Letter to the Editor: Tears Dripping Into My Sandwich
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Hello Robert,
I always open your newsletters with a mix of hope and shame. I remember my second day of full-time employment, sitting alone in a subway, tears dripping into my sandwich, an escape plan forming in my mind.
Fifteen years later I remain imprisoned by my cowardice and lack of imagination. We are all born straight-backed and defiant, but the world has twisted my body and broken my will. You shared a post of mine in the newsletter once, when I was still on Twitter, but I am a fraud! Unworthy!
Yours,
Reader E
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Oh no! I don’t want anyone to feel like that when they’re reading our newsletter.
Escape from full-time employment is a tough nut to crack. That’s why New Escapologist exists really. Escape plans are hard to formulate, so we have this periodical to share them and to lament their failure when failures happen.
There’s zero shame in not escaping. Most people don’t escape. We show in our pages that escape is possible, but it’s by no means certain nor even merely probable. Examples of successful escape aren’t there to taunt you but to give hope that maybe, just maybe, you can follow suit.
To escape, you might have to look poverty in the whites of its eyes and certainly to face down the idea of failure. You need to build failure into the plan. What would happen if you failed? What would be the worst case scenario? Could you face it?
Besides, many people who read our pages are perfectly happy in their jobs, have found ways to be content inside the box, or are working very slowly towards an escape.
Fifteen years isn’t such a long time really. Your job, for all that might suck about it, will have provided material comfort in that time. You’ll have something to show for it. And, if you really want to escape, you eventually will. Even if it’s just at the natural point of retirement into a state pension. In that way, escape is inevitable really. You just have to stay alive and be patient.
Letters to the Editor: Backyard Chickens Come Home to Roost
You know Hilaire Belloc, don’t you? He wrote Cautionary Tales for Children in which naughty children are joyously dispatched by fire, skewering, and devourment by lions.
But he also wrote The Servile State, a 1912 critique of Big Business and its relationship with the State. A problem with this relationship, Belloc writes, is that it builds a nation of grudging, demoralised Wage Slaves instead of engaged, independent-minded craftspeople. He was right, obviously.
And the solution he proposes for systemically ending Wage Slavery is… private property ownership.
I’m yet to decide if that’s an excitingly unconventional position or a drearily conventional one. Every Muggle in Britain today seeks to own property, but those who pursue it most fervently (those who become landlords for example) don’t generally want to end Wage Slavery. So. I’m interested.
“If we do not restore the Institution of Property,” he writes at the very top, “we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.”
Perhaps he’s saying that, once rent is out of the picture, a person approaches financial independence and can get on with something meaningful instead of toiling full-time. I wonder if Belloc (much like Keynes, who predicted we’d all be on a 15-hour work week by now) did not foresee the delinquent appetites of humans under capitalism. Plenty of people who pay off their mortgage but continue to toil, usually with some other thing in the balance — like a pension or even another mortgage for a bigger or second house.
I’ll say more about Belloc’s argument another time when I’ve come to firmer grips with it. Reader’s voice: what a cop out! It reminds me, however, that we’ve not said anything about the “renting versus owning” issue for a while.
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As many of you know, my partner and I recently bought our first apartment after decades of renting. We enjoyed renting and it was our preference: if you see your landlord not as a boss or superegoic parent figure but as a skivvy paid to keep you housed and to repair your washing machine when it breaks, it becomes a most amenable relationship.
Several rent hikes (or pay rises for our skiv), alas, made our continued tenancy unaffordable. Our rent doubled over six years.
The fun of renting is to aristocratically dismiss your worries about the future, but the cost expanded so exorbitantly that we found ourselves worried not just about the future but about the present. This doesn’t mean “ownership wins.” It means the UK rental situation is fucked up beyond measure.
When we bought the flat two years ago, I grumbled about it in the newsletter and got some email responses on the subject. So let’s run a themed edition of Letters to the Editor.
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Friend Ian’s email was amusingly useless:
Hi Rob,
Hope this finds you well. As a communist homeowner I have strong and conflicted views on this, which I meant to share with you following your first email about it, but, obviously, I never got round to it.
[I also wanted] to let you know that I might have clicked on the grieving face emoji in response to how I feel about your Kickstarter campaign. Rest assured this was in error: I intended to click on the happy face, but I’m in a bit of a vaccine fever at the moment, so not at my maximum competence.
Cheers,
Ian
PS: ‘grieving face emoji’ was an autocorrect typo; I meant to type ‘frowning face emoji’.
Ah, the vaccine. Heady days. Ian doesn’t go into detail about his conflicted feelings as a communist homeowner, but I imagine they are something like “property is theft but, since we’re economically bullied into committing theft, what are you going to do?”
Reader X wrote:
You may need to clarify – renting for 1000 quid vs. buying for 100 apiece?? Are house prices in Scotland that reasonable?! If so, sign me right up. I’ll draw on my escape fund and we can set up a nice escapological homestead littered with tinkering shops and garden space.
After the rent hikes, our old place was nearing £1,000 a month to rent. It was the cheapest flat on a fairly posh street where rental prices are now around £1,200. Our current mortgage repayments by comparison are £180 a month each (£360 total). I don’t know how typical this is: we wrestled a great deal out of the bastards at the bank. It’s a fixed-rate mortgage too, so we have not yet been hit by the inflation apocalypse.
Property prices in our city are more reasonable than in London though. All I can say is: don’t live in capital cities. Move north! I know the bright lights are exciting but (in my opinion) it’s better to live cheaply in a “workshop city” like Glasgow or Manchester or Liverpool where culture is produced rather than merely sold. To oligarchs.
Reader Q wrote:
As I start to get a bit older I am more in favour of buying. One can quarrel in the mind over the economics until your backyard chickens come to roost. But, you most likely can’t have backyard chickens when you’re a renter.
As renters, our equivalent of a backyard was a spare room. Readers of The Good Life for Wage Slaves will know the importance I place on having ample space for creative work and being able to accommodate friends. We could not afford to buy a place with a spare room though. We sacrifices the spare room to the reduced cost. And we still don’t have a garden. Not that we particularly want one.
and continued:
My current rented abode is filled with the half-finished intentions and tastes of another couple looking to make a few bucks after upgrading their digs. Sometimes I get a weird eerie feeling like I’m living in someone else’s past with their poor choice of cheap plastic jellyfish chandelier and thick purple wallpaper. But that’s the price of freedom, baby.
Now this I relate to. Our rental was supposedly “unfurnished” but it still came with the landlord’s filthy old roller blinds, lighting fixtures, and tasteless decorative curly things on the ends of the curtain rails. We unscrewed everything on Day One, stashing them away in the flat’s least-useful cupboard. For all we know, the former tenants did the same and these things go up and come down again with every tenant. See also the fireplace and the hole.
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For more on “rent versus ownership” and other thoughts about homelife, please buy The Good Life for Wage Slaves to help pay my mortgage.
Letter to the Editor: As Into a Quicksand
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Friend McKinley writes:
The “vast grey sleep” reminds me of a line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, when he catches the bus to the airfield for his first ever mail run as a pilot (which was very risky and glamorous at the time).
Finally I saw the old-fashioned vehicle come round the corner and heard its tinny rattle. Like those who had gone before me, I squeezed in between a sleepy customs guard and a few glum government clerks. The bus smelled musty, smelled of the dust of government offices into which the life of a man sinks as into a quicksand.
I see now that I had misremembered it. He’s comparing the office dust to quicksand. I had the phrase remembered as “one of those government jobs into which the life of a man sinks as into a quicksand,” which certainly feels like the people I know who got a job in the public service with every intention of getting out in a year or two. He’s saying the exact same thing, just sticking closer to his metaphor.
I now have this sudden fear that I first came across the line in Escape Everything! and it’s what prompted me to read Wind, Sand and Stars in the first place, the timing is about right. Regardless!
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Wringham Wresponds:
That’s a nice quote and it’s not one from Escape Everything!. The closest thing I remember quoting is this moment from a J. M. Coetzee memoir.
Something I failed to note about that quote is that, as well as being an early example of using a computer to skive, it’s an early example of computer programmers working devotedly for no extra money into the night.
Letter to the Editor: How is Friend Henry Doing?
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Hello Robert!
My brother and I are long-time readers of your blog and applaud your efforts to avoid work.
When we speak of the ills of technology, we often refer to Friend Henry, who you mentioned was quitting the internet for good. I’m curious: how is Friend Henry doing? Have they avoided the internet since then?
Hope you’re well and enjoying home ownership in idle bliss.
Warm regards,
Reader S
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Hello S!
Friend Henry is still going strong. He’s improbably sincere in his escape from digital technology and I do what I can to support him (which really just involves sending him an old-fashioned letter in the post every few months).
He tells me about his successes and failures in his project. A recent success was in his newfound ability to chop logs for firewood; he’s also building a tiny house of sorts and writing poetry. A recent failure was when he gave in to social pressure to buy a mobile phone, albeit an old Nokia-type thing and not a smartphone, but I don’t think he uses it much. He has certainly never messaged me from it.
In my next letter to Henry, I will tell him that you asked after him. I have tried to encourage him to write a “Notes From [his house]” column for the forthcoming print version of New Escapologist. He didn’t seem very keen when I first asked but I think my original request was for Web content; he might be more willing now that we’re talking about print. I’m not sure. I do like the thought of him writing his column by hand, Mark Boyle-style, perhaps even by candle light, filing it by post for Yours Truly to laboriously re-type.
Best Wishes, RW
Letter to the Editor: Grind Culture
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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.
Letter to the Editor: I Hoarded Insulin Before Jumping Ship
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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.
Letter to the Editor: See You in Two Weeks!
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This email came from Reader Emily who recently ordered the full print run of New Escapologist from our online shop:
Hello Robert,
I’m excited to have the whole collection on its way. I’ve been a fan since I met you and bought a few issues at a fair in Montreal, probably close to 15 years ago.
I was there on behalf of a feminist organisation focused on menstrual health activism at the time, and was feeling a bit alienated by the self-serious snickering often directed at me for hawking washable pads and underwear along with our zines. I enjoyed chatting with you at the New Escapologist table. Both you and the publication were refreshingly sincere and hilarious.
I want to make sure I have the whole back catalogue now, while its available. It means even more after ten years working at a desk.
I was recently reminded of my own family escapologist lore. A cousin or great uncle had arrived in Chicago from the old country sometime in the early part of the last century. He had been a scholar back home and as a result, had no “practical” work experience. Faced with the prospect of a day job for the first time, and having blown several interviews already, he headed to the local post office as a last resort. After an interview, my ancestor was offered the job and notified that he would start the following day. “Do I have the right to any vacation time?” he asked the boss. “Yes, sir, two weeks paid leave annually,” the boss replied. “Well then, I shall see you in two weeks!” he declared.
I realize now that this story is probably totally apocryphal bullshit. Would the USPS would offer two weeks paid leave to inexperienced young Jewish men fresh from Kiev???? Anyhow, its always been a family favourite, and it definitely paved the way for a lifetime of career ambivalence on my part.
Thank you for all the brilliant things you do!
Admiringly,
Emily
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Hi Emily. It’s a crazy thing but I’m pretty sure that I remember you. We’d see hundreds of people each day at those Montreal book fairs and we did at least 3 Anarchist Book Fairs and 4 Expozines; I’m quite introverted at heart and talking to so many people would really take it out of me. I can’t imagine being able to remember many people from that blur (or indeed very many of them remembering our table). But yes! I remember the menstrual products and thinking the idea was pretty great. It was a good attitude and a cool organisation.
Thank you again for buying the complete run. Every cool kid should have one. I’ve placed the order with the printer and it’ll be with you in about 10 days. In any event, your complete run of New Escapologist is wending its way to you.
Yours from an unseasonably sunny Scotland,
RW x
Letter to the Editor: Why Should I Fit Out a Home Office?
Reader G writes from New Zealand:
Re: returning to the office, here’s a contrary view. I have returned to the office after exclusively working from home for a while. (Life has been near-normal in New Zealand since mid-2020).
I did this by choice because I found I prefer a sharp barrier between the world of work and the rest of my life. Working from home, it’s easy to feel bad about stepping away for breaks, to work late, to keep an eye on online chat… I prefer to leave the office on time and leave work behind too.
Also, of course, my employers provide a reasonably ergonomic workspace for me with the associated amenities. Why should I fit out a home office and dedicate that space for the benefit of my employers? They don’t pay me any rent for it or buy me any extra kit.
I also prefer the social contact and the sight of other human beings and spontaneous interaction. I find video conferencing a poor substitute.
You’re correct, of course. If the office is right for you, that’s excellent. And your point about setting up a specialist workspace in your home is a good one. Why should you?
We’re traditionally against office life and the job system at New Escapologist but the real moral of the story lies in making a life that fits you and doing it creatively and out of free will. If you like working in an office, then that’s great!
I miss proper human interaction too. Not in the office context, mind you, which in my experience revolved around microagressions and colin the caterpillar. But face-to-face relationships with other people are irreplaceable, yes. I miss gigs and art shows and nightlife very, very much. I even speak as an introvert who has to stay at home for a couple of days with the curtains drawn if I happen to go out three nights on the run.
Human contact is too important to throw away even if it makes economic sense in the context of working from home. Video conferencing is garbage. I disliked it in the days of office life (20 minutes of a 60-minute meeting could easily be devoted to setting up a piece-of-shit technical “fix” to allow distant colleagues to have a say) and I positively despise it now. The remote quizzes and and so-called cultural events online during lockdown did not please me. “But it’s all we have at the moment,” is the usual refrain. But it’s not, is it? Books! Walks! Nature! Love! You’ve heard this all before.
Tired of the everyday grind? Try The Good Life for Wage Slaves or I’m Out, both of which are available now in paperback.
Letter to the Editor: I Always Suspected This May Not Be a Good Way to Live
Hi Robert,
I’m a long-time fan of your blog. Your content is a breath of fresh air on an Internet plagued with work worship, life coaches, productivity tips and the “power lunch” mentality. I started reading your book yesterday and it’s difficult to stop. Your writing style is a brain massage.
Let me tell you a little about myself: I’m Brazilian, male, 33 years old, and have what every parent here raises a child to get: a public-sector job. The admission exam for this type of job is very, very hard, demanding years of single-minded preparation. Once you pass it, your job entails massive boredom, senseless tasks and good pay, normally for life.
I always suspected this may not be a good way to live, even before setting foot in an office. After twelve years of living this life my soul was in an advanced state of corrosion. The paycheck never brought the lasting happiness that everybody said it would. The material goods it made possible did not motivate me any longer.
The turning point was when I needed a haircut one day. To get a haircut I needed to program my schedule one week in advance to carve out twenty minutes for it. Enough! I was a slave on gold chains. This must not go on.
On this journey through open plan offices and noisy coffee machines, I always made sure to save my money, knowing full well that I would not be able to bear the 37 years of mandatory work for retirement. Last November I made a deal with management to take one day off per week (Wednesday) with the matching 20% reduction in pay. I had made very few decisions in my life as intelligent as this one.
With this improvement in my life came a change in perception about the value of work. I started living in a more leisurely way. I barely noticed the 20% pay cut but it was difficult not to notice a holiday every week.
A year later here I am: new hobbies, new interests, and far more content than ever before. Hell! I’m making wood sculptures when twelve months ago I didn’t even know how to draw! In the workplace I’m a tech guy (the one with a spreadsheet for everything) and art apparently shouldn’t be attempted by people like me! Yet here I am, having a blast at cutting wood, not typing numbers on a computer. Imagine how many people have too hidden talents that will never see daylight because a job sucks away all the energy.
In the centuries to come we’re going to look to today’s offices and feel the same as when we look for Industrial Revolution factories. How could we do that to people?
I’m grateful for you being a voice against the madness of work and so-called productivity. I realized I’m not alone and very happy to realize this relatively early on life.
I attached some images of the sculptures. It takes hours and hours to make one, but who’s counting?
Best regards,
F
Letter to the Editor: The Sense of Freedom is Amazing
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Dear New Escapologist,
I love your blog and newsletter. It has been making my trip from ‘desk’ (shudder) to the ‘free world’ easier since late last year. I’m laughing again. I liked this quote from the blog of Catrina Davis to which you linked us in the May 2020 newsletter:
Millions across the ‘developed’ world are having to confront the fact that the future they worked and planned for, the one they were sold over and over again, by countless teachers and politicians and estate agents, is officially a dud.
Ha ha ha. So true. Sadly, many have been so cajoled into a particular way of thinking that they believe this is life. The office is a soul-sucking environment. You are paid a sort of compensation to die quietly of all the health issues caused by sitting in a chair day after day, staring at a screen like zombie.
You are tricked into believing that ‘team spirit’ is something you need to possess. It kills your creativity and is another term for ‘following the herd’. I walked out and never looked back. The sense of freedom is amazing.
I’m enjoying my life and feeling far healthier and happier than I ever did while ‘working’.
Thanks for your wonderful blog and sense of humour,
S
