New Escapologist : May 2021

Clocking Out (and Dropping Off)

Dear Boss, I Quit!

Well, I'm stopping the newsletter for a tiny while at least. It's more of a sabbatical than a resignation.

I'm certain there will be more from this stable sooner or later, but I'm taking some time to focus on other things. Naps mainly. But other creative projects to be sure.

I hope that's alright by you, my fellow Escapologists? Of course it is. You have never been anything other than supportive. And while we're off-air, you can still send me your daring tales of escape and you can always check the blog to see if there's something I just couldn't wait to tell you about.

In fact, there will be an update to An Escapologist's Diary fairly soon as I continue in my attempt to answer the question, "what would I do all day if I didn't have a job?" in a sarcastic level of detail. So look out for that.

For now: here's the May installment of New Escapologist (including a large post bag at the end of it all). Enjoy! And may your own escape attempt continue to thrill.

Robert Wringham
New Escapologist

Laziness Does Not Exist says Social Psychologist

Reader M draws our attention to a new book called Laziness Does Not Exist by social psychologist Dr. Devon Price. It looks good!

A review in Jacobin highlights the point that it’s awfully convenient for the world to point the finger and say “everything that has gone wrong in your life is your fault because you're lazy” when most people really are doing their best in a world set up (The Trap) to consume them.

Well, look. It’s not your fault.

Here’s part of the blurb from the back of the book (well, from the Waterstones website, but you know):

Dr. Price offers science-based reassurances that productivity does not determine a person’s worth and suggests that the solution to problems of overwork and stress lie in resisting the pressure to do more and instead learn to embrace doing enough. Featuring interviews with researchers, consultants, and experiences from real people drowning in too much work, Laziness Does Not Exist encourages us to let go of guilt and become more attuned to our own limitations and needs and resist the pressure to meet outdated societal expectations.

And so say all of us!

Reader M also shares a discussion about the book on Reddit.

Bin Man II: The Trashening

On one of my best days here I found a bunch of loose jewelry in a bin. There was a bit more inside some black trash bags.

Do you remember Martin? I mentioned him in this post and in Escape Everything!

An old friend of mine in Montreal, Martin describes himself as a professional scavenger. Objecting to waste, he set out to make a living from it as well as using the project as a basis for online anti-waste activism.

I’m happy to tell you that Martin continues his good work to this day. I’ve been catching up on his posts and they’re extremely enjoyable. There’s something so satisfying about his process of turning nothing into something (alchemy!) and his intervening in destruction.

I recommend his most recent blog post in which he shows off some fairly shocking (though not atypical) finds from last autumn. It includes some pure gold. Literally.

It goes to show, among other things, how a bit of cleverness and imagination (and maybe a peg for the nose) can free you from unhappy convention.

Start Big: An Essay

This is from a New Escapologist essay of 2019, one of my exclusive-to-Patreon efforts:

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 instead. 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.

I wasn’t sure about the quality of the essay at first and my struggle with it was part of the reason I stopped doing Patreon.

The struggle might have been worth it though because, revisiting it now, it doesn’t seem too bad. It garnered some good feedback from readers at the time (including wise Henry and sage McKinley) and the truth of the essay still rolls around in my head today.

I’ve dropped the password on the essay and dusted it off for general consumption. If you’re interested, you can freely read it here.

'Laziness'

Further to the work of Dr. Price, their essay, The Racist, Exploitative History of ‘Laziness’ is a cracker.

“The hatred of laziness,” they write, “is deeply embedded in the history of the United States” and consequently the rest of the world:

The value of hard work and the evils of sloth are baked into our national myths and our shared value system. Thanks to the legacies of imperialism and slavery, as well as the ongoing influence that the United States exerts on the rest of the world both in media and in military force, the Laziness Lie has managed to spread its tendrils into almost every country and culture on the planet.

Strong, most excellent stuff.

They go into the etymology of the word, which conflates weakness with evil, and then into the use of “laziness” to justify slavery in America and oppression of the poor during the Industrial Revolution.

It’s the kind of thing I touched on in my “How the West Was Won (by Work)” chapter in Escape Everything! and again in The Good Life for Wage Slaves but didn’t quite have the expertise or guts to go into very deeply.

Colonial America relied on the labor of enslaved people and indentured servants. It was very important to the colonies’ wealthy and enslaving class that they find a way to motivate enslaved people to work hard, despite the fact that enslaved people had absolutely nothing to gain from it. They also needed to find ways to ideologically justify the existence of slavery because many people of the period recognized (as we do today) that it was a morally abhorrent institution.

Importantly, this history forms the basis of the Operating System on which we run today:

Decades of exposure to the Laziness Lie has had a massive effect on our public consciousness. It’s made many of us critical of other people and quick to blame the victims of economic inequality for their own deprivation. It’s made us hate our own limitations, to see our tiredness or desire for a break as signs of failure. And it has created an intense internal pressure to keep working harder and harder, with no limits and no boundaries. This ideology was created to dehumanize those whom society had failed to care for, and with each passing year, the number of people who are excluded in these ways seems to only grow.

What a wonderful essay. I am yet to read Dr. Price’s book, but I recommend it all the same.

See also: Drapetomania and Overturning the Legacy of Slavery [with UBI].

Letter to the Editor: Why Should I Fit Out a Home Office?

Reader G writes from New Zealand:

On the subject of never returning to the office again, here’s a contrary view. I have returned to the office after exclusively working from home for a while. (Life has been near-normal in New Zealand since mid-2020).

I did this by choice because I found I prefer a sharp barrier between the world of work and the rest of my life. Working from home, it’s easy to feel bad about stepping away for breaks, to work late, to keep an eye on online chat… I prefer to leave the office on time and leave work behind too.

Also, of course, my employers provide a reasonably ergonomic workspace for me with the associated amenities. Why should I fit out a home office and dedicate that space for the benefit of my employers? They don’t pay me any rent for it or buy me any extra kit.

I also prefer the social contact and the sight of other human beings and spontaneous interaction. I find video conferencing a poor substitute.

You’re correct, of course. If the office is right for you, that’s excellent. And your point about setting up a specialist workspace in your home is a good one. Why should you?

We’re traditionally against office life and the job system at New Escapologist but the real moral of the story lies in making a life that fits you and doing it creatively and out of free will. If you like working in an office, then that’s great!

I miss proper human interaction too. Not in the office context, mind you, which in my experience revolved around microagressions and colin the caterpillar. But face-to-face relationships with other people are irreplaceable, yes. I miss gigs and art shows and nightlife very, very much. I even speak as an introvert who has to stay at home for a couple of days with the curtains drawn if I happen to go out three nights on the run.

Human contact is too important to throw away even if it makes economic sense in the context of working from home. Video conferencing is garbage. I disliked it in the days of office life (20 minutes of a 60-minute meeting could easily be devoted to setting up a piece-of-shit technical “fix” to allow distant colleagues to have a say) and I positively despise it now. The remote quizzes and and so-called cultural events online during lockdown did not please me. “But it’s all we have at the moment,” is the usual refrain. But it’s not, is it? Books! Walks! Nature! Love! You’ve heard this all before.

Letters to the Editor: Grieving Face Emoji

Last month’s edition of our newsletter included a lengthy intro from Yours Truly about the drudgery of shopping for a first home and the Escapological ramifications of doing so. It resulted in some letters.

Friend Q’s email is hilarious:

Hi Rob,

Hope this finds you well. Have you made a decision about buying a house yet? As a communist homeowner I have strong and conflicted views on this, which I meant to share with you following your first email about it, but, obviously, I never got round to it.

[I also wanted] to let you know that I might have clicked on the grieving face emoji in response to how I feel about your Kickstarter campaign. Rest assured this was in error: I intended to click on the happy face, but I’m in a bit of a vaccine fever at the moment, so not at my maximum competence.

Cheers,

Q

PS: ‘grieving face emoji’ was an autocorrect typo; I meant to type ‘frowning face emoji’.

Get well soon, old chum! Q still hasn't gone into detail about his conflicted feelings as a Communist homeowner, but as an Anarchist soon-to-be homeowner I imagine they're something like: “property is theft but we’re economically bullied into committing theft, so what are you going to do?”

Reader X writes:

You may need to clarify – renting for 1000 quid vs. buying for 100 apiece?? Are house prices in Scotland that reasonable?! If so, sign me right up. I’ll draw on my escape fund and we can set up a nice escapological homestead littered with tinkering shops and garden space.

Reasonable?! That might be cheap in London, but I think a thousand quid to rent a flat for a month is despicable. My limit seven years ago was £500. We moved into the current Escape Towers five years ago for £650. The rent was hiked 18 months ago to £750, which stung a bit. Ours is the cheapest flat on a fairly posh street where flats tend to rent for about £1,100. I think this cost is lunacy and people are essentially paying for a nice address.

If it is indeed reasonable by city standards, all I can say is: don’t live in capital cities. Move north! I know the bright lights are exciting but (in my opinion) it's better to live cheaply in a “workshop city” like Glasgow or Manchester or Liverpool where culture is actually produced rather than merely sold. To oligarchs. How’d you like them apples, London? I'm being slightly unfair but you’ll see what I mean.

Reader Z writes:

As I start to get a bit older I am more in favour of buying. One can quarrel in the mind over the economics until your backyard chickens come to roost. But, you most likely can’t have backyard chickens when you’re a renter.

Our equivalent of a backyard has been a spare room. Readers of The Good Life for Wage Slaves will know the importance I place on having space enough for creative work and to also be able to accommodate friends. Buying, however, has not allowed us to secure an extra room and in fact we had to sacrifice ours in service of the reduced cost of ownership. Materially, we had more space as renters. It just cost a fortune and threatened to get worse.

He continues:

My current rented abode is filled with the half-finished intentions and tastes of another couple looking to make a few bucks after upgrading their digs. Sometimes I get a weird eerie feeling like I’m living in someone else’s past with their poor choice of cheap plastic jellyfish chandelier and thick purple wallpaper. But that’s the price of freedom, baby.

Now this I relate to. The current Escape Towers was supposedly “unfurnished” but still came with the landlord’s filthy decade-old roller blinds and light fixtures and tasteless decorative curly things on the ends of the curtain rails. What's that about? We unscrewed everything on Day 1 and stashed them away in the flat’s least-useful cupboard. For all we know, the former tenants did the same and these things go up and come down again with every tenant. See also the fireplace debacle and the hole.

Aaaaaanyway, that's enough house-moving waffle. Here's a picture of the hip new pad.

That really is all for now. Thanks for reading this newsletter and indeed the whole newsletter incarnation of New Escapologist this past couple of years.

See you around the blog and escape well,

Robert Wringham, Esc.*


*I totally just made that up. Escapologists can use this instead of Esq. In over a decade of doing New Escapologist, I never thought of that until now. Unbelievable.