Journal Club
A few years ago, I made one of those pros and cons lists, weighing up whether I should stay in my tedious but stressful job, or whether I should leave and do something more interesting. The worst thing on the “leave” list was “might have to come back with my tail between my legs asking for my old job back, if nothing else works out.” In contrast, the worst thing on the “what happens if I stay” list was “may have a stroke as I’m so stressed.”
This is from one of our columnists in New Escapologist Issue 18.
Michael C is an academic who wades into the real research on our fanciful-sounding Escapological claims.
In the latest instalment of his Journal Club column, he asks if workplace stress is really bad for your health.
Hint: it is.
But the short and fascinating journey Michael takes us on is a fun one.
Proper Job
Further to yesterday’s post about Jay Griffiths, the Idler asked Jay in 2015 if she’d ever had a proper job:
I’m so glad you asked that! I was talking to a friend about this recently because she is living in a shed (and I’ve lived in a shed and the winters are brutal). We agreed that we’d endure anything rather than give ourselves over to The Man and get a proper job.
Well said.
(I don’t know if that friend is Catrina Davies, but it definitely and obviously is.)
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Take Flight
This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel — take flight. All that is wild is winged — life, mind and language — and knows the feel of air
These quotes come from Wild (2006), a travel book that proposes a rewilding of the heart, by Jay Griffiths.
Escapological? Yes:
I was following that wild call, familiar to us all: the young, the old, the sad, the curious, the footloose and all who yearn just to bugger off for a while.
She then explains that the footloose appetite is “an ancient need, made heroic in the past,” exemplified by the wanderings of knights and shamans.
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Limping
The book begins with a spectacular fall. Our protagonist has escaped prison. She has scaled the wall (we do not witness the clamber, only the fall) and then dropped thirty feet to freedom. The cost of freedom, it becomes clear, is a broken ankle, the titular astragalus bone. After an initial triumph of escape artistry, she must conduct the rest of her getaway limping.
This is from a review of Albertine Sarrazin’s Astragal (1965) in New Escapologist Issue 18.
That’s right, we review old books as well as recent ones!
The idea is that good artworks, perhaps especially books, are forever. We don’t have to live on the razor’s edge of the present, no matter what other media would seem to imply. In books, all history is our playground. That’s the whole point of writing things down really.
Rediscover the lost escape classics in our hot new issue by ordering your copy today.
Imagine an Exit
Rob Grant has died. He co-created Red Dwarf, my favourite TV comedy sci-fi thing of the 1980s and 90s. As well as the TV series, there were some fab novels.
The second novel was called Better Than Life and involved a virtual reality game that made your wildest dreams come “true” but trapped you inside them. In the real-world, meanwhile, your biological body withers and dies.
While the three main crew are trapped in the game, Kryten, the ship’s service robot, attempts a rescue mission:
In theory, leaving BTL was simple. All the player had to do was want to leave. All the player had to do was imagine an exit, and pass through it, back to reality.
Kryten had imagined his gateway easily enough, but as he was about to pass under the pink neon ‘Exit’ sign, a cafeteria materialized to his right. In the window was a handwritten card which read: ‘Dishwasher wanted.’
The cafeteria was deserted, but in the kitchen, stacked ceiling-high, were several huge towers of dirty dishes piled around a sink. Now, what kind of sanitation Mechanoid would he have been if he’d ignored those greasy, food-stained plates?
I’ll just wash a few, he’d thought. Reduce the pile a bit.
Eight months later, he was still there, still washing, still surrounded by stacks of dirty dishes. Finally he realized he’d been duped – the Game had found his innermost desire – and he’d scurried off, ashamed.
Mechanoids weren’t supposed to have desires.
It’s all there, isn’t it? The need to feel useful. The job that traps you. The technology that needs your attention. The vampiric theft of your life force. The door being open all along – so long as you want to see it.
Rest in peace, Rob Grant, whose name means to take and then give.
A great old Red Dwarf line is that “death isn’t the handicap it used to be in the olden days. It doesn’t screw your career up the way it used to.” Well, oddly enough “stiffie” Grant’s got a book coming out in July.
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I Look for Exits
I look for exits. I mean, if you can get in you must be able to get out. I think to myself. How do you open a door that won’t open? Do you kick it down? Break it down? Set fire to it? Locksmith? Wishful thinking? Secret codes? Magic words? I can’t help feeling there’s something I ought to do.
From On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, the seven-volume literary time loop sensation currently sweeping Europe.
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It’s Easier to Pause When You Don’t Have to Maximise Every Minute
The Guardian asks why an international “sex drought” has spared Denmark.
Good question. Except it’s not really about sex. Or Denmark.
That we don’t have as much sex as we did in the 1990s is an indicator — a warning light on a dashboard somewhere — of a deeper problem (and its solutions).
As well Denmark having a culture that’s kind to sexual minorities and isn’t shy about sexual conversation in general:
there’s no student debt in Denmark; students get paid more than €600 a month to study; it’s very common to take a year or often two out between school and university, so everyone’s more confident by the time they start studying.
Did you hear that? Young Danes aren’t stiffed by loans that can never be repaid. They’re even given a stipend. And time to breathe.
“It’s easier to pause,” a Danish student says, “when you don’t have to maximise every minute.” They’re more likely to go on a date, one of many activities a person might enjoy when they’re not run ragged by a joyless study-pay-work-pay-die system.
This Danish sex story is a case study to show (for the thousandth time) that people are happier and healthier and more alive when their prospects — and the fabric of everyday experience — aren’t destroyed by the juicing mechanism of The Trap.
The Trap, lest we forget, is set by the bastards who call themselves politicians and businessmen. Not by refugees. Not by dole scum. Not by your neighbours.
Until The Trap is destroyed by a lovely uprising, we’ll have to teach ourselves how to escape. Where The Trap presents you with debt and toil to the extent that you can no longer even enjoy your private parts, say “no thank you” and find a way out.
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AI is Stupid
From The Baffler:
As of 2025, 95 percent of companies that invested in [generative] AI did not profit at all from the investment […] As the tech journalist Edward Zitron estimated in his guide to the racket, by “the end of 2025, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Tesla will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years, all to make around $35 billion.” That’s like spending $100 to make $6.25—and then doing it again and again, five billion times.
Upper-echelon tech bros are idiots.
If you’re bored by the ceaseless “AI”-related witterings of a media in thrall to these idiots, especially in light of the revelation above, read New Escapologist instead.
The Baffler, incidentally, is one of America’s few left-wing media outlets with any clout, yet it wrings its hands over the same topics as any business dad of the conservative press. “Is AI really coming for entry-level jobs first, and the rest of the workforce next?” it asks. Yawn.
The article doesn’t mention UBI once, the only seriously proposal for replacing Wage Slavery as a way to feed people. Their use of “bullshit” in the headline — a word generally reserved in work-related conversation for thankless drudgery since our David’s Bullshit Jobs in 2013 — is little better than clickbait. Neither the word nor the sentiment appears in the article.
I don’t think we mention AI once in the current edition of New Escapologist, and we’ll probably maintain our aloof and studious silence until someone convinces us that AI will help real people to escape their day jobs with an income intact.
Our publication, written and published by human beings, is available in digital formats or on papier, singly or by subscription. We recommend clicking “notify me when back in stock” or otherwise hassling Magazine Café in New York for a copy if you’re in America.
Attention America!
Americans! What with the various shipping problems we’ve been having between our two landmasses (not least the ridiculous cost), I’d like to recommend Magazine Café as a place to order New Escapologist in print.
They are a real-life brick-and-mortar store in New York City, so you’ll be supporting their pleasant enterprise as well as ours. Issues 18 and 15 seem to be in stock for $16.50 each with free shipping. There also seems to be a subscription offer.
Shall we try and sell them out? Hopefully that will mean they can order the next issue in larger quantities AND solve the logistical problem of getting the magazine onto American soil.
Other US stockists are available. I’ve just had good feedback about these guys and not all stockists offer a mail-order service.
Unscreened
Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.
Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?
I don’t say screens are an inherently bad thing. They’re useful when you want to, you know, look something up on Wikipedia or type something or lazily read a few blog posts. But that’s bananas. To be clear, it says waking hours, not working hours. So in other words: half your life. Your LIFE.
This is your occasional reminder that you can at least escape social media if you want to, winning back at least two hours a day and therefore about 750 hours of your life each year.
I recently received some nice paper mail from Jonny, a New Escapologist contributor who has turned his Substack newsletter for writers (already a noble step away from the worst of social media) into a paper newsletter for anyone who requests it. It was lovely to get. My address had been typewritten on the envelope, the newsletter itself was simple and pleasantly laid out on a single folded sheet of A4, and I think he might have coloured in the letterhead (a pineapple) by hand. Thanks, Jonny.
It made me think about Analog Sea Review, a muscular and wilfully offline publishing enterprise. I pulled my copies down from the shelf and spent some pleasant time reading high-quality essays and poetry selected not by dubious algorithm but by a real person I trust.
When I searched for the “at least two hours a day” statistic cited above, the report it came from notes that “despite the apparent expansion of social media’s role in our lives, the amount of time that we spend using social platforms has actually declined over the past two years.”
So there is a pushback against this screen mania. Good.
More from the Guardian:
[we all] already have things we do and care about that put us beyond the reach of the algorithms. We all already know the deepest truth: that true human attention isn’t the click and swipe of screen time. True human attention is love, curiosity, daydreaming and taking care of ourselves and others.
The piece was written by a trio of activists called the Friends of Attention, another pillar of the resistance. They blame this screentime madness on “human frackers,” unscrupulous business interests who pump us full of crap to mine the resource that is our precious attention.
Get offline. Buy a nice notebook. Read books and magazines. Use the library. Walk.
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