After That Day, I Stopped Worrying
I’m reading Sea State by Tabitha Lasley.
It looked journalistic when I picked it up — plastered with glowing and collegial-looking praise from the Irish Times and Financial Times and the Observer — and supposedly based on interviews with offshore oil riggers.
In fact, it’s the memoir of an extramarital affair, which makes all that praise look a bit selacious.
It is good though! Inciteful and well-written. It’s another citation toward my evolving theory that the point of reading is a form of psychonautics; to travel in the experiences of others, whatever they might be.
It’s also Escapological. Lasley quit her job in journalism, dumped her crap boyfriend, and abandoned London in favour of becoming “a writer without portfolio” in chilly Aberdeen.
On her quit:
When I gave my notice in at work, my editor told me she’d miss me, then had a long conversation with another editor, over the top of my head, about the unlikelihood of attracting a decent replacement, given my simean day rate. Up until that point, I’d thought walking out of a job might be one of those decisions I’d come to regret. After that day, I stopped worrying.
On starting over:
I went to Morrison’s [supermarket] on King Street for a knife and chopping board, and had a sudden sense of what I must look like to the other customers. A whey-faced woman in her thirties, spending Saturday night alone, buying kitchen utensils cheap enough to shame a student. A battered wife. An asylum seeker. Witness to some violent crime, relocated by the govermnent, her new address designated by alghorithm.
On a darker flavour of walking away:
Married men never leave their wives. And yet, I always knew he would. I had a sense that if I led by example, if I left my job and the city where I lived, if I showed him how easy it was to walk away from things, he would follow. I was shocked and unsurprised at the same time.
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Narrow Escape
This couple have lived on a narrowboat for one year. Well, it’s more like a year and half now because I was late to the vid.
Anyway, here is their first annual report. It contains some more information about my favourite boating term, continuous cruising.
Also, look! A boat named “Narrow Escape!”
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New Escapologist Issue 17 is being re-printed. Shipping on or around Feb 10th. Get yours here today.
The Escape of Jo Nemeth
Jo Nemeth lives without money in Australia. Like Friend Henry, she was inspired by Mark Boyle, a New Escapologist favourite.
For the first three years, Nemeth lived on a friend’s farm, where she built a small shack from discarded building materials before doing some housesitting and living off-grid for a year in a “little blue wagon” in another friend’s back yard. Then, in 2018, she moved into [a friend’s] house full-time; it’s now a multigenerational [multi-family] home.
Instead of paying rent, Nemeth cooks, cleans, manages the veggie garden and makes items such as soap, washing powder and fermented foods to save the household money and reduce its environmental footprint. And she couldn’t be happier.
“I love being at home and I love the challenge of meeting our needs without money – it’s like a game.”
In an early blog post, Jo describes her big life change as “an exit strategy” and places it in the context of social action:
Every day I am thinking about my exit strategy. My fossil fuel exit plan.
Sure, fighting for system change on the streets and in parliaments must be part of our strategy, but it can’t be (won’t be) everything. After all, the system that needs changing is a destructive, violent machine of which we are all cogs. Maybe system change will come just as quickly from, or at least be aided by, many of us putting into place our household exit strategies. It will definitely play a part. It has to. We can’t go getting arrested on the streets to get emissions down then fly home, jump in our cars and go cook the evening meal on the gas stove. Who’s going to take us seriously?
Jo is now moving out of the house to get back to basics again:
she’s currently using recycled building materials to fix up a cubby in the back yard where she plans to sleep and spend her evenings reading by candlelight. “It’s very small, just big enough for a single bed and some standing room. There’s no electricity or running water.
“But I want to feel more connected to reality, to the birds and the stars and the sun and the rain. I feel really disconnected living in a big house. We just had a full moon and I almost missed it!”
I like how she describes a tiny home in the natural world as “reality.” Because of course it is! It’s the same point made by this brilliant woman, who describes “the real world” of suburbs and cities and the internet as “the madness.”
Many people who read Jo’s story probably see things the other way around: that they’re the ones living in reality (a consructed and networked world upheld by a majority) while Jo lives in a bubble of fantasy (an impractical romance). Yet she proves, again, that escape to an outlier reality where personal values prevail is entirely possible.
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The reprint of New Escapologist Issue 17 is about to go to the printers. Get your copy here.
Wyatt
Here’s art pop pioneer and soft machinist, Robert Wyatt:
I’m a real minimalist. I know some who call themselves minimalist, but they do loads of minimalism. That’s cheating. I really don’t do very much.
Thanks to reader Joe for sending this in. He says it has “Escapological resonance” and he is CORRECT.
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Do You Want to Break Free?
There are two articles in Issue 17 (help to finance a reprint here) about domestic labour, a type of work often overlooked when discussing the post-work future.
One piece — a review of Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time — looks into the possibilities of freeing us from home-based servitude forever.
The other — an essay by self-described housewife Matilda Bennett — suggests it might be possible to escape into domestic labour, freeing yourself of the horrors of professional toil.
Which do you most relate to? Read Issue 17 to see the two positions write large.
Escape from Manus
Here’s a radio documentary about Jaivet Ealom’s thrilling 2017 escape from Manus Regional Processing Centre.
Just as Jaivet is about to board his airplane to freedom, the passenger in front of him turns around. It’s a nurse from the base:
The nurse would have known him as EML19 because you didn’t have names where he’d been living. Manus Regional Processing Centre [was] an immigration processing facility inside a military base on an island in Papua New Guinea, patrolled by the Australian Federal Police and the ships of the Australian Navy. … No one detained there had ever escaped.
Eep!
No spoilers.
The escape, he says, was inspired by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and an “encyclopaedic knowledge” of TV’s Prison Break.
I enjoyed the detail that his smuggled cellphone hides behind a poster, not of Rita Hayworth, but of a biryani.
His story (of multiple escapes, it turns out) is further documented in his book, Escape From Manus.
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New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
Letter to the Editor: My Impending Departure
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader A writes:
Hi Rob,
I finished The Good Life for Wage Slaves last night and wanted to say how much I enjoyed it. It’s so full of good ideas, funny moments, and a thorough debunking of the idea that what you are is what you do for work. There were many parts and passages I enjoyed, and the afterword was a very nice touch.
Back in my 30s, I so disliked getting the question, “What do you do?” — especially when it was always the second or third question anyone ever asked — that I would usually make up responses. My favourite was always to say I was a fluffer in the porn industry. My second favourite was to answer “rocket scientist.” Both answers always stopped people in their tracks.
I’m not entirely sure that a wage slave can really have a good life, but a lot of the book’s value is just opening up people’s minds to the possibility that there’s a different (I’d say better) way. It seems hard for many people to do anything other than take incremental steps, especially when it comes to questioning the validity of their reality. And that’s what your book can do for people who haven’t already undertaken the path to saying no to a very dreary paradigm.
On a final note, I made my official announcement [at work] last week about my impending departure. I still have four and a half months of wage slavery ahead of me, but I’m determined to make it as rewarding as possible. And simply announcing my intentions was a pretty grand way to begin a new year.
Yours,
A
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Be like Reader A and quit while you’re ahead! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
Stay on Your Mat and Do As You’re Told
There’s a chapter in Butts — a splendid history of the arse by Heather Radke — about the 1980s boom in home fitness videos.
I remember that! My mum had the Cher one. We’d be watching TV in the living room and we’d hear her leaping about upstairs in time to the music. At least, I think that’s what she was doing.
Radke writes that
booms in American fitness culture usually correspond to rises in white-collar labor.
As more people are employed in desk jobs–in the 1920s and 1950s, for example–the people who work those jobs become less active than those who have more physically demanding jobs, a fact that often causes a lot of societal angst.
Anxiety about fitness (and its corollary–fatness) permeates middle-class culture in these eras because fitness isn’t ever only about having a body that is useful or a body that is healthy. Having a fit body seems to almost always mean something more.
Yes indeed. Everything has a symbolic value indexed against a constantly-shifting body of social meaning.
Later, Radke writes that
neoliberalism wasn’t just an economic philosophy; its tentacles would extend into nearly every part of [Western] life. It conflated the free market with individual agency, had no use for collective modes of expression or action, and judged the worth of people primarily in terms of market value–ideas that if taken seriously, would alter how people thought of themselves on nearly every level, including how they perceived their bodies. … A fit body become a symbol of a hearty work ethic.
So as well as being a response to the sedentariness promoted by desk jobs, those fitness tapes evolved out of the hyperindividuality of the time and also hardworkingness as a badge of pride.
The tapes were sold as fantasies of personal transformation and self-betterment but:
they don’t offer techniques that will ultimately lead to artistic interpretation or self-expression. Instead, when you do the moves, you are following someone else’s lead, mimicking them beat by beat in order to become more like them. Aerobics is, by and large, a submissive practice: you stay on your mat, inside your little rectangle, and do as you are told.
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Loaf! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 80. A Doss Time
Dear Diary,
I’ve been taking it very, very easy for 11 days.
I’ve been playing video games for the first time since 1996, reading unedifying literature, gently strolling along, sleeping late.
Today I took a very cheap bus to Edinburgh to mooch around some free art galleries, and then to stay up late watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a friend’s comfortable sofa. It’s like the the 1990s are back.
This is all according to plan. As I announced in the Idler this week:
For the next six months, I’ll be doing practically nothing. I’ve been telling others it’s a “sabbatical” because that’s a word people seem to recognise and broadly approve of, but really I’ve just had enough and I want a proper skive.
2024 was a busy year. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed most of my 2024 activity and I’ll benefit from the fruits of it all, hopefully, for years to come. But having something scheduled every day – somewhere to be, something to achieve, something to cross off a list – is no idler’s design for life. It’s not mine, it’s not yours, and if it ever seems we’ve veered off course, drastic action should be taken.
Hence the next six months. Corrective action. Or, as the case may be, inaction.
I hope you enjoy that blog in which I explain myself. If you do, by all means come along to my episode of “A Drink with the Idler” live Zoom thing on January 16th, the only thing on my to-do list for the next six months. Or, you know, don’t.
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Loaf! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
Off the North Coast of Sardinia
Mauro Morandi, the custodean of Budelli Island near Sardinia, has died, aged 85.
“I was quite fed up,” he once said, “with many things about our society. Consumerism and the political situation […] I decided to move to a deserted island […] far from all civilization. I wanted to start a new life close to nature.”
It sounds like he had a terrific life on the island:
Food is delivered to him by boat from the main island of Maddalena, and a homemade solar system powers his lights, fridge and internet connection.
During winter, when there are no visitors, he spends his days collecting firewood, reading and sleeping.
It was idyllic until almost the end:
His home on Budelli was a former second world war shelter until 2021, when he was evicted after a lengthy tussle with La Maddalena national park authorities, who had planned to transform the island into a hub for environmental education.
Morandi moved into a one-bedroom apartment on La Maddalena, the largest of the archipelago of seven islands off the north coast of Sardinia.
He spent some time in a care home in Sassari last summer after a fall, and is reported to have died at the weekend in Modena, northern Italy, where he was originally from, after his health deteriorated.
Morandi said he was struggling to adapt to life after Budelli. “I became so used to the silence. Now it’s continuous noise,” he said.
Why can’t people just be allowed to live (and die) how they want to? What is it about a simple live like Morandi’s that is so offensive to modernity? How could the development — which never even happened — have been inconvenienced by an elderly man living roughly in a war shelter?
When he resisted eviction, the authorities complained that “the property has been developed without permission.” Developed! The property! Look at it (above)! It’s an improvised wooden lean-to, hundreds of miles from the nearest pair of human eyes.
“I hope to die here and be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the wind,” he said at 81.
“I’m so used to living in the middle of nature,” he told the Guardian by phone. “What would I do back in Modena? Play cards and go to bars like other people in their 80s? Give over!”
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Resist! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
