New Escapologist : February 2026
From school to work to retirement to death. 🎓🖥️👴💀
Hello Everyone,
New Escapologist is the magazine for escape artists! Together we escape the treadmill lifestyle that takes you from school to work to retirement to death. 🎓🖥️👴💀
What you’re currently reading is the free companion newsletter. Issue 18 of the real magazine is available to buy in print or digital formats from our website.
Readers in the USA can buy from our website like anyone else, but we currently recommend ordering from New York’s Magazine Café for cheaper and faster shipping. Readers in the EU can order with increased peace of mind thanks to a new arrangement I made with one of our clever escape artists in Spain.
But enough logistics. Let’s run away together under cover of daylight. It’s the last thing they’ll be expecting.
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk
The Student Loan Trap
In Escape Everything! ten years ago, I wrote that student loans are a trap and should be illegal. I stand by that.
To me, it’s a component in a system of indentured servitude. You work to clear an unnecessary debt concocted for someone else’s financial gain.
They hit you while you’re young, before you know better, when you’re vulnerable and just want a good start. Their power and presence prevent you from seeing any alternative.
The student loans system also ties education formally and systemically to work: get a degree, get a job. Never mind curiosity or self-improvement or the furthering of human endeavour. Get thee to the grind and shut your youthful face.
When I wrote that book in 2016, student loans stood in the region of £25k. My own student debt after graduating in 2004 was about £6k. Even though it was evil, a student loan was a trap you’d conceivably escape.
Today, the Guardian reports that:
Helen Lambert borrowed £57,000 to go to university and began repaying her student loan in 2021 after starting work as an NHS nurse.
Since then she has repaid more than £5,000, typically having about £145 a month taken from her pay packet. But everything she hands over is dwarfed by the £400-plus of interest that is added to her debt every month, thanks to rates that have been as high as 8%.
Her total outstanding debt had ballooned to more than £77,000 by the end of November, and it is set to get a lot bigger as there are another 25 years left of the 30-year repayment period.
The amounts of money we’re talking about here are staggering. How badly do we (as a society) want kids to want to be nurses? What are you going to make them crawl through?
It is classic Trap technology. Make them pay (twice!) for what they want after creating a system to control and corral what they want in first place. Most people can’t see beyond the work/earn system: we lack an adequate vantage point. Most people really think they want to work, to the extent that you can charge them for it. With interest. Forever.
Luckily, there’s a solution of sorts. Don’t pay the loan back. Unpaid student debts are cancelled after 30 years.
Save the Student, a student money website, says that unlike most other types of debt, “it’s not always the best idea to make extra repayments … It’s unlikely you’ll repay your loan in full before it is cancelled, so making the extra repayments just means you’ll be paying back more than you need to in the long run”.
There’s no moral reason to pay back this sort of loan. It shouldn’t have been lent to you in the first place. Your creditor is a large, servitude-enforcing corporation. They won’t be hurt by your failure to pay them back.
Unfortunately, if you’re successful in getting a job, you’ll have to pay some of the loan back because a sum will be deducted automatically from your pay. Refusing to work, of course, is a good way to avoid that. But that’s rather a shame when you specifically set out to become a nurse.
LEGALIZE LOITERING
These hideous internet memes come from Da Share Z0ne, which recently passed its tenth anniversary.
If you’re not convinced of their value, Dazed magazine says:
Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog, as the old saying goes. You understand it better, but the frog dies […] That’s especially true for a gag operating on so many concentric levels of irony as Da Share Z0ne, for whom the frog metaphor here, a mixture of badass and depressing, is particularly apt.
They’re also resolutely (and relentlessly) on the side of Escapologists:
Divorce Rings
Fancy ladies have been buying divorce rings apparently. Divorce. Rings.
Obviously it’s another trashy act of high consumerism, but it warrants a mention here as a way to honour an escape.
People also do it with tattoos.
I asked my wife for her take on the trend. She says “I think people should think about themselves a bit less.”
Wee
I enjoyed this video about a tiny house in the Scottish Highlands.
It’s a fairly typical video for this channel, but the model of “have a tiny, safe, minimalist base while also travelling the world” is writ large and sweet.
When viewing YouTube videos, be sure to have the free version of AdBlockPlus installed as a browser extension and take this other staggeringly simple precaution against allowing SHITE into your precious eyeholes.
De-screened
Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.
Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?
I don’t say screens are an inherently bad thing. They’re useful when you want to check something on Wikipedia or write an essay or read a few blog posts. But that’s bananas. To be clear, it says waking hours, not working hours. In other words: half your life. Your LIFE.
This is your occasional reminder that you can at least escape social media if you want to, winning back at least two hours from screens per day and therefore about 750 hours of your life — your life!! — each year.
I recently received some nice paper mail from Jonny, a New Escapologist contributor who has turned his Substack newsletter for writers (already a noble step away from the worst of social media) into a paper newsletter for those who request it. It was lovely to get. My address had been typewritten on the envelope, the newsletter was simple and pleasantly laid out on a single folded sheet, and I think he might have coloured the letterhead (a pineapple) by hand. Thanks, Jonny.
It made me think about Analog Sea Review, a muscular and wilfully offline publishing enterprise. I immediately pulled my copies down from the shelf and spent some pleasant time reading high-quality essays and poetry selected not by dubious algorithm but by a real person who has my trust.
Reduce your screentime to reclaim your life (your LiFe!!!). Get a nice notebook. Read books and magazines. Use the library. Walk.
Chair of the Month
In doing research for Issue 19, I chanced upon a website called Work Design Magazine. I do not sneer at it. Work, after all, needs to be improved. If only for Wage Slaves to have somewhere nicer to plot their escapes.
Ticklishly, they have a column called Chair of the Month in which they review a different office chair each time. It’s been running since March 2023.
One shouldn’t really be amazed. Of course a publication about office design would (and should!) take an interest in chairs. It’s still funny though.
The granularity of special interest magazines was the spark that started New Escapologist in the first place. Ours is a niche magazine for those engaged in plotting their escape. That’s supposed to be funny because it makes one wonder what the contents of such a magazine could possibly be, what our equivalent of “Chair of the Month” might be.
For anyone yet to buy a copy of our physical magazine, our columns include:
* Workplace Woes – in which our readers blow off steam about their crap workplaces
* Scarpernautics – the latest technical developments for those on the run
* Notices for Wage Slaves – a pin board for those still stuck in day jobs
* Master Flee – a letter from your Escapologist-in-Chief
We also print escape-relevant cultural reviews, lengthy feature articles that might concern escape artists, interviews with expert lock pickers, and thoughtful columns from those who’ve legged it.
Here’s where to get our latest issue or indeed to subscribe.
Letter to the Editor: Like a Dissatisfied Chimp
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader M writes:
Thanks, as ever, [for the newsletter]. There are thoughts on my mind right now…
Being somewhat short of cash again (again, again…), I’m learning to “want what I have” instead of what I don’t have. This has involved a joyful replay of my old LPs and CDs: old friends I forgot I had.
Time slowed down, as I wasn’t permanently clicking buttons like a dissatisfied chimp when the first ten seconds of a track failed to ignite my interest. I’ve now cancelled Sp*tify.
On a recent podcast, the host mentioned that they watch out for apps which “have access to them.” An interesting concept. I don’t access X, for example. IT accesses me. So true.
Keep fighting the good fight.
*
Thanks M. Your LP and CD odyssey reminds me of Friend David Cain’s Depth Year. It puts quality over quantity, is cheaper, and more rewarding. Capitalism makes us want more-more-more instead of appreciating what we already have. That includes wide-open freebies like nature and good company, but since most of us were more rampant consumers in the past we’re probably also sitting on a wealth of recorded culture in the form of records and books and videos. In situations where we have more time than money, the solution is just as you describe. Go deep instead of wide for a while. That’s no defeat, it’s an opportunity to finally enjoy something instead of merely acquiring it.
That’s all for another month. Honestly, where does the time go? Oh yeah. I spent it writing a novel, screening a film, walking in the park, losing the pub quiz, drinking beer, cooking, making sweet lurve, celebrating St. Skeletor’s Day, and promoting my magazine because I believe in it. It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have a st00pid j-o-b anymore. And to think the only cost was constant vigilance. Bargain!
Keep watching the skies, kids, 👽
Robert Wringham
Editor, New Escapologist