wanted).

I’ve said before that the dying almost always give us the same advice: live for yourself, don’t pay too much attention to what others want you to do.

It’s a message from the future. And do we listen? Never.

Lou’s dad was only 63 when he went. It could have been worse. It could happen to any young thing, on your way to jury service or some other nonsense you didn’t really want to do. Live, baby, live.

You know, within reason. I don’t think Lou’s dad meant “be a murderer if that’s what you like doing.” Be decent. So long as your values are realised and you can have great fun while you’re still alive.

Years later, when Lou himself is dying, he writes in his diary:

I have always envisioned myself laying on my deathbed and looking back to reassess what I did on earth. I will be the only who matters, and I don’t want to have to realize that I wasted my life or didn’t accomplish what I wanted to. I will be the only one laying there knowing if I blew it or not.

Maybe Lou Sullivan was a rare one who did listen to that message from the future. Be like Lou! Have fun while you’re here.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.

Trap Life

Seen in Edinburgh last week:

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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.

Will There Be Funny Hats?

“The world of work is in flux, with a fight for our time and our livelihoods at the centre,” Elle Hunt writes in the Guardian today, “Fun doesn’t seem to factor into it – but [management consultant] Bree Groff argues that it should.”

Should it though?

Already I’m rubbing my hands with glee at the prospect of finding some vomit-making suggestions for workplace “fun” for my fellow misanthropes here in the blog. Surely they will involve Lego, team-building exercises, safe-for-work “humour,” maybe some funny hats.

what if work was neither our only source of meaning, nor a necessary evil to be endured – but a “nice way to spend our days”?

I’m listening.

It was a shock, when Groff entered the working world herself, to find it weighed down by so much baggage: back-to-back meetings, no time for bathroom or meal breaks, emails at all hours and busy work with no obvious point. The trouble is not so much work itself, Groff says, but all the “patently ridiculous, if not outright dangerous” trappings and norms that come with it – chief among them the expectation that it may come at the expense of sleep, relationships or wellbeing.

Correct.

We get paid to create value, not to suffer, Groff points out.

INCORRECT. Many managers and employers get off on human suffering. A certain kind of person is attracted to the managerial role. They are usually self-important power-tripping idiots with nothing finer in their lives than trapping their “inferiors” and watching them age. Beyond managers and employers, it’s also ideological.

“We’ve normalised this idea that work is just drudgery and we do it because we have to,” says Groff.

I’m not sure that’s true. New Escapologist and the Idler promote the idea that work is all to often drudgery, but we’re quite rarefied voices in a world where most people either enjoy their work because they don’t see an alternative way to sp[end 80,000 hours before dying or, if they hate it, they pretend to enjoy it because it’s “for the kids” or whatever bad faith argument they’re into that week. Or because they want to maximise their consumer privileges. Or because they don’t want to seem ungrateful.

Fun is a good metric [of workplace quality] because it’s hard to force, or fake. Instead of trying to lure workers back to the office with free lunches, employers could consider what it feels like to spend time there, says Groff. “Are people – especially the leaders – relaxed and happy and joking? Is it a fun place to be, or is everybody just in meeting rooms in their button-downs all day?”

The problem is: we’re paid to be there. And we’re there because we have rent to pay. We can’t laugh and joke with the people who own our time and knowingly have the power to ruin our lives with a simple “due to corporate restructuring, we have decided not to renew your contract” letter. Unless you’re genuinely committed to creating a non-hierarchical workplace (presumably a cooperative where everyone takes home the same wage and has an equal voice in the organisation’s direction of travel), the power imbalance is an insurmountable problem. Colleagues are not your friends. That’s why “colleague” is a word really. You can’t be yourself at work. And if you can’t be yourself — if you’re working under a reign of low-level fear — you can’t really have fun.

You can’t even really have much fun with colleagues on the same level. They’re just as embarrassed to be there as you are. They’d rather get through the day in dignified silence and then, as early as possible, go home to where real life happens.

As to “luring” workers back to the office from their post-pandemic WFH situations, why do want to do that at all when you know it’s more expensive and less productive? Is it because you’re a self-important bastard who wants to see disciplined bums on ergonomic seats between 9 and 5 no matter how little sense that makes? It is because you love Pret?

Anyway, I’m still waiting to hear about Groff’s idea of workplace fun. Come on. I want specifics. Will there be funny hats?

Groff uses the example of Peter Attia, a Stanford-educated surgeon who went through a period of playing clips from the cult film Napoleon Dynamite while performing various transplants.

Ahahahaha! Better than I could have hoped.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.

Exact Date. Every Day.

Adrian Edmondson‘s stuffy old schoolteacher dad (pictured above) was an Escapologist in his way:

For the last few years of his working life my abiding memory of Dad is of him spreading his paperwork out on the dining room table every evening. This isn’t marking homework or doing lesson plans, or anything to do with school, he’s trying to work out when he can retire.

he has various bits of pension entitlement from many different sources, and little bits of money squirrelled away, some of it in a bank in Jersey, which sounds dodgy. Some of it is obviously tied to interest rates, and in these days before computer spreadsheets, each evening he looks up the indices in the newspaper, adjusts various predictions, factors in inflation, dreams up possible variables, considers future interest rates, looks at his bank balance, tots it all up, and comes up with an exact date. Every day.

I suppose it’s a reminder that everyone — of all generations and temperaments — is running away from something.

What you’re trying to escape probably depends on which component of The Trap has got you down. In Ade’s case it was school, in his dad’s it was work. Which, oddly, was also school.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 is in the works and can be ordered today for November release.

Their Preoccupations Are Meagre

A whopping great “thank you” to Reader O for sending this in.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke writes to the aspiring poet Franz Kappus.

“Two sections in one of his letters,” writes Reader O, “stood out that made me think of your work with New Escapologist.”

In his letter “Rome, 23 December 1903,” Rilke writes:

My dear Mr Kappus,

You shall not go without greetings from me at Christmas time, when you are perhaps finding your solitude harder than usual to bear among all the festivities. But if you notice that it is great, then be glad of it; for what (you must ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not great? There is only one solitude, and it is vast and not easy to bear and almost everyone has moments when they would happily exchange it for some form of company, be it ever so banal or trivial, for the illusion of some slight correspondence with whoever one happens to come across, however unworthy … But perhaps those are precisely the hours when solitude grows, for its growth is painful like the growth of boys and sad like the beginning of spring. But that must not put you off. What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.

And when one day you realize that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?

Think, dear Mr Kappus, of the world that you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you like Az Whether it is memory of your own childhood or longing for your own future – just be attentive towards what rises up inside you, and place it above everything that you notice round about. What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people. Who says you have such an attitude at all? – I know, your profession is hard and goes against you, and I had foreseen your complaints and knew they would come. Now that they have come I cannot assuage them;

I can only advise you to consider whether all professions are not like that, full of demands, full of hostility for the individual, steeped as it were in the hatred of those who with sullen resentment have settled for a life of sober duty.

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New Escapologist Issue 18 is in the works and can be ordered today for November release.

What’s a Young Berserker to do?

Comedian Adrian Edmondson runs away from boarding school in 1973. The escape, recounted in his new memoir, Berserker!, doesn’t go according to plan:

There are only two options really […] face the wrath of my parents or run away. What’s a young berserker to do? I hitchhike straight to the docks. A keen reader of Tintin as a child, my idea is to find a cargo ship, shimmy up the anchor rope under cover of darkness, stow away in the hold until the ship reaches international waters, then present myself to the captain as a willing and capable deckhand. […] Unfortunately, Hull docks are closed. […] Bloody oil crisis, bloody stock market crash, bloody double inflation.

But adventure is still on the cards:

I’ve got nothing with me except some small change and two pairs of underpants, both of which I’m wearing. […] The next day I wake up in a chicken coop near a farmhouse just outside Beverley. [The chickens] look confused. Is that confusion? No, it’s not. It’s… opprobrium. They’re judging me! Chickens!

In the end, he goes to a phone box and calls a schoolfriend who reveals the police are looking for him. Adrian thinks he’s in trouble for a fire he idly set in a scrub brush, but apparently it’s not about that. Is it just about running away? he asks. “It’s about,” says the friend, “you going missing.”

I love that. He’s not really an outlaw or a fugitive. He’s not “wanted,” he’s “missing”!

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New Escapologist Issue 18 is in the works and can be ordered today for November release.