New Escapologist : November 2022
Whoa!
It's a New Escapologist newsletter. Not seen one of those for a while.
Why now? Well, since so many people are talking about leaving Twitter, I've been thinking about the alternatives to social media yet again. Long skeptical, I already have systems in place that knock "teh socials" into a cocked hat and, if I leave Twitter myself (my only social media thing) I'll need them. Better rack up some new blog posts and dust off the mailing list, I figured, or nobody will visit our beautiful website again. Besides, the Old Web is just better.
On a related [housekeeping] note, I'd like to move this list from Mailchimp (which has been annoying for ages) to Substack, so the New Escapologist newsletter after this one will likely come from there: "check your junk" is advice to live by. If, on the other hand, you have negative feelings about Substack, let me know and I'll take it into account.
More importantly, I'm thinking once again about bringing back the magazine in print. How's that for an alternative to social media? Move over bits, the atoms are back! I'll design a survey to properly capture everyone's thoughts about this, to find out what you'd most like to see in such an organ, but in the meantime please let me know any general thoughts you have on this front. As ever, I'm a gigantic ear waiting to hear your voice.
Your friend and neighbour,
Robert Wringham, Esc.
www.newescapologist.co.uk
A Whole World Out There
Here's a quote from Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, a good book about walking in cities and its relationship with personal freedom:
There was a whole world out there and I didn’t have to live in America simply because I was born there. I could live anywhere I liked.
This was an epiphany. One rainy night over a pasta dinner with my flatmate, we contemplated the enormity of it. We can go anywhere, we can do anything, we told each other.
She goes on to say “but it wasn’t true” because there are complications with visas and borders, challenges around finding income when you live abroad.
As someone who has had the same epiphany and then struggled through the same problems, I’d say it’s better to contemplate the enormity of your freedom in adventurous good faith than to deny it in bad faith when it becomes difficult.
To start with, you can go to a lot of places for six months without any visa woe. Like Rolf Potts, you can save a battery of wealth from perfectly conventional employment (scrubbing toilets is his example, I seem to recall) and use it to escape for just a little while or to buy time while you figure out how to escape more permanently. You can travel across multiple countries of Europe or states of America in a state of constant motion without worrying about visas at all. Other places, where visas are a problem, you can still work intelligently and patiently to, you know, get the visa.
Elkin herself is an American who lived in France for several years as an academic. She went “home” to New York when her Paris work contract was not renewed, but she still lived abroad legitimately for years. She lived in Toyko for a while too, under the spousal sponsorship of her partner when he was offered a job in finance there.
Getting a visa for my Canadian partner to live with me in the UK was an anxiety-producing nightmare but (a) the UK is particularly troublesome on that front (I had less difficulty with my visa in the other direction), (b) we were asking for rather a lot compared to someone who just wants to live abroad for a year or so, and (c) we won in the end.
I do not deny the awfulness (awfulness!) of the artificial barriers to moving around freely -- like Rutger Bregman, I’d prefer to see a borderless or soft-bordered world -- and we all know that many of those barriers are getting less and less permeable. But to assume you’re not free to live wherever you want and do whatever you want is to live in bad faith. Do it! Be fleet of foot! Walk through walls!
My partner and I, when moving around between the UK and Canada, did everything by the book, but you could just go somewhere anyway if you feel bold enough. Millions of people move around the skin of the planet without asking permission or by bending the rules. Momus lived in Japan for years by going back and forth on renewed tourist visas. When one of his visas was coming to an end, he’d go to Europe to work for awhile or go travelling to somewhere like Korea, returning to his girlfriend’s apartment in Japan on a fresh tourist visa for another six months. It came to an end (video link) eventually but nothing bad happened to him. And even now he remains a British citizen living in Paris and Berlin without much care for formalities. Heroic.
(Lauren Elkin’s book is great, by the way. I might say more on it sometime but for now I’ll just say that it’s a fine addition to the flaneur’s personal library).
On Quiet Quitting
Readers have been telling me about Quiet Quitting.
I didn’t have much to say about Quiet Quitting because (a) I didn’t know there was an alternative to it and (b) because it’s a stupid name.
Quiet Quitting is apparently the idea of attending your work as usual but “checking out” and doing as little as possible with minimal enthusiasm. You meet your contractual demands well enough not to get fired, you turn up to meetings, but you generally just drift through the day in a zombie-like haze. I’m pretty sure that’s nothing new and is in fact most people’s experience of office life. It’s basic survival really because to engage in the crap you’re supposed to be doing is mental death. And nobody decides to Quiet Quit; it just happens automatically because of boredom and being asked to do things against your will.
The name, “Quiet Quitting,” annoys me because reporting to work in a zombie state is anything but quitting. It’s doing what you’re told no matter what. If I were the Mayor of Naming Things, this would be called “The Obvious Result of Wage Slavery” while “Quiet Quitting” would be reserved for the act of finding the guts to leave your job without ceremony or fuss.
On the Sunday Scaries
So that’s Quiet Quitting dealt with. What next? Oh yes. The Sunday Scaries. This is the experience of feeling anxious on the weekend about returning to work on Monday. Once again, it’s not new and the name is stupid. The name is stupid because it’s willfully infantile (with a similar numb-nut cadence to “the terrible twos” or “sporty forty” or to those banal workaday hashtags like #ThursdayThoughts) and therefore trivializes something ruinous to our quality of life.
The bottom line is that if you’re off work and not currently on the clock, you should be able to live freely in those scarce and hard won moments. But that’s impossible because the psychic toll of work is so great. Having a job is like having someone standing behind you all the time and clanging two iron poles together: you can’t relax under those circumstances. You think about work all the time: at weekends, at night, on vacation, at Christmas, on your birthday, on a hot date, on the toilet, and in your dreams.
The Sunday Scaries have at least been investigated somewhat and the finding is that they:
regularly affect more than two-thirds of Britons who report work stresses, lack of sleep and looming to-do lists as the primary causes of anxiety before the start of the working week.
The worst affected were young adults with 74% of those aged 18-24 experiencing what psychologists call “heightened anticipatory anxiety” as the weekend comes to a close.
So almost everyone then. Well done, Civilisation. We’ve built a world where almost nobody can enjoy their hard-earned downtime for fear of being cattle-prodded back to work again. We’re not compensated for this stress and we shouldn’t have to endure it.
When they experience the Sunday Scaries, people apparently resort to social media, TV, and comfort eating: all things that exacerbate the problem of low quality of life and delay any hope of escape.
A psychologist who probably means well says that instead of wasting your time and brain in these ways, you should:
try getting active, which can help you to burn off nervous energy, writing down or keeping a diary of what you are doing and how you feel at different times to help identify what’s causing anxiety and what you need to do to help manage it. Small things can make a big difference to our mental wellbeing.
Anything but try to change your actual circumstances, eh? Anything but try to escape your job or the consumer treadmill that benefits from your misery.
Luckily, the UK government is on hand to help. Yes, the same government who want to increase working hours and crack down on “slacking.” So they have a ridiculous (and naturally very cheap) campaign in which people can visit a website for:
a personalised “mind plan” giving tips to help deal with stress and anxiety.
Urgh.
The current UK government isn't there to help you. They all but live to cajole you back into the workforce and, when you complain about the misery of it, they’ll find a cheap way to shut you up.
The Fool's Journey: a Chat with Milo
Friend Milo recently posted a video about his self-employment fails. It’s very funny and honest.
I like to mention failed escapes every now and then. It’s important to build the prospect of failure into your escape plan so you can hit the road with eyes open. And of course it generally helps to think about how you’d cope if everything went banana-shaped.
Personally, I don’t mind the prospect of failure (which is lucky really) and I always feel that if you have to go back to the office, tail between your legs, at least you’d have had an adventure and stories worth telling at the water cooler. Maybe that’s just my personal idiot optimism.
I had a few questions for Milo based on this vid. So lets ask them why not?
Read the interview here.
The Mountains are Calling and I Must Go
As seen at The Passenger Press in Glasgow:
The Passenger Press sells lovely hand-printed greetings cards and posters. We’ve bought some of their work before at zine fairs and online.
The quote was familiar so I looked it up when I got home. It’s from mountaineer John Muir. An informative article at Adventure Journal explains:
we should consider the full quote, which appears in an 1873 letter from Muir to his sister: “The mountains are calling & I must go & I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.” These words reveal a man who saw responsibility and purpose as well as pleasure in the mountains. Muir was a master observer who enjoyed the constant work of understanding nature.
I think that’s great and the sentiment is even more Escapological than I first thought. Obviously, “the mountains are calling and I must go” is a great thing to say as you stand up and walk out of a pointless work meeting. But it’s also about conducting yourself with decorum in real life, finding enthusiasm and intensity inside yourself and remaining true to it.
We happened upon The Passenger Press after delivering copies of my book, The Good Life for Wage Slaves to Good Press two doors along on the same street; why not get a copy in person if you happen to be nearby?
Dreamer John:
Economic Bullying at its Finest
[The UK’s chancellor] Kwasi Kwarteng will tighten benefit rules for part-time workers, requiring them to work longer hours or take steps to increase their earnings.
Just as the world wakes up to the bounty of a 4-day week, the UK government decides to crack down on part-time work by reducing the financial support available to low-income households.
I’ve said in my books and in New Escapologist that most people don’t work by consent but are “economically bullied” into it. I’ve sometimes wondered if that expression is too much, but here is a government who fully admits to this withdrawal of support being an attempt to “grow the labour supply.” Which is a nice way of saying “let’s starve them out.”
[This item is UK-political and contains a certain strong word popular in Glasgow but less so in other parts of the world. You're not obliged to sully your brain with this filth but, if you'd like to, enquire within.]
Dear Diary...
There’s a similarity between travel and reading: knowing that you’ll probably never be here again.
An Escapologist's Diary is an ongoing attempt to answer the question "what would I do all day if I didn't go to work?" in a sarcastic level of detail.
Sometimes, a year goes by before I think to make an entry but I recently made two! There's one about a trip to Naples and another about reading massive books.
Thanks for reading! This newsletter and the blog it draws from will be freeeeee forever, but if you’re feeling generous you can support my "work" (hah!) by ordering The Good Life for Wage Slaves from its publisher or I'm Out (the updated paperback version of Escape Everything!) from wherever you like to buy books.
If all goes to plan, I'll be back in your inbox next month, speaking to you through Substack. I'll also have a survey concerning the possible (even likely) return of New Escapologist in lovely, tactile print.
Bright Blessings,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk