New Escapologist : December 2024

Look into the eyes of the fireman cat and see the abyss

Dec 12, 2024

Hello Gorgeous,

Welcome to New Escapologist, the free and easy newsletter from the magazine of the same name. We look at inventive ways to escape tiresome work and rampant consumerism in favour of a more considered and creative life. We’re bloody good at it too.

Speaking of the magazine, the all-new Issue 17 is shipping now. Get it here if you’d like one.

There are very few copies left! There’s also not many days until I escape to Montreal for the holidays, so get your orders in as soon as possible if you’d like a copy shipped this side of December 28th (when I’ll be here again at Escape Towers).

There are so few copies left of Issue 17 that I’m tempted to order a second print run. I did that for Issue 16 though, which initially sold gangbusters only to leave me with quite a bit of leftover stock. So grab yourself an Issue 16! Why not? Especially if the new 17s are all gone by the time you read this. Which is possible. Issue 16 is among our best work to date.

Available forever, of course, are Issue 17 and 16 in digital formats for £8 each, or Issues 14-17 for a stupidly good-value £20. Pimpsy.

Anway, on with the newslettery show.

Your chum,

Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk

PS: Do you happen to live in Montreal or its environs? Thanks to our appearances at Expozine and the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair over the years, we have quite a few subscibers there. Bonjour! If you’d like to meet while I’m in town, please drop me a note and let’s see what can be done.

A Drink With the Idler

You don’t have to live in Montreal to receive the ABSOLUTE HONOUR of meeting me though. Thanks to Captain Trips-era modern technology, I’m doing the Idler’s “drink” night on Zoom.

It’s a half-hour “in conversation”-type thing between me and Tom Hodgkinson, followed by a half-hour Q&A with any attendees bold enough to raise a hand.

It’s on January 16th at 6pm (UK Time). There’s a small cost of £7.50. I don’t think I get paid for this: from my point of view it’s just an hour of fun. Come one, come all.

Here’s the blurb they’re kindly putting out:

Join “A Drink with the Idler” as we chat to comedian Robert Wringham about freedom and how to escape the daily grind.
Robert Wringham is a writer-comedian and publisher of New Escapologist magazine. He is writer and presenter of the Idler Academy course “How to Escape”, a guide to autonomy in the modern world. He is also author and co-author of a number of books including The Good Life for Wage Slaves (P&H), Escape Everything! (Unbound), Melt It: The Book of the Iceman (Go Faster Stripe) and Rub-A-Dub-Dub (P&H Books), a novel.
The discussion between Robert and Tom will be followed by a live Q&A, and the Idler Academy’s Head of Philosophy Dr Mark Vernon will present a short “thought for the week” to get our brains fizzing.
The event will be hosted by Idler Academy director Victoria Hull.
This is an online event. It should be like meeting up in the pub for an interesting conversation. We leave the meeting open at the end so you can carry on chatting.

Here’s where to go for ticketing and joining instructions. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you there.

What Do People Do All Day?

Who could not be charmed by Richard Scarry?

His style is beautiful, perhaps we should be skeptical of his idealistic obsession with manic and uneneding labour. It’s all in good fun, but there’s also a sinister Calvinism lurking just beneath the surface. “Children are workers too” reads a page of his What Do People Do All Day?. Look into the eyes of the fireman cat and see the abyss.

Does “busyiness” necesarily need to be “work.” i.e. at one with the jobs the system? Perhaps that’s a question for another day.

Reader Andrew shares this short article with us. It’s a month old now because I’m a bum.

[As a child] I was terrified of being left alone, terrified of the dark, scared of UFOs and, perhaps most trickily, stricken by the existential panic of not knowing what to do with myself. It seemed to me entirely possible that at any time someone was going to take a look at me, realise I had no idea how I was going to spend my days and permanently send me to the naughty corner of life (ie, I’d end up an accountant).
For that reason, the title of [Richard] Scarry’s book was both a horrifyingly loaded question (“What do YOU do all day?”) and a soothing promise that if I read the tome, I would understand exactly how I was meant to spend my time.

The article is about the joy of “little jobs” — errands — as distinct from a career.

I’m not sure how practical it is to seek out little jobs as your main activity in life without also fretting about money all the time or becoming tied up in some sort of precariat scam administered by a Deliveroo-type company, but maybe I haven’t thought about it enough. There are probably ways. I’ve vouched for temping before. My friend Henry gets by with casual cash-in-hand gardening work.

Lingo Corner

Hot on the heels of this excellent Yiddish saying comes the word stravaiger.

It means “wanderer,” maybe “vagabond”, or “one who strolls.”

Paging Dr. Glen!

Grow a Spine

If you’ve been buying New Escapologist in print since the “witty comeback” in 2023, your collection will look something like this. Phoar!

Subscriptions for the next four print editions are available now, but also look out for a Kickstarter campaign at some point in 2025 to get the next cycle of four on the road.

Coached

Tom Grundy (a personal development coach, New Escapologist columnist and generally lovely chap asked me some great questions about the good life, consumerism, mental health, and the escape from work. Join Tom’s newsletter if you’d like to to check out the interview.

Arthur C. Clarke

Next week (well, December 16th) sees the birthday of the man who once said:

“the future of work is full unemployment.”

Happy 107th Birthday, Arthur. It’s the future now. It may not quite be how you envisioned it.

The Direct Action of Flight

They don’t call it “Escapology” but here’s a good recent essay about it from Aeon magazine:

Those of us who wish to contest our subjection can, of course, unite in coordinated campaigns of resistance and push for formal reforms. We can also embrace quieter, less visible tactics, including the direct action of flight. As Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos argue in their book Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century (2008), ‘escape functions not as a form of exile, nor as mere opposition or protest, but as an interval which interrupts policing.’

Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century

And here’s a little more about that book randomly mentioned above:

these are the people who manage to subvert power and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Global North Atlantic societies.

This book was published just a few months after we started New Escapologist. It’s mad to think that someone else was thinking in sociological terms of escape at precisely the same moment as I was.

(It’s also mad that I’ve not heard of this book until now, especially as an early bit of research was to read another book with practically the same title).

The Table of Contents:

Prologue

I THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE PRESENT

1. Sovereignty and control reconsidered
2. Escape!

II A CONTEMPORARY ITINERARY OF ESCAPE

3. Life and experience
4. Mobility and migration
5. Labour and precarity

References
Index

I very much approve of the hysterical exclamation mark on Chapter 2. Clearly, these authors get it!

Anyway, I’ll get reading let you know what I learn.

Letter to the Editor: Does the Answer Really Lie in More Work?

To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.

Reader K writes:

Dear New Escapologist,
During a recent delve into my journals, I was reminded that in 2010 we were engaged in some email correspondence about giving up shopping. I was in a wonderfully free period of life between graduating from University and starting anything else and was writing a blog about resisting consumerism.
Shortly after this I was offered a full time job [for a large charity]. Jobs in the charity sector, especially in campaigning organisations, are dangerous because they give the appearance of doing something worthwhile and politically radical while trapping you at a desk for 40 hours a week (or more, because when you’re making the world a better place it feels morally incorrect to stick to your contracted hours.)
Promotions and raises, instead of bringing forward my escape, enabled more tattoos, better coffee, tickets to see bands that other people had heard of too. I’ve always called myself an anti-capitalist but capitalism got its claws into me anyway. Punk is an aesthetic like any other, marketed to me on Instagram via adverts for purple hair dye and tattoo brightening cream.
As I enter the second half of my thirties, I find myself increasingly tired of it all. Working for a charity seems, at best, paternalistic — full of white middle-class people who think they know best about the lives of the less fortunate — and at worst complicit in a system of widening inequality and climate crisis by letting governments off the hook by providing services no longer sufficiently funded by the state.
Much better, I thought, to be fixing those inequalities at the root causes. So I ran as candidate in the [redacted] elections. The only party I could stomach joining was the Green Party, so I didn’t win, but I did well enough to be asked to stand as a local councilor. The amount of work that would entail makes my chest tighten in panic.
And I’m wondering, does the answer really lie in more work? Is the world going to be made better by all this hustle? By attending endless meetings in our spare time? By being so exhausted that we mindlessly consume terrible food and bad TV and the endless scroll of social media?
A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Way Home by Mark Boyle in a charity shop. Reading this, alongside the return of New Escapologist (and especially the piece about Henry Gibbs) has me thinking of escape again.
I’ve already stood down from one of the trustee boards I’m on, and started ignoring calls for volunteers on Whatsapp groups. I’ve stopped posting on social media. I’m even thinking of moving out of London and planting a veg garden.

Hi K,

In Issue 17, we’re running an excerpt from After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek. They make a distinction between freedom through work and freedom from work, which is an important one.

Your point about punk being an saleable aesthetic is good. There’s a book about this called The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath. When I interviewed him for Issue 9, he seemed to think this was all so obvious, that everyone can see through the claptrap. But is it? At that time I still believed in at least some of the punk aesthetic being symbollic of actual values, that someone with blue hair or some tats might be my tribe. Which is ironic really because in punk terms I look like a real square. But anyway, it’s a good point. Punk is for sale.

I hope you do what’s right for you, K. I won’t advise you to do anything because only you can know your full situation, but slowing down and operating far from the capital are things I’ve always put stock in and they seem to work for me.

At least doing less (or just hanging out instead of working) doesn’t burn any fossil fuels. E.F. Schumacher wrote in Small is Beautiful (1973) that we should have done the work in the 1960s: used the finite “capital” or “starter loan” of fossil fuels to create sustainable alternatives. But we didn’t. We’re still substiting on capital all these decades later. Whatever happens now, I’m not sure that panicking about this failure is entirely productive.

That’s all for this month and, most likely, this year. Don’t forget to buy an Issue 17 quite quickly if you want one.

Until next time, may I be among the first to wish you an exceptionally Happy New Yonk. May we resolve this time to live idly, creatively, and — most importantly — free. Don’t be a slave to others, nor one to your own ambitions.

Your pal and chum and friend and mate,