To Escape by E-Bike
This is an introductory paragraph from a remarkable essay in The Point magazine, which I mean to say more about in coming days:
I spent my breaks in the city park across from my office, eating lunch on the wrought-iron benches dedicated to old machine politicians, people-watching. Pedestrians would trickle down the crunchy gravel path in front of me — young migrant families pushing strollers, old drunks on e-bikes, state workers talking loudly into their AirPods. It had only been a few months since I’d started, and yet I already felt alienated from the work I was, supposedly, doing. Here I was, out in the community my office served, surrounded by people whose lives would go on with or without me.
Did you spot the real hero of the story? Correct! It’s the drunk on the e-bike. He doesn’t bother with alienating work to get by!
Oddly, here’s an aside from Cory Doctorow this week on e-bikes:
E-bikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged and reliable, they’re basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you’ve gotten accustomed to an e-bike – maybe you’ve invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat – you’ll never go back. The advantages of an e-bike commute over a car commute are legion, but my favourite little pleasure is the ability to easily make a stop at a nice coffee shop halfway between home and work, rather than being stuck buying shitty chain coffee near the office.
I’ve never been on an e-bike because my city is small and I walk everywhere and I have no need for speed, but the idea of other people riding them instead of driving cars on the streets I pay for is appealing. It sounds like it could be a nicer life for them too.
Vision of the future: e-bikes with stops for coffee (for workers) or booze (for heroes). I’m starting to feel optimistic about the future again.
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Change your future with New Escapologist. Issue 18 is available in our shop.
To Hell in One of These? Sure.
Thanks to Reader C in New Zealand for sending me this remarkable essay at an equally remarkable website (which we’ll come to in a moment) about handcarts.
The essay is about rediscovering the handcart: a push-chair like platform designed for carting things around in an urban environment. It goes on the footpath, not the road and has many sensible things going for it:
Unlike a van or a car, my handcart doesn’t need gasoline, electricity, or batteries, making it entirely independent from energy infrastructures. Neither do I need to pay taxes and insurance. The handcart is a very democratic vehicle. It allows anyone to carry a load wherever they want, while older, less affordable cars and vans are no longer allowed to enter city centers due to the installation of Low Emission Zones.
It is also, of course, slow, which is subversive.
When people ask us why we don’t use it as a bike trailer, we can also answer differently: why the rush? Deciding to travel with the slowest vehicle possible is subversive because it questions values we take for granted in the modern world, such as speed and utility.
To many people, walking a handcart seems like a waste of time, but our experience is exactly the opposite. Every trip is an adventure, and we always look forward to using it again. It’s a pleasure to drive the vehicle, more like steering a boat than driving a land vehicle. It’s easy to chat with other pedestrians, who tend to be very curious about our vehicle. Consequently, the trip takes even longer.
The article gets more and eccentric — and therefore more and more reasonable — as we go along. It ends up talking about the handcart as a place to sleep, a place to work (as a digital nomad), and finally as a way for you to sail along on roller skates.
We could increase the speed of the handcart by using a larger sail, and combining it with roller blades, inline skates, or a skateboard. In that case, the cart would pull the driver in good winds.
This brilliant article, which surely deserves some sort of award, comes from a website called Low-Tech Magazine. “You’ve probably already come across Low-tech Magazine,” says Reader C in her email to me. Whenever someone starts an email that way, it will inevitably be completely new to me!
The website looks into forgotten and analogue technologies and asks if they can still be useful. It rejects the assumption that high-tech is always better. Magnificently, the website’s server is run on solar juice. You can see the panels on the guy’s balcony if you like.
And those images? They’re “dithered,” apparently, which is more energy efficient. I’d say they’re very stylish and interesting to look at as well. They remind me of reading, specifically the Financial Times on paper, which is far lovelier and easy-on-the-eye than conventional Web photography. Every little corner of this website has been considered carefully and robustly engineered. What a find!
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Don’t forget about New Escapologist though. Issue 18 is available in our shop.
Inherent Value
Philosopher Julian Baggini has a nice harrumph about why so many things today — from art and singing to sex and nature — are marketed as “means to ends” instead of in their own right.
He laments an art gallery pass, which twists the arm of potential art lovers not by pointing out the inherent beauty of paintings but by the hours it’ll statistically add to the end of your life thanks to art’s scientifically-quantified destressing power.
I wonder what advocates of this logic imagine people will do with the extra longevity? Art won’t appeal anymore if it has no inherent value.
I have seen countless other examples of all the things that are good in life being promoted not for their own sake but for the material benefits they bring. This instrumentalisation has become normalised so insidiously that we don’t even notice that it is odd, let alone wrong. Nor do we seem to be aware of quite how pervasive it is. Yet its effects are profound, leading us to lose sight again and again of what is truly of value in life.
I’ve noticed it too. “Listen to birdsong to reduce your stress levels.” How about just “listen to birdsong”? Why wouldn’t you want to listen to birdsong?
Intrinsic human goods include all the things that make life worth living without need of any further justification. To ask of them: “What’s the point?” would be to miss the point. They are the point.
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Every Reason to Hate Cars
This is a lot like my anti-car essay back in Issue 3 (later filleted for the Idler), BUT MORE SO.
It’s based on a very good academic paper called Car Harm (2024).
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Vast and Calm
The artist Landis Blair, normally based in busy Chicago, has retreated for a few days to a cabin in remote Wisconsin.
In his newsletter he writes:
[I revisited] a number of the principles and ideas of […] the magazine and newsletter New Escapologist, which showcases writings and wisdom about escaping the daily grind.
and:
in spite of feeling like I was physically and mentally moving far more slowly through my days, I was in fact getting more work done than I have in a long time. […] I can’t help wondering whether part of this shift in perspective was due to the expansive view of the frozen lake that I saw every time I looked up from my work. Seeing something so vast and calm seemed to put everything into perspective. This book I was agonizing over really didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. And if something like that lake, which is far grander and more important than anything I will ever accomplish, can exist with such calm, it is hard not to absorb some of that energy and begin to act in a like manner.
Ah, lovely-lovely.
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I Finally Stopped Delaying
I took a six month sabbatical from work and halfway through that sabbatical, I quit my job. I started to live in the moment instead of the future. I went swimming in a local lake. I read books. I walked by the canal. I visited a friend in Devon. I started writing my newsletter. I ran in the park. I took magic lessons. And I finally stopped delaying all the things I was waiting to do and started doing them.
In turn, I stopped delaying my life.
New Escapologist contributor Tom Grundy has put together a very nice PDF called How to Work Your Way.
After a nice intro (where the quote above came from), Tom interviews six people with unusual ideas about work. “Every one of them left their corporate jobs,” says Tom. I’m one of those people!
Tom cautions us that this isn’t a book about how to quit your job, but rather a guide to the “invisible scripts” that can hold you back when you’re trying to decide what to do with your life. Check it out, it’s good.
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New Escapologist Issue 18 (containing Tom Grundy’s column as well as others) is available now.
Landfill
apart from the fear that I’ll one day have a use for the thing I’m binning, the thought of anything going into landfill weighs heavily on my soul.
Adrian “Urinal” Chiles writes amusingly about decluttering today.
Don’t worry too much about the landfill thing, Adrian. Do your best to intercept the passage to landfill but remember that (a) all things are destined for landfill except for those that remain aboveground when the asteroid hits, and (b) everything is already landfill.
“Waste” happens not at the end of a manufactured thing’s life, in landfill, but at the start of its life when raw materials are extracted from the Earth.
Nobody seems to get this. It is my contribution to the eco/bins/minimalism conversation.
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Mercantile Filth
Does freedom exist? Yes, it can be bought: people who have money are free. They can afford to do what they want when they want — and that is freedom, which, we are often told, is happiness.
This is from Service, a brand new novel set in LA’s Echo Park district by John Tottenham. Big thanks to the New Escapologist reader who recommended it.
Tottenham’s embittered protagonist struggles daily with his bookstore job, a mountain of debt, gentrification, and his failure to find a state of mind condustive to writing. It’s brilliant. It’s Black Books but furious. Blacker Books then.
It contains many an exquisite Workplace Woe from the service industry:
There are seven or eight steps involved in a credit card transaction, and the entire procedure, from the moment of it being handed over to the printing of the receipt, takes approximately thirty seconds — often longer, if as is so often the case, the machine is malfunctioning. I handle roughly two hundred of these transactions a week, which amounts to at least an hour and a half a week — no less than seventy-five hours: three full days; nine full work days a year — spent processing and handling these items of mercantile filth.
And some top-notch bathtub writing too.
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Letter to the Editor: You Didn’t Make the Cut
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Joshua from The Minimalists writes:
Howdy, Joshua from The Minimalists here. You didn’t make the cut.
A couple years ago, I made a quiet decision: I removed more than 100,000 inactive subscribers from The Simple Newsletter to keep it affordable, intentional, and clutter-free.
You’re reading this email because you were one of those people.
Since then, I’ve completely rebuilt the newsletter from the ground up. It’s still free — but now it’s simpler, more thoughtful, and far more useful.
So I want to welcome you back.
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Dear Joshua. How fucking dare you?
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Get all the minimalism you’ll ever need in the pithy pages of Escape Everything! instead. Or indeed our newsletter, for which, you’ll be happy to know, you made the cut.
Let People Be Free
Regular readers of this blog will know our position that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is (a) a likely solution for societies who want to abolish Wage Slavery and (b) an illustration of what happens when you let people be free instead of forcing them into undignified jobs that waste everyone’s time and energy.
In one of the best UBI pilot schemes I’ve seen so far (one with results so promising that it was recently made permanent, albeit in a cautious and limited way), there are some nice qualitative findings.
Only months into the scheme, I found out I was pregnant. The basic income helped me decide to have my baby, knowing I could continue creative work and keep my small studio space
The basic income gave me more freedom to experiment in my work, to write for independent publications and engage with community initiatives. I helped to create events that brought together artists across forms and raised money for a local rape crisis centre.
Before introducing this scheme, Ireland ranked among the lowest in the 27 countries of the EU for spending on culture. In 2022, that amounted to €897m, or 0.2% of GDP, compared with an EU average of 0.5%. A basic income for 2,000 artists increases Ireland’s spending by only about €35m a year, which would be offset by economic gains.
Yet again we see that when people are left to their own devices instead of being economically bullied into bullshit jobs, the advantages to the person and to society are huuuuge.
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