On Self-Help and Making the Bed

Every day, I make the bed.

It’s not a particularly onerous task and it can even be quite a pleasant one if seen in the right way, but I always feel slightly irritated by having to do it. We’ll come back to that in a minute.

There’s a self-help book called Make Your Bed and I occasionally think about reading it. I’ve really had my fill of self-help though. While it’s sometimes enlightening, one only needs so much enlightenment.

I’d rather read novels. I see fiction as something (top-tier life) and non-fiction as about something (second-tier life), self-help being almost a third tier since it’s just about fine-tuning reality instead of actually being an event in reality.

I have no idea what the Make Your Bed book is about, but I assume it tells you to make your bed because making your bed (a) doesn’t take very long, (b) makes a big difference to the vibe of where you live, (c) it actually quite a pleasant and mindful task you allow it to be one, and (d) acts as a mild physical warm-up for doing other things. I assume it is a metaphor for (a) tasks seldom being as bad as you imagine, (b) choosing your battles, (c) seeing things different ways, and (d) how activity can snowball once you’ve begun.

I will never look up that book to find what it’s really about. I have not read the review I linked to above. If you’ve read it though, tell me in the comments how right or wrong I am.

Anyway, those are some of the things I think about when making the bed. But why the slight sense of irritation at having to do it?

There’s another self-help book on the market at the moment with an ‘escape’ theme, just right for us to review in the next New Escapologist. I can’t be bothered though, so I asked someone else to do it for me. Thanks, Arie!

Arie came through today with his review and, among other things, it describes a way to overcome stress. You want to be “there,” when in fact you’re “here” is the explanation. Once you’ve accepted that, you’re on your way to overcoming stress.

Procrastinating slightly from making the bed this morning, I considered this. Why don’t I want to make the bed? It’s because I find it slightly stressful. Why do I find it slightly stressful when everything about making the bed is actually pretty good? It’s because I want to be “there” (a tidy world where the bed is made) instead of “here” (a messy world where the bed is unmade) and I can’t get “there” quickly enough.

Once I’d understood that, I asked myself why it’s so undesirable to live “here” in the messy world. It’s not so undesirable really. So I got breakfast and made the bed later instead. I did not feel the stress of the “make the bed” task hanging over me as I ate my breakfast. It works!

And I didn’t even have to read a self-help book. Though admittedly I had a unique way of learning from it anyway. Sorry Arie.

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New Escapologist Issue 16 is available now in print and digital formats.

He Began to Make Plans

From Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood:

He began to make plans. In a few days we were all three of us to leave Berlin, for good. The Orient Express would take us to Athens. Thence, we should fly to Egypt. From Egypt to Marseilles. From Marseilles, by boat to South America. Then Tahiti. Singapore. Japan.

Now that’s an itinerary!

It calls to mind the quote from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine we used as an epigraph in Issue 1:

Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Moroccan midnight.

In Goodbye, the itinerary is proposed by a millionaire called Clive who seems willing to take his penniless Bohemian friends (Isherwood and “Sally Bowles,” the Liza Minelli character in Cabaret) on the journey of a lifetime to escape a Berlin about to be co-opted by the Nazis.

Clive pronounced the names as though they had been stations on the Wannsee railway, quite as a matter of course; he had been there already. He knew it all. His matter-of-fact boredom gradually infused reality into the preposterous conversation. After all, he could do it. I began seriously to believe that he meant to do it. With a mere gesture of his wealth, he could alter the whole course of our lives.

Sometimes all you need is money. But for the rest of us, there’s wit.

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New Escapologist Issue 16 — footloose and fancy-free — is available in print and digital formats from our shop.

Research

“Arts and crafts give greater life satisfaction than work,” reports today’s Guardian:

researchers say we could all benefit from creative endeavours and that such pursuits have a bigger influence on life satisfaction than having a job.

Gee, you think?

I’d imagine it’s because people aren’t economically bullied into knitting. Embroidery and painting don’t generally involve alienation or a commute or a barely-useful paycheque.

Last time I looked, creative hobbies arrived at under your own steam aren’t usually an insult to your very soul.

The results, [the lead researcher] added, might reflect that not everybody is in a job they find fulfilling.

Yeah.

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Issue 16 of New Escapologist is back in stock. I don’t usually do second print runs but Issue 16 has done very well for itself. Don’t make me regret printing more! Grab a copy today. x

Dowie on Art and School

John Dowie’s new book, Before I Go, is out today.

I’ve already quoted from him here and here, but there are two more Escapological (and, to me, relatable) Dowie nuggets in my notebook:

The only people who advise people not to be artists are people who have never been artists. It is as if they are so deep in a rut of their own choosing that they can’t see over the sides.

It’s true. When you’re a child everyone seems to say, “you can be anything you want to be.” But then, in my case, there was trouble when my best school subjects turned out to be English and Drama. Becoming an actor or a writer was of the question, the stuff of fantasy.

The school careers advisor and every other adult I asked was dead against it. “Actors spend a lot of time resting,” my dad said, inadvertently making it sound brilliant. “Drama is a hobby,” said my deputy head teacher when I bumped into him coming out of the dentist one day. But that was life in the Midlands in the 1990s for you. It’s probably different today. Right?

There’s no reason not to become an artist if that’s what you’re good at and if it’s what you enjoy. There are perfectly legitimate career paths in the arts. And even when there aren’t, just find a way to do it anyway.

The purpose of school is not to teach children kindness, or the love of animals or how to play together nicely. The purpose of school is to teach children how to make money (almost always for somebody else).

It doesn’t matter what interests the child may have. If they don’t lead to making money then they have no value.

And that was the rub. My school and the other adults in the Midlands of the ’90s just couldn’t see how money could be made for other people — that is, the employment model, perhaps inspired by the mythical trickle-down economics — using art. You had to become a factory worker or get a job in a bank or the council or something.

Even when I accepted the reserve fate of librarianship, it was met with scepticism. Books, you know. Books. Books look suspiciously unprofitable for other people.

Anyway, Dowie’s book is marvellous and it’s out now. Go get it, you first-class scamps. In print. In digital.

Jeremy Gross (1970-2024)

What if the global economy were structured, not to send wealth into the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs, but rather to ensure the best possible lives for everyone, ensuring that people lived fulfilling lives free from want, engaged in activities that interested them and engaged them, enabling them to pursue their own interests alongside working for the common good?

Spiritual Contamination

From After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (2023) by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek:

In the early 1900s, sociologist Thorstein Veblen delineated the existence of a ‘leisure class’ whose class status was, in no small part, expressed by their ability to withdraw from work.

Sounds nice. That’s what I’d do.

The aristocrats from the feudal era had also been able to separate themselves from the daily grind, and many from the new capitalist classes followed in this tradition. Whereas the lower classes — quite literally the working classes — were forced to work in order to survive, the upper classes were able to extract themselves from the ‘spiritual contamination’ of work. Instead they signified their social status through expressions of idleness, frivolity, and consumption.

In other words, it used to be fashionable to be “idle rich.” Maybe some people even aspired to it.

It’s bizarre how today’s rich do everything they can to avoid being seen as idle. They launch “brands,” lie to magazines about their impossible daily schedules, monopolise public discourse, claim to have the answers, run for president. Yawn. What a bunch of strivers.

Maybe liberal guilt or survivor guilt is at the bottom of it: “I know you have to bust your hump to stay alive; I’m sorry for that but even here at the top of the tree, we work hard too.”

Or perhaps it’s indicative of the total dominance of the work ethic.

Either way: fuck ’em. Stay at the bottom of the tree and work less anyway. Don’t aspire to riches, especially if it means hard work when you get there.

Don’t get your hands or spirits dirty if you don’t have to. Idleness and frivolity are the order of the moment.

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New Escapologist Issue 16 is selling well. Get yours before we completely run out. If you have it already, how about a copy of the inexplicably re-popular Good Life for Wage Slaves?

To All You Workers Out There…

This line from Slacker (1990) cracks me up:

“To all you workers out there, every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death.”

He’s supposed to be crazy but I sort-of know what he means.

Interestingly, this character is a recently-freed prisoner. One of the first things he does with his freedom (after issuing this statement to some student filmmakers) is play a videogame in an amusement arcade. I found that charming somehow.

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New Escapologist Issue 16 is selling well. Get yours before we completely run out. If you have it already, how about a copy of the inexplicably re-popular Good Life for Wage Slaves?

Walkabout

From Vagabonding by Rolf Potts:

Culturally, the walkabout ritual is when Aborigines leave their work for a time and return to their native lifestyle in the outback.

On a broader and more mythical level, however, walkabout acts as a kind of remedy when the duties and obligations of life cause one to lose track of his or her true self.

To correct this, one merely leaves behind all possessions (except for survival essentials) and starts walking.

What’s intriguing about walkabout is that there’s no physical goal: It simply continues until one becomes whole again.

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New Escapologist Issue 16, “Footloose and Fancy-Free,” is out now.

Contains Swearing

Are you satisfied by your job? Do you leap out of bed each morning with a song in your heart, eager to travel swiftly and painlessly to a fabulous workplace where the layout and technology are perfectly adapted to your goals and needs?

What of home life? Do you return from work each evening with time and energy to get stuck into your rewarding, creative projects? Do you have a good grasp of the sort of ā€œhome economicsā€ mastered by your parentsā€™ and grandparentsā€™ generations?

If so, this book is not for you. If, on the other hand, your experience of the worker-consumer lifestyle is a screaming Hell of clueless, unsatisfying, underpaid, carcinogenic, insecure shambling that you never signed up for and is an affront to your years of difficult and expensive study, The Good Life for Wage Slaves might be the helpful volumeā€“or at least the shoulder to cry onā€“youā€™ve been waiting for. It contains swearing. Also cats.

My 2020 book, The Good Life for Wage Slaves is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. Or at least a resurgence.

As well as an unexpected uptick in online sales, it seems to be a bestseller at Aye-Aye Books, my local bookshop. They’re flying out the door. Is there something afoot?

Why not get in on the inaction? Here’s where to grab a copy. (Or here if you’re a digimon).

Automated Roasting Jacks

Aw, who’s this little fella?

It’s the turnspit dog. Hiya, boy!

The turnspit dog used to help cook our dinners back in the pig-on-a-spit days of the over-an-open-flame times.

He helped by running in a wheel that kept the spit turning. Like this.

The turnspit dog went extinct when he was replaced by the arguably less cute automated roasting jack.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Look, I’m not saying that humans won’t or even shouldn’t be automated out of existence. But maybe we could start to think about building a world where our permission to live is no longer dependent on being useful.

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Do something useless today and get yourself a copy of the all-new New Escapologist.

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