New Escapologist : August 2020
To Live On Your Wits
Hello everyone. Robert Wringham here. I've spent a funny few days working to get the new book out. Normally, an author doesn't need to dirty their hands with the actual logistics of a book's release but Aefa, the publisher, is in Toronto until quarantine rules can be relaxed. So it was up to me and a couple of friends to do the leg work on the UK side of the ocean.
I don't mind doing things like this every now and again. It's hard work compared to my usual mode of, well, not doing much at all, but it's also mischievous and spry in a way that appeals; nailing down a defined problem with willing and flex.
Three days of shunting and shipping reminded me of the time we organised a zine fair. In both capers, I transgressed amusingly close to escaped workplaces. It was good, cheeky fun to all but sneak past the old office window on a purposeful, Escapological mission.
Anyway, I’d already been thinking about the expression “to live on one’s wits” and its connection to “being witty.” At New Escapologist, I talk about living freely and ethically and tactically. At my personal site, I tell humorously-intended stories. Is there an overlap contained in the word “wit”?
Just as I was having these thoughts, clever old friend Unclef gave me a book called Wit’s End: what wit is, how it works, and why we need it by James Geary. It’s a good book. Playful, brief and smart.
Its most important contribution to answering my wit-based question is the phrase “improvisational thinking.” That’s it! That is what connects ha-ha wit with living on one’s wits. Both are direct expressions of improvisational thinking.
But this paragraph explains it neatly too:
forms of wit other than the pun [can be] understood as compressed detective stories. I’m thinking in particular of people who “live by their wits,” as the saying goes. Inventors, scientists,and innovators of all kinds, people skilled in improvising fixes, finding clever escapes from tight scrapes, or making unlikely discoveries under seemingly inauspicious conditions.
Finding clever escapes from tight scrapes, by jove. Geary goes on to tell the stories of some of those scientists and inventors by way of illustration, but it’s also what Escapologists do every single day just by going about our general business. Improvisational thinking is at once the alternative to the rat race and the swiss army lock pick (if there could ever be such a thing) required to escape it.
It’s what they don’t teach you in school because they can’t teach it in school even if they wanted to. It’s a mindset that needs to be cultivated through unusual experience and by thinking constantly about the world and its mechanisms: “Why isn’t X like so? Can Y function better if we turn it upside-down? Can I live this way instead of that way? Do I need as much money to do Z as they tell me?”
It’s the essence of an Escapological mindset or outlook. Things like minimalism, finding clever backdoor ways of doing exactly what you want to do (rather than mainstream paths to what the others think you should do), and building muscles of resistance by not consuming the same televised crap as everyone else, are all ways of using or honing one’s improvisational thinking, one’s wits.
More on this in a moment.
A Cubier Cube
Against all odds, working from home [has been] more successful than anyone would have predicted, with many people reporting their productivity [levels] increased during the first two months of lockdown.
“Against all odds” indeed. Bloody hell. As if the mandatory attendance of modern literature's shorthand for Hell is the only conceivable way of getting things done on the road to fulfillment and is not, as the case may be, its single biggest obstruction.
The article is admirably about the quest for other ways of working though, and how offices might be redesigned in future to be happier and more pleasant places.
It goes into the story of Bob Probst, a name I mentioned in Escape Everything! as the de-facto inventor of the office cubicle. He invented it as modular “systems furniture” and now sees the classic “veal fattening pen” as an abuse of his system.
What I wanted to mention though, is how the photograph used to illustrate the piece (a) looks sort-of like a miniature rather than a real place, or is that my imagination?; and (b) looks oddly preferable to the offices I have known even though it’s clearly supposed to illustrate the worst excesses of dystopian workplace architecture.
Weirdly, what I like about it are those privacy dividers (splash boards?) between work spaces: actual cubicle walls. We didn’t have those in our office, so we just had to dwell in each other’s personal head space all day, trying not to read each other’s minds and unable to pick our noses. It was exhausting. Yes, I might have actually preferred a cubier cube to the one I had. Weird!
Obviously, I’d rather be at home though. Or in a library. Or on a beach. Or just impaled on a spike.
UBI Improves Everything
New Scientist (one of the namesakes of New Escapologist!) reports that:
the world’s most robust study of universal basic income has concluded that it boosts recipients’ mental and financial well-being (sic), as well as modestly improving employment.
That is can improve mental wellbeing should almost be a foregone conclusion, though obviously these things need to be tested (which is what has just happened in Finland) if we ever want to roll it out and base a society on it.
It shouldn’t seem far removed from reality that some forms of depression and anxiety can be salved by an economic safety net; that not being able to sell enough units or to clock enough hours could result in destitution.
What is interesting is how employment rates slightly improve under conditions of UBI. It demonstrates the hunch held by generous-minded people that humans still want to do things once our basic needs are met. No longer being economically bullied into work doesn’t necessarily lead to personal stagnancy.
Reminder: the real barrier to our winning UBI is moral, not practical. Its opponents believe it's a sin to not be busy and that the only way for people to stay busy is to be forced into it. This, really, is the front of the argument.
The Most Toys
I found myself thinking recently about the saying, “he who dies with the most toys wins.”
It can’t ever have been anything other than a joke, can it? That the word is “toys” rather than “treasures” suggests a wry sentiment.
Imagine believing in it at face value though. To die with the most toys! The most junk. To end one’s life with the largest possible number of complicated material things that were made under duress by other people with materials torn from the living Earth.
To die in a state in which your relatives will need to spend months or longer poring over it all, assessing each “toy” and bickering over it all, when they could be living their lives.
And then I remembered that I’ve written about all this before, albeit without quoting “the most toys.” As you were.
Live In a Foreign Country
Another useful point concerning the Escapological mindset in James Geary’s book is:
Now, you might wonder whether this type of wit is innate–you either have it or you don’t–or whether it might not in some form be nurtured and cultivated. Well, it turns out there is a way to hone the powers of attention and observation needed for serendipitous discovery: live in a foreign country.
He means that, abroad, everything is different and a certain “cognitive flexibility” is required (and is developed) at all times. It keeps you on your toes, which is useful. Check out "A Montreal Year" in your copy of Escape Everything! for the worm's eye view on this.
So live abroad! Or do the sort of things that might have similar effect on your brain to living abroad: walk through streets that you don’t need to walk through, read a different sort of book, write one, talk to different sorts of people, learn another language.
Cognitive flexibility and improvisational thinking, kids. It’s what’s for dinner.
Hypocrite Minimalist + Running Man
I have a series of posts on Patreon called “Running Man” (now in its sixth installment). It’s essentially all about living on your wits. Please chip in at Patreon if you’d like to read it. It's easy-peasy.
There are other items to see there too, including six older essays (not published elsewhere in print or online) and a brand new show-and-tell blog series called “Hypocrite Minimalist” in which I tell the stories of individual items.
As well as getting access to this New Escapologist subscription content, supporting our Patreon campaign means keeping the New Escapologist website online and this monthly newsletter coming out. That's really what it's for. So thanks, one and all, for any and all support.
What Is Freedom Today?
The highest form of freedom is love. Here, I’m a pathetic old romantic.
What is freedom today? Or more specifically: what was freedom in 2014?
Here’s professional cleverclogs, Slavoj Žižek, to answer to the question.
Cube City
Reader Antonia draws our attention to this news item:
Welcome to cube city. Xu Weiping, a Chinese multimillionaire, has a vision for the future of office work in the post-Covid-19 pandemic world: thousands of office pods where each person works in their own self-contained 3m x 3m cube.
Xu reckons the coronavirus pandemic will have such a fundamental impact on the way people work that he is converting 20 newly constructed office buildings in east London into 2,000 of the individual cube offices.
Urgh.
Still, as I hinted earlier, three-metre by three-metre is a far bigger cube than I ever had when I worked in an office. I started out with a desk that was perhaps 1.5m wide; I would not have been able to touch the shoulder of a co-worker but we would have been able to touch fingertips with ease. Management then moved us to a tighter work area in which each desktop was a meter wide at most (perhaps 85cm) and we could to touch each other’s shoulders with ease. So in a way, Cube City would have been preferable to Concrete Island (the name I give to my old workplace in The Good Life for Wage Slaves).
For all the "spacial generosity" of Xu Weiping’s human battery farm, the thought remains: why bother? Why go to the effort to put shoes on and squelch yourself onto a packed Tube carriage to reach a place in the isolated docklands that boasts such fabulous features as “a kettle, fridge, microwave, videoscreen [and] a chair and desk.” I mean, just stay at home. Got distracting kids or dogs or something? Even some really swanky noise-cancelling headphones won’t set you back as much as cube tenancy and a commuter pass.
I’m writing this from our dining table in case you’re wondering. I’m wearing slippers. Freak Zone plays quietly on the radio while my partner draws in pencils on her £20 LED drawing board. It’s lovely.
The New Book is Out Now!
Did I mention I have a new Escapology-related book out? I think I might have quietly mumbled something to that effect. But here's the proper spiel and blurb.
Are you satisfied by your job? Do you leap out of bed each morning with a song in your heart, eager to travel swiftly and painlessly to a fabulous workplace where the layout and technology are perfectly adapted to your goals and needs?
What of home life? Do you return from work each evening with time and energy to get stuck into your rewarding, creative projects? Do you have a good grasp of the sort of “home economics” mastered by your parents’ and grandparents’ generations?
If so, this book is not for you. If, on the other hand, your experience of the worker-consumer lifestyle is a screaming Hell of clueless, unsatisfying, underpaid, carcinogenic, insecure shambling that you never signed up for and is an affront to your years of difficult and expensive study, The Good Life for Wage Slaves might be the helpful volume–or at least the shoulder to cry on–you’ve been waiting for. It contains swearing. Also cats.
The Good Life for Wage Slaves is available in the UK and Canada as a deluxue paperback and e-book, and also in German translation as Das Gute Leben.
That's all for now. See you next month, me hearties. —Robert Wringham. x
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