New Escapologist : March 2020
It's Beginning to Feel a Lot like Christmas
Covid-19! It' another company-wide event nobody asked for!
How are you all doing? We're in scary times but Escapologists are perhaps naturally better-suited to self-isolation than many people. We tend to prefer being at home to being in offices. We like to walk. We're generally well-prepared and on top of things. We're unlikely to struggle to think of things to do behind closed doors. We're also relatively accustomed to feeling that the world is upside-down and the wrong way around. Not bad.
I've lost work (The Good Life for Wage Slaves will not be out in English in June - stay tuned to see what happens on that front) and I've cancelled two trips. And of course I'm as scared of Captain Trips as anyone. Escape Towers is situated at the side of a railway line and the trains that rattle pass my window every five minutes are this week all empty: their lights are all on and they are running to the usual schedule but there are no passengers on board. This is very spooky and apocalypse-feeling and I wish I could ignore it but the trains even sound empty.
And yet, I find myself relatively, unusually calm. Do you feel that way too? Years of catastrophising is finally paying off! Psychologically if not practically.
Weird observation: it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. Actually, the mood around here feels less manic and frightening and annoying than recent Yuletides. Yes, there are some product shortages and a dash of retail madness but, because of the potential consequences of panic, people are being more generous and respectful than on the run-up to Christmas. And, unlike the festive period, our street is populated by human beings (self-isolating at home instead of scurrying off to parents' houses in the 'burbs), which feels good.
Thanks to the big bay windows of our tenement-lined street, I can see into the homes of our neighbours (and they into ours) and most seem to be handling the situation well. I see them returning from shops with bulging grocery bags but, since most of them don't drive, not with grotesque and selfish quantities. I see them kicked back on couches with books and guitars and each other. Not bad.
There is one chap, however, who is clearly struggling to work from home. He's set up a de-facto office desk, multi-coloured Post-It notes fussily arranged next to his hopeless desk telephone. He spends his time with chin in palm, gazing out of the window. Poor fellow. I wonder if this is because, estranged from materials or tools of his trade, he can't work, or, if he's one of the people (like I used to be) who doesn't actually have more than an hour of work to do in his job and is struggling to fill his 7.5 contracted hours now that he doesn't have colleagues to annoy with or meeting rooms to fill with drivel or water coolers to walk back and forth from. I can't know of course. But I can intuit. He has the demeanor of a bad airplane passenger, someone who can't sit still and let the journey pass.
But enough Corona Daydreams for now. Here is your digest of a month of Things Escapological. I hope it does not seem disrespectful of current events since not much of it is directly about them ("how can anyone think of anything other than Covid-19?!") but that it provides instead some moments of easy distraction from any anxieties or boredom you might be experiencing. It's not my intent to make light of the situation but, since we're all living through it together and things will get back to normal eventually, let's take it easy.
Robert Wringham
New Escapologist
Double-Entry
Book recommendation! Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) by B.S. Johnson.
It’s about a frustrated office worker who goes to ridiculous lengths to reclaim his dignity. In fact, he becomes a terrorist so I hesitate to mention him as someone to relate to BUT it’s all played for absurdist laughs against a 1970s (rather than post-9/11) backdrop and there are other things going on in this extraordinary novel too. It’s very short and very funny and very Twentieth-Century in tone while at the same time being forth wall-breaking with a comedic lightness of touch. I recommend it.
Here’s Johnson’s description of Christie’s office:
The atmosphere was acrid with frustration, boredom and jealousy, black with acrimony, pettiness and bureaucracy.
I think that’s excellent. B.S. Johnson saw the novel as a dated outlet for storytelling and his way of rescuing it was to write from a spiritual/internal/reflective viewpoint: perspectives that TV and film would struggle (and continue to struggle) with. And it’s a good reflective description of an office. It’s certainly how my old workplace felt to me.
The novel begins with a calculation worthy of an Escapologist: how long ’til retirement? He works out that he can retire “early” but is still appalled by his lot:
Christie was silent even at the information that he had only forty-three and not forty-eight years before he was free.
Anyway, it’s a good book. You can read a little more about it here but I advise against spoiling the plot for yourself if you plan to read it.
The Answer is Not the Office
We are all different from each other, and we work in different ways. Still, we must all come together to the office, usually an ugly building with lousy coffee, at a predetermined time and stay there for at least 8 hours. Of course, eight hours are just for lazy, uncommitted employees. The real heroes are proud of working night shifts and making you feel bad when leaving the office earlier. Going home on time is a form of treason.
“Strong agree” with this nice article by Fernando Silvestrin about the office as a place in which good (i.e. deep, creative, worthwhile) work can’t possibly get done.
While offices are the only place built specifically for us to get the job done, we don’t actually get any work done at the office – especially creative work. But isn’t answering emails, attending meetings and listening to your boss, what we call “working”? Not really.
Russell and Keynes Ride Again
Few things sound more southern California than “Let’s shorten the workday to have more time to surf!” But shortening the workday to boost productivity and improve the company? That’s pretty counterintuitive.
This item in the Guardian is a brutal read if, like me, you struggle to digest the passive voice or the word “paddleboard.” I offer it here, however, as more happy evidence of the world waking up to the Big Sausage Energy of the shorter working week.
The article offers a case study of a finance company reducing their working hours (but not their salaries) as an experiment in productivity. Now, New Escapologist doesn’t tend to focus on productivity as a reason to reduce toil (I’d say let’s reduce work so that we can do something else with our time, ideally something that doesn’t involve raiding the screaming Earth for yet more “materials”) but if that’s how we can get the grindstone boys on-side, then that’s fine.
I also find the “experiment” element of this story impressive: they tried it for 90 days, vowing to keep the new system if it worked. Every good thing should start that way, shouldn’t it?
It’s always nice to see Russell and Keynes deployed to good effect:
And we really need to improve work. A century ago, the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the economist John Maynard Keynes argued that by 2000 – eight decades in their future and two decades in our past – we could all be working as little as three or four hours a day. In Russell and Keynes’s lifetime, technology, labor unions, rising educational standards and greater prosperity had reduced the length of the average workday from 14 to eight hours a day. They thought that as technology continued to advance through the 20th century, productivity could continue to rise, economies could continue to grow and working hours could fall further.
But Russell also warned that while “modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all”, if productivity gains and profits were hoarded by factory owners, executives and investors, those same advances could be used to create a world that offers “overwork for some and starvation for others”. That’s not a bad description of work today.
The article is on side. Thanks, Guardian. The comments are unusually encouraging too: lots of love for work reduction and teleworking, plenty of people defending the (i.e. our) critique of the work ethic.
"The World of Work Needs a Wholesale Redesign"
This is a Feminist argument for escape (or reform) from Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez:
Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign–of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture–and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives. We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women’s work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It’s about time we started valuing it.
I have sometimes wondered if the workplace is a male-orientated space and that this is part of the underlying problem with it. After all, many of the things I hated about office life could without much stretch of the imagination be seen as the vestiges of a male world: lack of privacy, too much noise, the “bullpen” concept, plastic everything, hopeless food, extrovert worship, the idea that we should tolerate discomfort, pranks, high-fives, nicknames, hostility towards the health and safety department, hostility towards measures of equality and diversity, inflexible hours, resistance to working from home, obsession with car-parking facilities over convenient access to public transport, the conversion of a Quiet Room into a “Situation Room." Would offices have looked like this under a matriarchy? Maybe. But a hunch–a suspicion–says no.
I remember hearing years ago about “sexist air conditioning” that leaves female office workers uncomfortably chilly while their male colleagues are as happy as can be.
This book actually has the answers. In the case of air conditioning, nobody in the office said “it’s important that men are comfortable and women are not,” but rather it’s because the settings of office air-con really are based on data derived from the study of men and not, as one might imagine, equal numbers of men and women. This is only the beginning though, as the work chapter of the book explains, and there are endless examples of systems and technologies failing women (and ultimately everyone) because of this data gap.
Essentially, the world was built on the premise that “the male” is the default human while “the female” is some sort of aberration or “alternate” rather than, as the case obviously is, naturally half of the population. Why exclude? It’s amazing. (The “default male” concept is explained succinctly in the book’s intro which you can read online).
Invisible Women is a brilliant, glistening book, extremely readable despite being data heavy, and each case study presented is there for a good reason. Each one proves so many points and, if the world would only respond to this book, it would be win-win-win: better for women, better for men, better for everyone. (In case you’re wondering, the book and its author are not “down on men;” the author is keen to point out that many of the inequalities being discussed are a result of the data gap, which results from decisions badly-made long ago, rather than individual, conscious acts of misogyny — though, actually, it makes little difference since the result is the same). It’s a brilliant, challenging, extremely important book about the consequences of ignoring half the population. Read it!
An Escapologist's Diary: Part 60. The Fireplace.
A rare opportunity for a minimalist purge has arisen. Oh yes indeedy.
When we first moved into Escape Towers over four years ago, this fireplace (pictured) was adrift in the middle of the floor in the otherwise empty main room.
We had no such appliance as an electric fire or television set for it to frame, nor was it attached to the wall in the spot where a wood or coal fire would once have stood. It was just there, in the centre of the room; a heavy, dirty, useless, suburban-looking, possibly Alpine-inspired fireplace.
Since it was surely the property of the landlord and therefore our responsibility to keep safe lest we lose our deposit, we tucked the fireplace sideways into the hall closet and tried to forget about it.
Tried to forget is the key thing here. As a minimalist, I have a sensitive, almost spiritual, awareness of every item under my jurisdiction. If something’s not right–if an alien object should trespass or something of ours should go missing–I’ll know about it. It’s like a disturbance in the Force.
Every thing we own weighs slightly on my consciousness and in proportion to its size, so it was hard not to be continuously aware of this hulking great fireplace: a lump of someone else’s hardware for which we were annoyingly responsible. After bed and chaise, it was the third biggest object in our home.
At war with moths, I wondered if this fireplace could be offering my winged enemy safe harbor. The blighters, I’m told, are mad for gloom so I conjectured that perhaps they dwell or find respite in the slim space between the cumbersome object and the wall. I wracked my brains as to how to get rid of it.
Though it felt hopeless, I dug out and scrutinized the letting agents’ inventory on the off-chance that a fireplace was in fact not listed.
Reader, in this thorough inventory, rigorously compiled by a pro-bean counter down to the condition of individual floorboards and cornices, the fireplace was not listed. It was absent from the list. Which meant (fanfare of fanfares) we were free to get rid!
(It also meant, of course, that we’d had this stupid thing in our lives for over four years unnecessarily. We could have slang it on the day we collected the keys. But let’s not dwell on that. We’re free, now!)
The picture above is of said fireplace, exposed to the rainy Scottish elements, cast asunder and waiting for council uplift, no longer collecting dust or providing a home to the trouser-munching Scourge and their maggotty sporn. Daft really, but the difference it has made to my minimalist temperament is considerable.
Reader, have you ever had the pleasure of casting out some ungainly hunk of matter, perhaps one that you didn’t even own? Refreshing, isn’t it?
The contents of hall cupboards (in-use coats, umbrellas and shoes excepted) constitute dark matter and should be expunged. (And I’m reminded here of a cupboardy tale by friend Henry.) Well, we’ve just expunged some 30% of our pesky dark matter in a single liberating schlep. Oh baby.
Reader Kat writes:
I am now less than a month from my escape and, once I have left the office behind, pretty near the top of my ‘to-do’ list is to clear out that cupboard. You know which one. I am looking forward to it an irrational, ridiculous amount.
Related:
Friend of New Escapologist David Cain is enjoying a similar pleasure in purging his pantry. It’s a fun time.
Looking for Wisdom? No Need to Wait for Sudden Peril
Reader Antonia writes from a locked-down Italy:
With the new virus (and related anxiety) spreading over Italy these past weeks, lots of people are working from remote. While the overall issues about purpose, working hours, etc. are not being directly addressed, for many jobs working from home is proving to be just fine…
Similarly, Tom mused in the Idler that the Coronavirus might lead to green-minded and idler-compatible working practices. He quotes the Financial Times: “China’s coronavirus-related slowdown has wiped out the equivalent of the UK’s carbon emissions over six months.”
So we’ve learned that people working from home (using technology and systems that have been in place for over a decade) instead of expending resources in travelling to spiritually-corrosive and uncreative workplaces can lead to an easy reduction in harmful pollution and carbon emissions. Amazing.
Antonia:
…I wonder did we need an epidemic to realize that?
I think this is an excellent question. It’s crazy that it would take the terror of an epidemic to make people realise that (a) remote working is easy and beneficial and (b) the eradication of commuting would decrease pollution and carbon emissions. Why can’t we just have foresight?
It reminds me of the cancer journals I wrote about in Escape Everything! After reading a selection of diaries left to a hospital library by the terminally ill, I noted that people tend to come to the same conclusions about life when they’re facing death. They conclude that time with family and friends are the important thing, that work and career and striving were a harmful waste of time. It was sad to read but I couldn’t help thinking “why did it take a cancer diagnosis to make you understand this?”
It’s almost as if it weren’t the central message of almost every religion, philosophical system, and Hollywood movie ever made.
It shouldn’t take illness and the fear of immediate death to assess (and commit to) one’s priorities. You could do it right now.
(It is not my intention in this post to be flippant about Coronavirus. If you’re actually worried about it, the Guardian offers some nice reassurances).
All for now. Stay chipper, please. And (if you like), write to me with your news and ideas by clicking reply to this email.
Your chum,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk
www.patreon.com/newescapologist