The Condensed Minimalist
There has, ironically, been a lot said about minimalism in books and online. But to live minimally really just requires adherence to two simple objectives:
1. Don’t buy or otherwise acquire anything inedible;
2. Rid yourself of anything not frequently useful or aesthetically pleasing to you.
That is the whole of the law!
Borrowing Shop
Reggie draws our attention to a “borrowing shop” in Berlin.
The idea is simple. The shop has a stock of useful things like tools. Customers borrow the items as if the shop were a lending library instead of buying them for keeps.
It’s a way for a community to pool resources and for individuals not to suffer the burden of ownership.
If it were common to see this in neighbourhoods and the idea of borrowing, say, a lawnmower or a drill were a dependable one, it would be a real boon for minimalism and community spirit.
Just as you don’t need to own Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows because it’s definitely in your local public library, you wouldn’t need to own a drill if you knew there was one to be borrowed from the borrowing shop.
I made the mistake of reading some of the comments thread in the article about the Berlin borrowing shop and it was filled with variations of the obvious criticism: how does it make money?
Generously overlooking the fact that “making money” shouldn’t be the aim of every last goddam thing (especially a community initiative for the benefit of everyone), the answer would be to charge a nominal fee per lend.
I don’t know why that would be a problem. Charge £2 per lend, perhaps with exceptions for the superpoor. Obviously. Everyone’s a winner.
It’s a great step back toward common public resources (payphone, town clock, public baths) instead of the private ones we’re all supposed to love under Neoliberalism.
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An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 37. 2013 Review.
Dear Imaginary Shareholders,
It’s been a weird year. For starters, I took a job. Not something I generally recommend, as you know.
Read the rest of this entry »
Practical Stoicism
I spent the weekend reading a little book about Stoicism and its potential to be practiced in everyday life. Oddly enough, this week is apparently Stoic Week.
I admired the author’s reason for writing his book: to demonstrate that ancient philosophy can be applied to the modern everyday (and should be, for personal improvement, peace of mind, and a nicer society).
There are three Stoical techniques among the others described by the author that I already find myself doing fairly naturally, and which I can vouch for:
1. Negative visualisation
Imagine how it would feel if you lost something you currently enjoy. How would you cope if you lost your computer, your looks, your teeth, your winter coat, your favourite coffee cup, a loved one, your mobility, your ability to read? All nightmares of varying degrees of severity.
Briefly considering these potential losses makes you deeply grateful for what you have (and science tells us that gratitude is healthy).
It’s a measure of antifragility, psychologically preparing you for occasions of real loss. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s a talisman against insatiability, making you less likely to want more than you currently have. I think this technique might be the true engine behind my tendency toward minimalism and is a genuine way to find contentment.
2. Periodic Voluntary Discomfort
I sometimes like to deliberately endure slight discomfort. I’m not into self-flagellation and I’m not into the “no pain, no gain” school of exercise, but I might try to tolerate a slightly ill-fitting shoe before buying a new one; or see how long I can sweat through a summer before switching on the air conditioner; or push myself to walk five miles instead of catching the bus.
It makes you understand what comfort is, makes you more tolerant, makes you less dependent on luxury or perfection.
It makes you appreciate small luxuries wherever they may be, and to take little for granted. If you’re accustomed to drinking tap water with meals, the occasional glass of wine or iced tea is a marvelous treat. If your main form of transportation is walking , a jaunt in a taxi is quite the adventure.
It’s also humbling: why should you have the newest, hippest and most expensive of everything? Who are you, the King of Siam?
3. Consistent Self-Monitoring
To fulfill a social element of Stoicism, Seneca suggests we reflect upon our actions at the end of each day or, better yet, develop an internal self-monitoring agent capable of assessing our behaviour as it happens. I have this. We probably all have it, but it can be trained to be consistently active and to be on the lookout for certain positive or negative traits.
I’m not naturally generous for example, forgetful that sharing and gregariousness are good virtues to have! But my self-monitoring ability alerts me to instances of this now. This doesn’t mean I obey it consistently, but at least I choose to be an arse now.
Stoicism. It’s what’s for dinner.
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An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 36. Dark Matter.
Three domestic opportunities for minimalism arise. Oh baby. It’s rare for even one to come up these days since I’m already down to brass tacks (Tacks? Excessive!).
1. Life without microwaves
A microwave oven is something most devout minimalists are proud to be free of, but since I tend to rent furnished apartments there’s usually one around.
When our microwave exploded last weekend, my girlfriend suggested we try to live without it rather than replace it. Music to my ears!
Since I do most of our cooking the old-fashioned way, the only thing we ever used the microwave for was to reheat leftover coffee (a dirty habit anyway). I suspect we will not replace it. Already the microwave-shaped empty space in our tiny kitchen is nourishing my minimalist soul.
2. Eradication of DVD
Years ago, I minimised my DVD collection by jettisoning the cases and filing the discs into a handy DJ case. I now have an alphabetised DVD collection the size of a shoe box. It’s a work of art.
But! I want rid of it. Watching DVDs has become a bore. I prefer to read books for home entertainment these days; but even if you’re happy to watch videos, DVDs are a lousy experience compared to Internet downloads. They jump, they’re often incompatible with newer media software, and you have to humour the obstacle courses of animated menus and the offensive anti-piracy warnings. So I’m giving away my beloved collection of classic British sitcoms to my friend Phil, a Canadian, who likes British comedy and will be new to much of my curated treasure.
3. A blitz on Dark Matter
I’ve wanted to mention ‘Dark Matter’ for ages. Dark Matter is the mysterious, barely-detectable matter that physicists believe accounts for much of the universe’s mass. It’s also the metaphor I use for the unseen stuff shoved into the backs of cupboards. It’s the shameful plaque-like accumulations that minimalists don’t count on their inventories, preferring instead to pretend it doesn’t exist. But there can be loads of it! (By loads, in our case, I mean there was a desk lamp, some empty boxes, and a beach towel — like I say, brass tacks). It’s now no longer with us.
Why the sudden attack on our Dark Matter? We used to keep suitcases under our bed, something which has always bothered me. They would accumulate dust bunnies and the symbolism alone was a headache, so I wanted to relocate them to our closet, hence the need to clear it out.
Now that we’ve courageously tackled Dark Matter, the breath of chi dragons can swirl around us unencumbered as we sleep.
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Three for Three
Issue Three — The Practicalities Issue — was our breakthrough issue and is always our most popular item at book fairs.
To celebrate its approximate anniversary, we’ve made the PDF available for a paltry £3. That’s the same price as… well, something very cheap indeed.
Never read New Escapologist? Never tried our digital editions? Here’s a cost-effective opportunity.
Issue Three features a conversation with Tom Hodgkinson who you’ll all know as the editor of the Idler and headmaster of the Idler Academy. It’s also full of fine practical tips on how to get started on (and to maintain) your life of freewheeling laziness.
Spread over 90 beautifully-typeset pages, the contents include:
– Robert Wringham’s classic article “Plot Your Escape”;
– David Gross on tax resistance;
– Mark Wentworth on easy minimalism;
– Mark Wentworth on how to travel;
– Wringham on being a pedestrian;
– Fan-favourite Jon Ransom on how to skip work with aplomb;
– Neil Scott on David Foster Wallace;
– Escaping dependencies;
– Brian Dean on escaping anxiety culture;
– Reggie C. King on the music of Moondog;
– Projects, Trifles, and Follies;
– Tom Mellors on Bartleby the Scrivener;
– Fabian Kruse on how to disappear;
– Leo Babauta on shopping;
– Dickon Edwards and Reggie C. King on pseudonyms;
– Fabian Kruse on money without the work;
– Wringham on Autonomy.
Enjoy it all for just £3 today. But hurry! The offer will end at some arbitrary near-future date!
How to buy? Just click this humble button:
Towards Zero Waste
I read a few weeks ago that Wales is almost halfway to becoming a ‘zero waste’ society. With 48% of their household garbage being recycled, they’re doing better than almost any other Western country.
Reducing one’s impact on the environment is one of the key aims of minimalism (and minimalism is a key tenet of Escapology), so my partner and I got to thinking about how we could nudge our own household closer to the zero waste target.
We were already casual recyclers of the usual materials (plastic, glass, paper, cans), but we were still producing a bag of miscellaneous garbage every week. These are the steps we took to further minimise what we send to landfill:
– We checked the details of what can be recycled in our neighbourhood. It turns out that Tetrapacks (milk and juice cartons) can be recycled but we’d always ignorantly binned them. So now we recycle those.
– Our area has no municipal compost programme and we have no garden, so a sizable portion of our waste has been vegetable matter. My girlfriend’s parents, however, live in an area with a compost programme, so we keep it all in a Tupperware box, which I then carry to their house on our weekly visit.
– I never used to bother recycling small pieces of paper like bus tickets and grocery receipts. Fiddly, innit? But now I do.
– We’ve committed absolutely to reusable grocery bags. We never accept a single-use plastic bag from a shop now. Ever! I hate carrier bags. When they’re not suffocating babies or choking sea turtles, they’re hanging forlorn and muddy in a tree. Let’s stop using them.
The only things left in our garbage at the end of the week are non-recyclable plastic wrappers, beer bottle tops, and egg shells. It can be squished down to the size of a tennis ball.
Garbage management is not going to help directly in your escape, but looking after the environment will help us all to live in a better world. Like they do in Wales.
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Welcome, new readers
We enjoyed a spike in blog readership this week after being mentioned on a couple of more prominent blogs. Huzzah!
I’d like to welcome these new readers. Welcome! I very much hope that you stick around for a little while.
In case you’re wondering precisely what all the fuss is about, here’s a little FAQ by way of an introduction:
What is Escapology?
It’s about deftly avoiding the potential traps of modern life: debt, stress, unrewarding work, bureaucracy, marketing, noise, and over-government. It’s about embracing freedom, Anarchy and Absurdity. It’s about overcoming miserliness, passive-aggression, mauvaise fois and submission. Escapology asks you to consider the circumstances in which you would most like to live and encourages you to find a way of engineering them.
What is this blog?
It’s the online companion to a magazine called New Escapologist (available to order in both print and PDF at our shop).
Both the blog and the magazine both discuss the above subject of “Escapology”.
The blog is updated regularly, but not to a schedule.
What is the magazine like?
Each issue is a compendium of funny and existential essays and anecdotes relating to Escapology. It is beautifully typeset, it is square, it is released to an irregular schedule, it is between 34 and 110 pages, and it can be purchased (in either print of PDF) here.
Who writes all this?
The magazine has writers and illustrators from all over the world. The blog is maintained by me, Robert Wringham. I’m the editor of the magazine and also a humourist and a stand-up comic and a bunch of other stuff.
What would I do if I didn’t go to work?
There are many options. Escapologists have reported enjoying travel; charity work; political activism; cottage industry; dedication to an art or craft; physical challenges; autodidactism; and decadent laziness. To go some way to answering this question, I maintain an online diary to document my post-escape life. It’s called An Escapologist’s Diary.
You talk about minimalism a lot. What does minimalism have to do with Escapology?
One of the most important things to strive for as an Escapologist is mobility. Each possession or dependency is a threat to mobility.
Why be a minimalist? Who wants to live in a white-walled box?
I’ll hand over to Leo Babauta (who fields more questions about minimalism here and here).
It’s a way to escape the […] excesses of consumerism, material possessions, clutter, having too much to do, too much debt, too many distractions, too much noise. But too little meaning. Minimalism is a way of eschewing the non-essential in order to focus on what’s truly important, what gives our lives meaning, what gives us joy and value.
Does your project have anything to do with Houdini?
He was the inspiration for it. We use escapology as a metaphor:
Houdini’s popularity as an escape artist came about during a time of technological and political revolution. It was during the 1900s that Ransom Eli Olds implemented the first mass production of marketable cars, Tomas Edison’s phonograph made a commodity out of music, and the colonial expansion of Europe and America prompted the birth of the somewhat unpleasant political period known now as New Imperialism. Technologies and movements initially plugged as liberating would soon be discovered by thinkin’ types to be nasty, horrible traps designed only to placate, segment and enfeeble. When people become dependent upon companies or governments to entertain them, to transport them, to plan their days and to import their goods, they forget what it is to be free, alive and autonomous.
The work of Houdini and his contemporaries escaped the province of curiosity – that of conjuring and ventriloquism – and into the universe of metaphor.
Taken from An invitation to New Escapology.
So that’s us in a nutshell. There’s more about us here, and you can further connect to our goings on via our RSS and Facebook page. Enjoy!
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Escapologia Digitalis?
The digitisation of printed materials is the most relevant topic in publishing and librarianship today. Boring, I know, but there we have it.
Just before he died, the great Ray Bradbury finally consented to a Kindle edition of Fahrenheit 451: a symbolic victory for eBooks if ever there was one. Even my own lovely book, published recently by Go Faster Stripe, comes with an instant PDF download when you buy the print version.
Even though I dislike eBooks myself, I’m beginning to think seriously about providing a digital download version of New Escapologist. It would not replace the printed editions: it would simply be another platform from which to read them. My motivation is a combination of the two strongest forces in the universe: peer pressure, and supply and demand.
Naturally, as a reactionary paperphile, I have reservations about this manoeuvre. On one hand, it is likely to be a profitable one, meaning we’ll be able to pay our writers and illustrators more regularly. On the other, it does feel like a slight ethical and artistic compromise. Let me explain:
We produce New Escapologist with a certain aesthetic experience in mind, and I feel this is compromised if a reader’s first exposure to the work is on a screen (likewise, I don’t intend to have the blog printed and bound at any point). Moreover, the entire ethic of New Escapologist is to live freely, which, we’ve always said, means severing dependencies upon pricey electronic gizmos. Moreover, I have a deep personal passion for books: real books. I don’t have much to say one way or another about downloadable PDFs, which means the ‘labour of love’ element of producing New Escapologist could also be compromised.
There are counter-arguments to all of my reservations, of course. Many of you feel that digital downloads facilitate freedom rather than hamper it because the lack of dead tree about the person will allow one to travel light. Moreover, the provision of a PDF download doesn’t directly contravene my love of books, just as the existence of websites or fortune cookies or sky-writing airplanes don’t: there’s arguably room enough in the world for all formats to exist.
Here are four reader arguments in favour of a digital edition:
– Dear Robert. Regarding your call for opinions on the digital editions, I would vote in favour of producing NE in PDF format, but in addition to the hard copy version. I like both formats but for different reasons. Hard copy is tactile and real but digital is convenient and accessible from anywhere. Perhaps you might consider subscription options that offer either or both formats: digital-only being cheaper to reflect reduced production and distribution costs, with hard copy at the current price but with complementary access to the digital edition. I’d personally favour the latter model.
– Hi Robert. Just a note on digital editions. As a minimalist, what puts me off buying the NE back catalogue is having to have them physically and move them around with me when I move (which I tend to do quite a bit). I know I could read them and give them away, but I’d rather have them for re-reading so would be more likely to buy if I could put [it] on my kindle.
– Hi Robert. A lot of the key magazines are giving free iPad compatible versions to their print subscribers as an extra incentive. However, don’t get me wrong I still love and fully appreciate the physical product… it’s just that sometimes I would like access when I don’t have copies handy (e.g. during a long plane journey, like today!)
– Hello! I stumbled upon this site via Click Clack Gorilla, and am enamored. I wanted to read the print publications as well, but I travel for work and currently live in Japan. I feel bad having things shipped all around the world to me, and then the dilemma of keeping them or passing them on once I move again. So, if there was ever a question of making the publications in PDF form, I am one vote for yes please!
And here is one well-reasoned reader argument against a digital edition:
– Hello. I think of NE as opposed to computer screens, and more importantly big business taking over our booknesses. I will never be ‘buying’ an ebook. You can’t flick through it, pass it on, use it for something it wasn’t intended. Ebooks (unless from free online libraries, I suppose) are eroding our freedoms, not helping them! I’m surprised some of your readers are happy to only read what Apple and Amazon let them. OK, perhaps if you were to sell the ebook file directly from your own website, which I could then download and put on my own device of choice, then that would be ok-ish. But I’m still always going to be buying the paper version. Maybe you could bundle the e-version with the paper one. Anyway, personally, NE is ‘goodbye to all that’, and that includes screens, batteries, plugs, wires and multinationals. And you can’t read on the iPad in direct sunlight, which really seems wrong for NE.
And in a personal email to a friend who had asked how to resolve Escapological minimalism with a love of books, I recently wrote:
– I have realised, after much thought on the subject, that there is no substitute for books. eBooks do not cut it for me. I cannot get excited about a “plastic pal” such as a Kindle or a boring bit of searchable software like a PDF or a DOC. Electronic book-reading devices would certainly solve the problem of physical book ownership, but my interest in books (as I imagine yours) extends beyond the information they contain. Part of a book’s soul is not in the words but in the typography, the binding style, the size, the thickness, the choice of paper, the odour, the width of the page margins, the weird little print anomalies or type errors. Even the vandalism, marginal notes, coffee cup rings, bookplates, hand-written dedications (“For George, Christmas 1963, Nana and Gramps”) from previous owners are part of the experience for me. You know when you buy a book and there’s a publisher’s advert in the back for alien-sounding books that don’t exist anymore and cost 2p? I love that more than anything! I love books – real books – and that is something this minimalist has to live with.
So there you have it. I’m really on the fence with this one, and finding it difficult to continue in my usual mode of benevolent dictatorship. If you’d like to support the life of paper and coffee cup rings, please continue to buy it. If you’d like to join the debate for or against digital editions, leave a comment in this post.
Buy the complete back catalogue of New Escapologist with a 10% discount today.
Want not, want not
Since the creation of New Escapologist, I’ve met a number of people with passions for dumpster diving, junk reclamation, and food foraging.
Personally, I don’t go in for the salvaging lark. I’m too squeamish and I’m skeptical about the economies. Nevertheless, I respect that many people find liberty in such activities.
I mention this because I just finished reading The Scavengers’ Manifesto.
The general idea of reusing or repurposing found objects is admirable. “Waste not, want not” is some fine inherited wisdom. Scavenging (if we must call it that: the authors are keen to reclaim the word) to save money and to minimise one’s impact upon the natural world are actions quite compatible with the Escapologist’s life.
Trouble is, scavenging is made redundant by minimalism: the system to which the more determined Escapologist would subscribe. As a minimalist, I’m aloof to the material world. Scavenging reduces want, but I’ve already surgically removed my want.
When the authors breezily list the treasures they’ve acquired through scavenging, I can only think “I desperately don’t want any of that crap. I don’t even want to think about any of that crap”.
It’s a shame that so much usable stuff is discarded in our wasteful society, and it’s admirable that the scavenger seeks to intercept some of that stuff and to extract extra value from it. But as a minimalist, I don’t contribute to such detritus, and I wish that other people didn’t either.
Minimalism trumps consumerism both financially and environmentally, but scavenging is just another form of consumerism and is wholly dependent upon big consumerism.
Scavenging focuses on the middle element of the three Rs of environmentalism: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I’ve long felt that reusing and recycling are inferior measures to reduction: once a natural material has been converted into a commercial commodity, it might as well already be in the landfill. Reducing (through minimalism) is where we should focus our environmental efforts.
Liquid cash in the bank, instead of tied up depreciating in material commodities (scavenged or otherwise) is also, generally speaking, a preferable financial situation offered exclusively by minimalism.
“Waste not, want not” is a fine philosophy compared to blind consumerism. But “Want not, want not” is a far more dignified and productive maxim.
Cheer up, scavengers. Here’s a picture of dead billionaire Steve Jobs in his apartment. Look, he’s got practically nothing!
