How to Get Rid of Things
If you’re trying maximise your freedom by downsizing or if you just want to benefit from minimalism in general, you’ll sooner or later find yourself in a phase of “getting rid of things.”
What is the best way to get rid of things? I mentioned that this guy was wasteful in getting rid of things quickly by taking them to charity shops or the tip.
Charity shops, I’m sorry to tell you, will probably also take your things to the tip. Or leave them outside the shop in garbage bags ready to be taken to the tip. Charity shops are overburdened with donations. Only the finest junk will make it onto their shelves. Besides, charity (in the sense of large businesses posistioning themselves as middlemen) sucks. We need social reform, not charity. Their brands are sometimes toxic. I like the idea that they keep used-but-useful goods in circulation, but they’re increasingly crap at this.
So, here are the best ways to get rid of stuff, in order:
1. Don’t acquire it in the first place. This is probably too late if you’re currently purging, but it’s worth remaining vigilant to acquisition. Getting rid of stuff is only one side of the methods of minimalism; the other and arguably most important side is not buying or otherwise acquiring things to begin with. You can adopt a minimum acquisition ethic any time and future purges will be less onerous.
2. Sell it in person to non-charity-based second-hand shops (especially book and music shops). This is good for batches of things, makes money for yourself, and keeps used-but-useful things in circulation.
3. Sell it in person via Craigslist or Gumtree or similar. People will collect it from your house if you make it clear that you won’t deliver. Top tip: charging a token amount of money makes people take the transaction more seriously than if you list it for free (collectors of free junk often never turn up). Selling is generally better than giving away for free, not just because you’ll make useful beer (or escape fund) money from the exchange but also because the thing you’re getting rid of will go to someone who actually wants or needs it instead of greedily accepting something just because it’s free and sticking it uselessly in a cupboard or on a big pile of other hoarded junk.
4. Sell it online with eBay, Etsy, Vinted, Depop, etc. You’ll get the market value for whatever you’re ditching, but this isn’t as good as in-person selling because (a) it will involve a trip to the post office and (b) you’ll miss out on local economies (i.e. talking to someone who lives nearby, keeping value in local circulation instead of sending it inevitably to the largest population centres and Silicon Valley-type mediators via an app).
5. Leave it somewhere it can be taken for free: a community givebox is ideal but a dry street corner can work too. Check back to make sure it’s been taken: don’t be a posh fly-tipper.
6. Give it away for free with Freecycle, Craigslist or Gumtree but see reservations in 3 and 4 above.
7. Donate it to a charity shop in the hopes that they won’t bin it.
8. Give it to a friend. This is good and avoids the charity shop problem, but they might only take it to be kind to you (rather than really wanting or needing it) and it will still be in your personal/social ecosystem and therefore potentially retrievable or psychologically still part-owned; better to ditch it more thoroughly.
9. Smash it up and put it in the bin. Which is less effort than:
10. Take it to the tip. Ideally on foot (see my walk review in Issue 14) so as not to stink up the world with your disgusting car fumes. When junking something, remember it will be dead forever and any value that might still be extracted from it will be gone. The profit of binning something or taking something to the tip is pure ullage: the valuable absence or emptiness that will take that object’s place.
General guidance when getting rid of stuff: do it gradually, not in one big purge. You’re less likely to dispose of things productively or thoughtfully when trying to purge quickly.
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Minimalism! Not written about that for a while. Feels good. There’s a guide to minimalism in Issue Three and I’m Out.
The Lost Art of Declining Politely
Ours is the magazine of “getting out of things.” We tend to focus on big things like jobs, but I sometimes think about adjusting the microscope to talk about escaping micro-commitments like parties you don’t want to go to.
I usually bin this idea because, really, it comes down to: just say no — politely.
An item in today’s Guardian confirms this decision but also made me think a little further about why so many of us have trouble saying no.
Maybe it’s because you don’t want to damage a relationship. But if a relationship is so fragile that it could break when you don’t want to go dancing, is it really a relationship worth preserving at such costs?
Maybe the fear of saying no is to save your own reputation. You don’t want to be seen as a bad sport or a wrecker or no fun. Not going to the party would be bad press for yourself.
I think the real reason, however, is a sort of projection. It’s our own fear of rejection (combined with decent human empathy) that is to blame. Because we don’t like be rejected, we couldn’t possibly reject another.
So that’s where the work needs to happen. If you don’t like to say no, you might need to work on your own fears.
At the risk of being mildly indiscrete, I think I learned the art of saying “no” from our own Tom Hodgkinson. When he asked me to write a column for the Idler in 2016, I giddily sent him my first try. “This is not what I had in mind,” he said, “This is more of a diary piece.” He explained what he was looking for and I got on with it.
It wasn’t the answer I wanted but at no point did I question Tom’s authority (or natural right) to say no. Since then, I’ve not struggled to reject New Escapologist submissions I didn’t care for. And when I politely declined an early cover design for Stern Plastic Owl, the designer thanked me for my clarity and we got on with doing the right thing instead.
That Guardian article does not encourage people to decline honestly or politely: it encourages us to wuss out and to tell white lies. This comes at a cost to our character and it disrespects people.
One of the things people struggle with, for example, is saying no to charity workers on the street. The article suggests we tell them that we already donate to another charity so as to “validate their cause and therefore their endeavour.” They know you might be lying, apparently, “but they also know why, so the exchange ends up being quite pleasant.”
I think not. Just because you’re afraid of rejection doesn’t mean they are. Respect them by being honest. Don’t waste their time. Let them go free to find success with a less stingy pedestrian. Here’s how to handle a chugger: don’t break your stride, smile kindly, and (at most) say “no thanks, sorry.” But always smiling. And always walking.
The same goes, basically, for any other request you don’t want to indulge. Decline politely, with clarity and honesty, and don’t stop.
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Find more wisdom on getting out of things in New Escapologist Issue 15 (due this week!)
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 74. Existenzminimum
I just got back from a happy few days in Paris. I met Friend Landis who was over from Chicago for a book tour, swanned around at the AsiaNow art fair, listened to live jazz (and got hit on) at Harry’s Bar, and visited the Louvre for the first time.
What I mean to talk about today however is the hostel. I stayed in a proper hostel dorm for the first time in perhaps 20 years. I loved it and I’m going to do it again in Holland and Luxembourg next month.
Seemingly, Paris hostels have privacy curtains on their bunks, which really changes everything. The bad thing about hostels as everyone either knows or can imagine is the feeling of overexposure; that strangers might be looming over you as you sleep. But the simple addition of a curtain makes a hostel every bit as good as a Japanese capsule hotel. You can still hear people moving around in the room at night, but I found it oddly comforting; you can tell from their soft movements, careful not to cause a fuss, that they’re just sleepy travellers the same as you.
For about £30 (instead of the £100+ you’d need for a hotel room in a city like Paris) you get the privacy of your bunk (in which there’s a reading lamp, a socket for charging your phone, and some little shelves for anything else you like to have nearby in the night), a locker in which you can stash your bag for the duration of your stay (actually a cube-shaped chest with a padded lid, good for sitting on to remove or put on your shoes), and access to the communal kitchens and toilet/showers.
Sorry to rattle on excitedly, but I am excited. I really enjoyed all this.
The toilet/shower rooms are much like the ones you’d find at a modern gym: by which I mean private shower cubicles, not the horror of shared showers like the ones in which footballers practice their heterosexuality. The kitchens, I was surprised to see, were spotlessly clean but well used: as well as being a casual social space for strangers to chat, I saw travellers preparing decent meals in there like fresh soup and spaghetti. (I just used it to fill my water bottle before vanishing off into Paris for pastries and cocktails).
There was also a cafe-bar in this particular hostel. I assumed it would be a basic affair for weary travellers so I dropped in on my first night with a plan to read my book over a quiet pint. But there was a jumping party going on! Glamorous drag queens were spinning records while the well-dressed Parisian youth gyrated and laughed and mingled. The place felt like the colonial bar in Lawrence of Arabia where he demands lemonade after crossing the desert; it was decorated with strings of muted lights and lazy palm fronds.
I was wearing my smelly Montreal Bagel t-shirt and some old jeans, so I was hardly presentable for it. I thirsted for that beer though, so I courageously ensconced myself at the bar and chatted with a bar worker who wasn’t bothered about my grotesque appearance and texted with my partner at home who assured me I was beautiful. I felt too self-conscious to read though, so I quaffed my refreshing blanche and made a dash for my bunk.
Sleeping with that curtain closed was a bit like being on an overnight ferry or a sleeper train without, obviously, the sensation of motion. For three nights in my coffin-like quarters, I slept like a brute.
The hostel struck me as quite the model for living. It was my socialist motto of “private sufficiency, public luxury” taken to the extreme and placed under one roof. I was happy to be far from material responsibilities and domestic maintenance. I think I could have worked on my books there if I’d wanted to.
If my partner ever throws me out, I’ll look into a long-stay hostel arrangement. The existenzminimum of a bunk, a locker, and access to those shared cooking and showering facilities was extremely liberating. And when you’re not sleeping or padding around in the communal spaces, you’re out there in your new town, living.
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Be frugal, be free. New Escapologist Issue 14 is available in print and digital formats now.
A Shipping and Shopping Update
Phwoar! Look at all those lovely magazines. I have 250 of them in my tiny Glasgow flat at Escape Towers, ready and waiting to be shipped. It’s going to be a busy couple of days.
If you missed the Kickstarter or you were waiting for a more direct way to subscribe or buy the new issue, now’s your time to shine.
Remember that there’s a fiver off The Good Life for Wage Slaves as well. Use coupon code WAGE5.
Shipping announcement:
I’ve been promising to ship on 10th August (this Thursday) but Kickstarter haven’t actually sent us any money yet. Shipping hundreds of mags before being paid for them would be a significant financial risk so I may have to wait a couple more days before shipping them. They’re ready to go though and I’m looking forward to getting them into your hands.
Shop news:
There were some teething troubles at the overhauled shop, though I have hopefully fixed them. The problem seemed to be with PayPal. If PayPal still doesn’t work for you at checkout, please know that you can also order by credit/debit card or even by direct bank transfer. Please see the various options available.
If PayPal doesn’t work but it’s still your preferred way to pay, you can send your payment to me directly through PayPal instead. I’ll know from the amount of money what you’re ordering and I’ll treat it the same as any other order. Sorry for the palaver.
Here’s where to go if you’d like to be in the first batch of mags being shipped.
Remembering. And Asking “What Next?”
Imagine if Capitalism was just switched off one day. If the government just decided to admit that money isn’t real and the whole thing was being called off. Debts written off, no more payday, Absolute Jubilee. Landlords wouldn’t need to suck the lifeblood out of tenants any more because their own upholstered lives wouldn’t be dependent on wealth. Supermarkets wouldn’t charge anymore and could just become food distribution centres, under the benign new management of community organisers. We could all escape our bullshit jobs and do nice things (valuable cultural things, important altruistic things) for no pay instead.
Obviously this will never ever happen and, if it did, all sorts of forgotten and ignored problems would scuttle out of the cracks. It was an idle fantasy arrived at today while thinking about… Twitter again. Sorry.
I don’t think Twitter is really going to disappear, though lots of people seem to. And if it does go, what will people do when they find that they’re finally free?
Freedom from social media as we know it could really be the consequence, I think. Twitter is probably the last of the true mega-platforms, isn’t it? TikTok has more users but it seems less infrastructurally important because, unlike Twitter, it’s just a bit of fun. Nobody’s pestering me to join TikTok and nobody thinks I’m eccentric or a Luddite for not being on it. Shops don’t tend to have TikTok emblems in their windows like they do for Facebook and Twitter. Nobody says “oh, you have to be on TikTok!” It doesn’t seem to have the “necessary evil” strongarm nudge power of Facebook and Twitter. With ease, you can ignore it.
It seems that, were Twitter to shut down or vanish behind a paywall, you could get away with having absolutely no social media in your life at all. Nobody would expect it.
So what will happen when the age of “necessary evil” social media, of Big Social to coin an obnoxious phrase, is over? To start with, journalists might have to re-learn some old tricks; to actually ask penetrating questions instead of scraping Twitter for secondhand hot takes.
Many will continue in their “pivot to video” by embracing TikTok and whatever comes (or has come, probably) after it. But it will be diminishing returns as these platforms become sillier and less essential.
Others will return to a period of Internet time before the algorithms took over: platforms called dreamwidth and cohost are being mentioned and they look just like Livejournal. That would be nice. I still believe that the Internet is not the problem, only that the mega-platforms are damaging free will.
And maybe we can regress en masse even further to pre-Internet ideas. I for one am hoping to set up a small publishing press (real paper!) with a friend next year. New Escapologist might be back in paper too. Move over bits, atoms are back!
The death of Twitter obviously wouldn’t be as big as the death of money but there would be a similar sense of walking out into freedom again (a freedom that was there all along, really), of squinting in the sunlight and feeling its warmth on your skin (but was it always so warm?), of remembering, and asking “what next?”
Get yer atoms here, missus: treat yourself to a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
The Great Resignation
This just in from Joel Golby:
I have never been in an office environment that has been conducive to work. Think of the constant emails about the shared fridges; the radio that is on for some reason; the guy making an ostentatiously loud phonecall on Bluetooth headphones. Never in my life have I seen a photocopier or central printer placed in a position where the sound and smell of it doesn’t disturb at least three people.
Obviously, my relentless list of grudges is far better and funnier but probably couldn’t be published in a newspaper.
Golby’s piece appeared on the back of what the pundits are calling The Great Resignation: an apparent mass quitting of bullshit jobs in the UK and US.
A couple of months into the Pandemic, a large number of office workers suddenly found themselves (a) working from home, and (b) taking stock of what really matters after being faced so full-frontally with d.e.a.t.h.
Some of them also, (c), found themselves with capital for the first time after saving so much paycheck money thanks to no longer being able to go anywhere or do anything.
Almost two years (!) later, those handily-itemised chickens have come home to roost. (a) and (b) equate to the gift of time to think without the shrapnel of office/commuter life blasting into soft and vulnerable faces for ten hours a day. (c) means an an escape fund never planned to accrue.
(a), (b), and (c) combine, Voltron-like, into the perfect circumstances for A MASS ESCAPE. Or at the very least, a chance for some people who, despite everything that has been done to them still have good bodies and minds, to try something different.
Many people will squander this opportunity as is their right or not notice it at all, but others will have already awoken to the realisation that, holy crap, the whole exhausting project was a scam and that the door marked “exit” was open all along. It is still open.
So what to do? Well, the Guardian, served up some borderline clickbait this morning, containing the secondhand weasel words of some buttonholed wimps. See if reading that is at all helpful, but escape artists of character can also buy my book. It was first published in 2016 but it’s more applicable than ever now, and it doesn’t mention Covid once. (I have maybe 3 discount copies left, actually.)
I’m glad that so many people now have the time and money to throw in the towel in pursuit of something more useful or pleasant. The Great Resignation, if it’s real, is potentially a meaningful time to be alive. But the real “Great Resignation” (and yes, yes, the media have just called it that to make it sound historically important) was when so many of us resigned ourselves to office jobs in the first place.
In other news, Colin the Caterpillar — the uninvited spirit animal of British office bods — is now available in a jar, presumably for the white-collar worker who, from home, no longer has to care about appearances or dignity or acting like a salaried adult in the slightest! Imagine eating sugary cake (not a sugary cake, mind you, but simply sugary cake) out of a jar. IMAGINE IT. And now imagine being destitute and eating something you scraped off somebody’s mudflap; tell me that there’s any noticeable difference in the sense of impoverishment you feel. Yum!
Sorry if I sound at all grumpy today, lovely reader. After months of protests and professional advocacy, they’re still trying to close my local library. For what it’s worth, please sign the petition. x
The Coupon Malfunction
The coupon code I’ve mentioned no fewer than three times at this blog hasn’t been working properly and I only just found out.
It seems to be working now and we’ve also extended the offer to December 25th.
So if you’d like £2 off The Good Life for Wage Slaves, here’s where to go. The coupon code is RAGEQUIT3.
Sorry to anyone who has been trying and failing to redeem the coupon this past week.
We are now back to being a fine-tuned, well-oiled machine. You’ll see!
Number of days without a disaster: 0.
I Fled Shrieking From That Madhouse of Boredom
I’ve been reading an humongous tome of autobiographical essays by “Designated Bad Seed” of science fiction, Harlan Ellison. I love his alive, cantankerous writing so much, and these essays have reconnected me with a deep well of pluck I’m sorry to say I’d forgotten about. Thank you, Uncle Harlan, wherever you are.
What I’d like to tell you about today, my fellow Escapologists, is a particular essay from this book in which Ellison describes working a drudge job for Capitol Records in 1953. He describes a first day of anxiously working quickly, fearing being judged not good enough by “the Demon God of Industry”, and then being told to slow down by a co-worker because his pedal-to-the-metal processing power makes the others look bad.
He talks to a long-serving Wage Slave, “a mouse of a creature” who has been filing bills of lading for eleven years, against his dream to “just go with the wind.”
The terror that froze my soul cannot be put into words. […This man was] set irrevocably on a cubicled routine of pointless chores making money for Gods on far mountaintops… and I saw what my future would be if I left my life in the hands of those prepared only to dole out thirty-six dollars a week for another human being’s existence.
Sensing a future echo in utero, Ellison’s had enough:
I grabbed up that sack of bills, leaped out of my chair, sending it crashing to the floor, and with all my strength and lungpower flung them into the air, screaming “FUCK IT!” Amid the bills-of-lading snowstorm, I fled shrieking from that madhouse of boredom and dead dreams on West 57th Street, never to return.
As far as I know, to this day, Capitol Records has an unclaimed check for one-half day’s work, in the name of Harlan Ellison.
Hah! Great isn’t it? I really just wanted to share this inspirational moment with you–you fine people with eyes on the door–but I also recommend The Harlan Ellison Hornbook more generally to anyone with low blood pressure.
Start Big: On Ends and Means
It is easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends. — Joan Didion
Listen. I might have discovered a previously-unobserved source of human misery. If we can work out how to escape this thing, we can probably all be a lot happier.
We might even be happier at work and not want to escape it if only we could escape this problem. We could be happier at school, happier in our own heads and, yes, happier on the toilet.
I know it sounds grandiose to go claiming a new discovery and all, but describing sources of misery–revealing them for what they are–and working out how to escape them is sort of my job now. And I’m digging deep.
So what is this newly-discovered reservoir of despair? Pop-Tarts? Well, that’s a good guess, madam, but no; the misery inflicted by their kind is already a matter of record. What I want to talk about today is:
a mass failure to begin with the end in mind.
Or possibly:
a tendency to confuse ends with means.
Wait! Wait! It know it sounds oblique and may not be as actionable an improvement as, say, escape from social media, but you’ve just got to hear me out. Trust me, I have a headful (it’s a word) of thoughts and some strong anecdotal evidence!
The idea of “starting with the end in mind” comes, I’m embarrassed to say, from a self-help book I’ve not read properly on grounds of not wanting to rot my mind any further than it’s already been rotted by such things. Self-help books are like the sun: sources of energy that that should never be looked at directly.
But it’s rather good. I know “begin with the end in mind” sounds platitudinous like “start as you mean to go on” or something, but it’s really not so vacuous and the further I travel in time from that book, the more and more its significance occurs to me.
It’s about having an actual end point–a finished product and/or situation–in mind before you start doing something. It’s also about not confusing means with ends: going to work, for example, is a means (i.e. the mechanism required to make money to live on and also to contribute to some sort of a product or service) that is too often seen as an ends (“I am, finally and inherently, a proctologist. My arrival in the world of proctology is a final result. Just as I’m a husband and a flyfisher and a worshipper of Cthulu, I’m a proctologist.”).
We fail to begin with the end in mind sometimes as individuals (one might join a gym with a general hunch that it’s healthy and that it sounds good when you say “so I’ve joined a gym”) but, more significantly, we fail to begin with the end in mind as societies too and the result is that individual people are plopped into situations and environments without knowing what’s really going on.
Life is confusing and frightening, right? Well, I think a big part of that is that we’re too often led into tight quarters where the end has not been explained to us. The end is too often poorly defined in the minds of those telling us what to do too: the “end,” often, might not even exist. When we go to work, we don’t know what The Company is really in service of and we don’t know what that thing it’s in service of might itself be in service of higher up the totem pole of society: all we can do it turn up, complete the tasks assigned to us, and take home the paycheque. All we’re left with is means.
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Many of the hopeless jobs I’ve been pressed into over the years probably felt hopeless to me because I didn’t know what they were for. And on those rare occasions I did have a sense of what they might be for, they were usually so far into the suburbs of anything worthwhile, that the handing in of Mr. Notice wasn’t far behind.
Someone of my father’s generation might say that the ultimate purpose of a job is besides the point and that you should just be happy to be working and be getting paid for it. Just turn up, punch the clock, do the work, get out. Simple. But that’s because he worked in secondary industry with a clear and tangible purpose at all times; he didn’t know boredom–true, soul-rusting boredom–in the way that we do. It’s hard to sit on a chair, watching a clock tick down, or faffing with Excel without being told what this is all for. I mean, even if the Prime Minister just went on TV to say, “Look, almost all of your jobs are actually pointless. But we’re morally unprepared to pay you to stay at home, so we’ve had to invent busywork for you. Sorry about that. But, just to be clear, your sitting on that ergonomic swivel chair is the whole end as well a means.” At least that would be something.
It drove me nuts, this sense of alienation. I have a natural impulse to visualise the end result of things. I can’t help it. You’re probably the same. If I’m writing a chapter for a book, for example, I need to know in my gut how it relates to the other chapters, how it fits into the broader scheme of the book, and how that book slots into the world library. I can’t help but imagine what sort of cover the publisher will give to the book and how attractive or ugly it’s likely to look or on people’s nightstands. That’s normal, isn’t it? Does a parent-to-be not preemptively picture the face of their wee one? It’s a natural impulse surely, not just another case of me being a delicate petal.
If your job was to report to a factory and to drill equally-spaced holes into six-inch lengths of metal tubing and then to pass it down to the next person, you’d probably be told at some point that you’re making flutes. You might then reasonably suppose that said flutes go off to market where they make (a) money for your employer and (b) music for ears and that (b) music if not (a) money is an inherent good and therefore an end. I suppose this job, being repetitive, would get boring after a while but at least you’d know what the heck was going on, just what all of your hole-drilling was in aid of.
Some white-collar workplaces have “mission statements.” Maybe there was one tacked up on a notice board or laminated and Blu-Tacked to a load-bearing pillar in your last office. Those mission statements are supposed to dovetail elegantly with everyone’s job descriptions so that everyone knows just how they contribute to the organisation’s agenda and how their duties relate to everyone else’s duties and how everyone–despite our varying degrees of happiness, busyness, and reluctance to be there–is actually on the same page and serving the same Grand Vision. It seldom works like that though does it? In the private sector, missions mutate to keep up with market forces (and are bogus to begin with since the mission of any company is to “make money” for a boss or for shareholders, any talk of “a passion for jell-o” or “bringing twiglets to the world” being obvious nonsense). In the public sector, mission statements tend to be so willfully obfuscating and are rendered in such twisted perversions of language that nobody can relate to them much less understand the bloody things. The effect of all this is that people just have to turn up, perform the tasks they’ve been told to perform, and not to trouble themselves over what it’s all for, what Great Machine they’re helping to drive into the future.
This hunger for meaning–a need for basic orientation–was rarely met in any of my white-collar jobs and it was maddening. You’d be welcomed into the office on Day 1, given directions on your daily activities over the course of perhaps a week, but a wider sense of what all of this was in aid of was either assumed or explained exclusively through an HR-prepared induction pack of contractual waffle and out-of-date “organograms.” It was a bit like being stuck in the trunk of a moving car with a hood over your head and being asked, for reasons unknown to you, to solve a Rubik’s cube. It’s not impossible, it’s just tedious and pointlessly mysterious.
I was thinking about all this recently and it occurred to me that a sense of not really knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing–a feeling of being lost at sea when you’re dutifully standing right where the world has told you to be–is probably the source of untold unhappiness at work.
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At school–another time in life when perfectly happy and intelligent people are gaslit into worrying we might be misanthropes or stupid–we are seldom told what the lessons are about: why we’re being told these things, what they have to do with us. A general understanding may have been instilled in us about the importance of “passing maths” so that we can graduate high school and move on to the next artificially-maintained stage of life and on and on and on, but it all seems so absurd and irrelevant when you’re sitting there at a desk, being told about Ox-Bow Lakes.
In Geography–a subject I generally liked–we had a teacher who was good at getting us through exams. His trick was to teach “facts” by rote. It worked. We all passed Geography with flying colours. By “facts” he really meant “details.” A geography exam could not be blagged, he said, on general views or ideas about the world. You had to be able to write “the Cotswolds” or “1978” or “the Maasai Mara.” Points were awarded for these details. He gave us all sorts of wacky mnemonic techniques and bashed these facts into our heads until we could recite them automatically without even switching on the conscious parts of our brains. Now I think about it, it must have looked quite eerie from his perspective and rather like something from Children of the Corn. “Ox-Bow Lake, sir,” we’d all say in chorus, “Jurassic limestone, sir.”
I did not find this strategy objectionable at the time because learning facts divorced of context was at least easy and it meant I could get back to making out with my girlfriend or reading comics or whatever it was. And yet now, as an adult, I find myself wondering what an “Ox-Bow Lake” might actually be. I know they’re a kind of lake. I can draw one from above. I can even tell you about how it is formed and how it relates to “meanders,” to “eutrophication,” and to “natural erosion.” But I don’t know what much of that really means or where one one of these fabled Ox-Bow Lakes might be. Are they in England somewhere? Are they in Africa? Mars? To this day, I have no understanding–intellectually or viscerally–of what, really, an Ox-Bow Lake is. I can just parrot some words I learned by rote.
Surely, I wonder now, there must be better ways of teaching kids. Surely no marker of exams ever thought “Oh yes, this youngster really understands the essence of the Ox-Bow Lake.” It’s all so “phoney,” as Holden Caulfield–whom we did not study in English class–would undoubtedly say.
What I’m saying here is that these geography facts and so much else at school were endured in isolation with no end in mind: no reasonable context was given for any of it. The lessons started at the wrong end of things: before teaching this sort of deeply specialised nitty-gritty, shouldn’t we be told something general about life (like, where we are now, historically-speaking, and on which operating systems, geopolitically-speaking, do our lives run) and then, should we graduate to such ludicrously granular specialities as needing to know about the various types of freshwater lake and their formation, about how it all relates to us and our place in the world? Just like “orientation” in a job, how about some orientation from schools on the relevant basics of present-tense Life on Earth?
(Curious to know if there’s a school of thought on this, perhaps called “contextual learning,” I looked it up. It turns out there is but despite the general theory being noble–“teachers […] present information in such a way that students are able to construct meaning based on their own experiences”–the rest of it is really a lot of softy twaddle and involves hands-on “experiences” instead of the noble Aristotelian tradition of classroom- and book-learning, which is a lot of pedagogic wisdom to throw in the bin. You went too radical, Contextual Learning!)
So a kid is not schooled “with the end in mind,” nor is end of schooling kept in mind at all, only the means (which consists, if memory serves, of getting the regulation backpacks and calculators, sitting still, respecting your teachers, not chewing gum, and doing homework on time — urgh). If the end of school is to prepare students for life in a practical way, it’s obviously not fit for purpose. If the end of schooling is to teach an understanding of the world, it’s not doing that either. But I don’t really know what the end of school is because it was never explained. It’s just something everyone had to do.
Imagine if the Prime Minister came on TV again to say “I’ve been talking to the Secretary of Education and, essentially, we just want to keep young people off the streets, alright? So sit tight, grow up, and then you can do what you like.” Again, at least it would be something.
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Politics meanwhile is a veritable haven of failing to start with the end in mind and getting wound up in means. Everyone’s got their tribe and nobody wants to ask what the end of that tribe really is. Your first encounter with politics probably involved a political party broadly aligned to an ideology or–more likely–your witnessing a reaction to a party-political statement by someone whose opinion you valued at the time. You’ll have heard your dad complaining about Reds or your mum complaining about Blues and it’s enough to get you started on a lifetime of political opinion-having.
One needs to step back and ask what it’s all for. In the United Kingdom, where I live (and will continue to live until my actual country of residence, Scotland, votes to leave the UK in favour of Europe in a couple of years) the Conservative Party aren’t even slightly interested in what it’s all for. They aren’t so much interested in running a country as holding onto power (and therefore money and limelight and future consultancy or public speaking opportunities).
A Labour Party campaigner I used to follow on social media before I quit had two passions in life: campaigning for a Socialist Labour Party and getting them into power; and what she called “self-destruction.” She’d routinely post pictures of evidence of scarring or of drinking and smoking too much. It didn’t look like she was seeking help or anything: it was more a case of “Self-Harm Pride” or something. I swear I wasn’t being judgmental–go ahead and self-destroy if that’s what you’re into–but I wondered if the Socialism didn’t conflict with the self-destruction. I was too shy to ask.
I don’t look at social media any more, but I asked a young Socialist in the pub what he thought about this. “Isn’t destroying yourself just doing the Tories’ job for them?” I suggested. “If the Tories want to make their cronies rich through privatisation and to punish the poor by inflicting austerity measures and dismantling the welfare state, isn’t it just helping them along to abbreviate your own life and compromise your own wellbeing?”
“Maybe,” he said, “but looking after yourself is what a Libertarian would say.”
He could be right, I suppose. Whenever I do that political compass thing, my position is firmly in the Libertarian left. But it makes me wonder what the point of Socialism could possibly be if it’s not to raise the quality of life of individual people. Even Jeremy Corbyn (while discussing automation in 2018) has referred to “a chance to raise living standards and give people more control of their own lives.” Because that’s the point. It’s not about righteous fighting (which is a means, not and end) while willingly suffering (even inflicting) hardship and rejecting the good life on class grounds. What’s the point of that? Self-destruction isn’t “solidarity;” in damaging yourself–whether actively like the activist I’m talking about or passively through self-neglect–you’re harming a member of the crowd you’re trying to save. You’ve confused means with an end.
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At work, at school, and in politics it would be good if the actual “end” could be kept in mind. Performing actions without understanding the end is, I’m increasingly convinced, the origin (even the epicentre!) of alienation and therefore the font of misery. We probably wouldn’t want to escape those institutions so badly or to engage with them so half-heatedly if someone would just take the time to explain what’s going on, how everything fits together in the world, and what the “end” of everything really is. This is more and more important the higher one goes in thinking about society: work, school, and politics are but elements of a world. What about the social world at large. How do we want to live? To trot out a hoary old Wildean wit-nugget:
a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of utopias.
And that’s my point. Utopia–whether we’re talking personal and individualist or social and wide-reaching–is an end. And without that end in mind, any project you undertake is doomed. So. Begin with the end in mind. Build it into the foundations, my tolerant and long-reading friend, bake it into the brownie while the brownie’s still still a dough, start with the end and work, like a writer of detective novels, backwards from there. Don’t mistake means for ends. Don’t sweat the small stuff: if you want to run a project or plot any course of action, or if you want to know how to spend your days: START BIG.
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This essay began life as one possible introduction to a book called The Good Life for Wage Slaves before being set to one side and repurposed for an online readership. If you liked the essay, please consider buying the book.
Fishbourne Wasn’t the World
I’ve just turned the final page of The History of Mr Polly, one of H. G. Wells’ non-sci-fi novels. It is Escapological.
Mr Polly is a member of the provincial lower-middle class. He is poorly educated (set up, like most of us, to join the workforce or else serve as cannon fodder) but likes to read and is at heart a romantic chap.
He carries a secret anger at his obvious destiny to marry his cousin (something which sends shiver down the spine of the modern reader, but all Wells really means by this is “someone nearby and of similar stock, no soulmate”) and to open a small shop. He is also frustrated by the apparent acceptance of other people to this same lot. When he laments it in public, he meets with the usual “know your station!”- and “no point thinking you’re going to escape”- and “ooh, I should be so lucky to have time for books!”- type remarks.
Polly is driven to suicide:
The end! And it seemed to him now that life had never begun for him, never! It was as if his soul had been cramped and his eyes bandaged from the hour of his birth. Why had he lived such a life? Why had he submitted to things, blundered into things? Why had he never insisted on the things he thought beautiful and the things he desired, never sought them, fought for them, taken any risk for them, died rather than abandon them? They were the things that mattered. Safety did not matter. A living did not matter unless there were things to live for…
He had been a fool, a coward and a fool, he had been fooled too, for no one had ever warned him to take a firm hold upon life, no one had ever told him of the littleness of fear, or pain, or death; but what was the good of going through it now again? It was over and done with.
I like that “safety did not matter” remark. Even today people talk about “risk” as if (a) there weren’t perfectly valid and orthodox career paths available within those apparently risky — usually artistic or entrepreneurial — lines, and (b) forgetting that “risk” is only to flirt with failure while settling for safe mediocrity is failure; it’s like deliberately throwing yourself off a cliff when you’re afraid of falling.
Cometh the hour, Polly bungles his suicide and ends up burning down his shop and some other buildings on the street. In so doing, he saves the life of the deaf old woman who lives next door and is championed a hero instead of an arsonist. He is also given insurance money for the shop.
The drama of all this and Polly’s realisation that his actions (albeit unintentionally) led to change wakes him up from his previous assumption that one’s future is already decided.
We are rewarded for sticking with him through desperate times with this lovely passage:
But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether. You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless perhaps they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution. I give these things as facts and information, and with no moral intimations. And Mr. Polly lying awake at nights, with a renewed indigestion, with Miriam sleeping sonorously beside him and a general air of inevitableness about his situation, saw through it, understood there was no inevitable any more, and escaped his former despair.
He could, for example, “clear out.”
It became a wonderful and alluring phrase to him: “clear out!”
Why had he never thought of clearing out before?
He was amazed and a little shocked at the unimaginative and superfluous criminality in him that had turned old cramped and stagnant Fishbourne into a blaze and new beginnings. (I wish from the bottom of my heart I could add that he was properly sorry.) But something constricting and restrained seemed to have been destroyed by that flare. Fishbourne wasn’t the world. That was the new, the essential fact of which he had lived so lamentably in ignorance. Fishbourne as he had known it and hated it, so that he wanted to kill himself to get out of it, wasn’t the world.
