The Escape of Mark Russell
Thanks to Reader C for drawing our attention to the story of Mark Russell who cashed in his Pokémon cards in a successful bid for escape.
With the money, he quit his job in PR to travel New Zealand in a camper van.
As a result of the windfall … he’s been able to buy the 2019 ex-rental Carado RV, while boosting the bank accounts of his family. He’s quit fulltime work, packing in corporate life for rolling countryside.
The inspiration to travel — pay attention, kids — came not from sudden wealth but from reading:
“Many years ago, I was captivated by the book Blue Highways [by William Least Heat-Moon], a story about his journey around the back roads of the United States, and I guess that’s what I’m doing here,” says Russell.
Mark now spends his time (over 100 days now) experiencing beauty and talking to fellow travellers. And, naturally, he reflects that:
your working life may not have been as important as you thought at the time.
*
I Never Heard From Them Again
Did leaving in a viral blaze of glory hamper his ability to get another job? Not in the slightest. Soon after leaving, DeFrancesco began working in a museum. He says the incident has “honestly never come up” in job interviews since. In fact, he says it might be something to “put on the résumé”.
This is Joey DeFrancesco speaking, 15 years after making headlines for quitting his crappy hotel job with the help of of brass band.
For anyone wondering if quitting a job suddenly or spectacularly or on a whim might ruin their future job prospects, this is clear evidence that you need not worry. The world of work wants you.
There’s a lengthy piece in the Guardian today (on Monday morning, naturally) about people who quit their jobs loudly and outrageously.
Believe it or not, I don’t encourage this. I encourage quitting for sure, but I find this sort of spectacle a bit nauseating and it might scare or upset the people you’re leaving behind – most of whom are there under duress, just as you were.
It’s better to send a dignified email, work your notice, explain politely why you’re leaving, and deposit one last paycheque before scarpering.
Still, it’s important to remember that walking out doesn’t defy the laws of physics. You can just go:
“Two months [notice]? You’re lucky if I give you fucking two weeks. I gave you two hours, babe. I’m leaving now.”
But even the quiet dignity of an “I quit” email can instil a wonderful feeling of liberty:
After the email was sent, her boss tried to call her. She didn’t pick up the phone. “I never heard from them again,” she says. After Carly left the office for the final time, she felt euphoric. “I could have stripped my clothes off and run naked all the way home. The anxiety and stress I had been feeling all vanished,” she says.
*
New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
Wine Cellar
I stumbled upon this quote (from a Sapiens-reading tech bro but let’s be nice) about treating your home library not as a “TBR” (another blasted inbox) but as a wine cellar:
Think not of the books you’ve bought as a “to be read” pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.
Perfect.
There are other areas of life that could benefit from being seen as wine cellars.
I, however, am uniquely bad at wine cellaring. I try to generate surpluses of long-life foodstuffs like jams and preserves, tins of sardines, honey, olive oils, and, yes, wines. For the right time, the right place, the right mood. But I just scoff them.
My thinking is: they’re there to be eaten or drank, so why not eat or drink them now? And so it goes on. Forever.
Let it never be said that there’s a fine line between Escapologist and prepper. I could never stock a bunker adequately, even if I meant to. You’d just find me in there after the fallout’s cleared, dead and fat. “He died doing what he loved,” you could tell the obit people, “napping.”
*
New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
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.
*
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 you have hundreds of hours to spend learning about the world’s train and bus systems.
*
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.”
*
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.
*
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.
*
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.
*
New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
Trap Life
Seen in Edinburgh last week:
*
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.
*
New Escapologist Issue 18 can be ordered today for prompt shipping in early November.
