Nature is Not in it
This is Enrico Monacelli writing in the Quietus last year about the previously mentioned After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek:
Work sucks. It just does. Especially in the state that we’re in: a good job is harder and harder to come by. Let alone a good job that gives you the time and means to enjoy all the things that make a life worth living: a nice place to rest your head, quality time with those you love and free time to idly cultivate those very talents and aspirations that makes you human in the first place. More and more people feel like life is being sucked out of them just to get by. Work lingers throughout each aspect of our daily life like a horrid Thing that gnaws at our very vitality.
and
A job is a way to force you to schedule your hours and organize your life entirely around capitalism’s every demand, leaving no space to your autonomous ability to enjoy or do whatever you like. There’s no pointing in reforming work or creating better jobs then: an oppressive system of total domination remains an oppressive system of total domination no matter how much you ameliorate it.
That’s true!
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Letter to the Editor: Right Where I Itch
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader U writes:
I’m a new subscriber and after reading Issue 16 I have to say this Henry Gibbs fella is scratching me right where I itch. How can I read more of his notes?
He reminds me of Mark Boyle, whose The Way Home: A Life Without Technology is certainly worth a read.
Kind regards,
U
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Thanks!
He’s the real deal, our Henry. His column appears in Issues 14, 15, 16 and (this coming December) 17.
14 is available only in digital;
15 is available in digital, but if you wait there will be some shop returns;
16 is still available in print;
17 will be available to pre-order next month.
We like Mark Boyle here at the magazine too, and I happen to know that The Way Home is one of the few books Henry himself owns a copy of.
RW
In That Moment, A Seed Was Planted
Because I’m a tantrum-prone baby, I mostly think and talk about total escapes from wage slavery.
This guy, however, reminds us that we don’t have to be so drastic if or when it doesn’t suit us.
We can simply change jobs — maybe escape the stultification of white-collar work — if we want to:
one day, a window cleaner came to the office. I completely lost track of time watching him work. When I finally snapped out of it, I told him it looked like a peaceful job.
Yes, I can’t imagine a better job, he replied cheerfully.
In that moment, a seed was planted. Six months later, I was on a plane to Bangkok for a sabbatical in Asia
Pause. Take a break. Reassess. Do something else.
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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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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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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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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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