New Escapologist : January 2023
He trained his camera on the world he hoped to leave behind
Hello again. This is New Escapologist, a newsletter from the famously cheerful magazine and blog for people with escape on the brain.
Happy 2023 to Escapologists everywhere. And big thanks to the 150 of you who completed the reader survey. I’m grateful and the results are proving useful already.
The survey will remain open until the end of January if anyone else would like to respond, but the free (ish) book offer is finished for now. You snooze, you lose.* Speaking of which, the books have now been shipped and will soon, postal strike willing, plop onto doormats across Scotland, England, France, Sweden, America, Canada and Australia. High uptake!
Elsewhere, I’m drafting and soliciting original content for our first new print edition in five years. Expect marvels. Anticipate eccentrica. Prepare yourself for daring escape stories and inspiring escape tactics. For goodness sake, send caffeine.
Your friend and neighbour,
Robert Wringham
New Escapologist
*in this one case only: we are pro-snooze.
The Escapes of Chauncey Hare
Thanks to Friend Tim for sending me this Atlantic article about the office photography of one Chauncy Hare.
Photography started as a hobby for Chauncey Hare. For 27 years, he worked as a chemical engineer at the Standard Oil Company of California, using his camera to escape the tedium of the office. By 1977, he couldn’t take it anymore. But before he declared himself a “corporate dropout” and committed to art full-time, Hare trained his camera on the world he hoped to leave behind.
Here’s Chauncy himself in one of his office pods. He doesn’t look very happy about it:
He took photographs of dispiriting American workplaces for years, getting his work into New York’s MoMA and big galleries in San Francisco.
Remarkably, he quit his job again when he tired of full-time photography. He instead became a clinical therapist specialising in “work abuse.” Clearly, the antiwork message was Hare’s personal mission.
Before Hare died, in 2019, he saw to it that any future publication of his work would include the following disclaimer: “These photographs were made to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people by multinational corporations and their elite owners and managers.”
There’s a 2021 book about Hare’s remarkable life work. It’s called Quitting Your Day Job.
How You Can Help Elderly Relatives
Escape From Hospital
A recent item in the Guardian had the strange title, “How you can help elderly relatives escape from hospital.” You get Emily Dickinson’s thrill from the word “escape” and from the instructional tone, but it’s also troubling in that you wonder why anyone would want to escape from a place designed for wellness and recovery. It brings to mind dark hospital fantasies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Kingdom, and Toby Litt’s Hospital. To be honest, I prefer Scrubs.
Yet here we are. The NHS in Britain is struggling after 12 years of austerity exacerbated by Hostile Environment policies and Brexit. Equally frightening is a staffing crisis in social care. The twin crises have led to a Kafkaesque situation where maybe a third of hospital beds are occupied by people who don’t need to be in hospital. They’re no longer ill but they can’t leave because there’s no facility in social care to help them with cognitive or mobility issues.
Anyway, the newspaper item consists of two letters from people who helped their relatives escape. One describes how they registered with the Office of the Public Guardian to get jurisdiction over their mother’s care. The other says they simply bundled their aunt into a warm dressing gown and left.
It neatly illustrates two main modes of escape. You can use knowledge and patience to deploy bureaucracy against the force that holds you, or you can be fleet of foot and just go. The former is often smarter and can solve longer-term problems like what to do when you’re all out of runway or if your jailers come after you. But, oh, the courage and dignity of the latter! I’ve done both.
This hospital case study also reminds us that an escape isn’t just good for the person doing the scarpering, but good for everyone else too. Those vacated hospital beds were doubtless desperately needed. Escape can be socially useful as well as personally liberating. Better you do something useful or beautiful for the world than, for example, tirelessly turning up to an office each day.
I suppose this is as good a time as any to remind UK-based readers to vote against the Conservative Party at the next available opportunity. Even if you’re a Conservative by nature, the current mess probably isn’t what you had in mind.
The Indulgence of Sleep
Sleep is our nightly escape from worldly woe. To conk out, perchance to drop out.
Here’s a passage about sleep from Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE, which is so far my novel of the century.
“A lack of sleep leads to fascism, you know, Griselda.” I decided it would be a good time to expound my theory: the sort of people who claim to require a few hours a night frequently happen to be morally bankrupt. This did not include people who couldn’t get a decent number of hours’ sleep because of insomnia, work or children and so on, but rather people who claim not to need it and thus exhibit their own productiveness. These people included various right-wing politicians, dictators and numerous CEOs, regularly dubbed “The Sleepless Elite” by business magazines. Implicit in their claim is that everyone in the world aught to relinquish sleep if they want to escape hardship. That you are being indulgent. Perhaps their own lack of sleep causes this way of seeing: they are seriously sleep-deprived without realising they are, and after this long-term deprivation, their capacity for empathy has dwindled.
I remember something Tom Hodgkinson said in the Idler in the noughties: he was responding to Tony Blair making the perennial Thatcherite claim that he doesn’t sleep very much and in fact doesn’t dream. Tom contrasted Blair’s strange boast to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” arguably the most rousing and important political statement ever.
I suppose the dictators and CEOs observed by Shola von Reinhold think they’re being stoical or independent-minded with their claims to supernature, but it’s hardly inspiring for a so-called leader to boast of being compromised and, in Blair’s case, unimaginative.
If you’re looking for new year’s resolutions, you could do worse than buying and reading LOTE and, indeed, learning to nap.
Learned Helplessness
Since last month’s newsletter item about prison labour, I’ve been reading books about prison. The best one so far is A Bit of a Stretch, the prison diaries of Chris Atkins.
Here’s Atkins on self agency, the ability to steer your own course through life:
Much has been written about whether we have a hand in our own destiny, but at least in the outside world it feels as if we have some involvement in our fate. Prison not only robs inmates of control, but also denies them the illusion of agency. They are constantly reminded that they have no impact on anything, which has long been cited as a cause of mental illness.
He goes on to describe Jay Weiss’s 1971 psychology experiments in which rats were trained to avoid electric shocks by pressing a lever. The rats learned what to do but then Weiss rigged it so that the levers no longer worked. The rats went through a period of pressing the lever regardless (“but… but.. it always worked in the past!”) and then fell into a period of depression.
Atkins says this has a striking similarity to the effect of “call bells” on prisoners, which nominally exist for inmates to call a guard for help or attention. Much of the time, however, their calls go ignored (due to low staffing levels resulting from politically motivated funding cuts).
When Atkins was in prison, the call lights on the outside of cell doors would flash ineffectively almost all of the time, their occupants becoming steadily more desperate and then hopeless. Bleak.
This is known as “learned helplessness.” It’s when we (or prisoners or rats) learn that that the once-helpful buttons we’re pressing no longer work, that the interface of agency is broken.
Hasn’t this also happened in the world of work? Who can believe that a normal job in 2023 can bring riches or freedom? The lever is a dud.
Learned helplessness exists systemically in schools, universities, jobs, hospitals, commerce, visas and immigration. It is designed to prevent escape.
Escape, hope and agency are intertwined. Dare to dream of escape, dare to hope, dare to act.
Tove Jansson: Love and Work
Fair Play by Tove Jansson is a work of fiction drawing heavily on Jansson’s later life, which she shared with her artist partner Tuulikki Pietilä.
Together they make art, bicker playfully, obsess over movies, walk in nature, receive visitors. Sometimes they live in the city and sometimes on an unpopulated island.
In the foreword, Ali Smith says the novel’s main themes are “love and work.” This is correct and it’s a fair reminder that “work” is not the true thing an Escapologist objects to. For example, we’d probably value the flow and the consensual nature of small art production. The problems are the grinding submission of employment and the competitive brutality of capitalism.
Fair Play is stuffed to brim with depictions of love and what we might call “the right kind of work.”
Some people just shouldn’t be disturbed in their inclinations, whether large or small. A reminder can instantly turn enthusiasm into aversion and spoil everything.
There’s also a collage of photographs on the inside covers, which I found relaxing to look at.
You can find more pictures, quotes and video about Jansson and Pietilä at our website here and here.
Velo Flaneur
Here’s a pleasant blog from a mellow escapee.
It’s by the artist formerly known as Reader M in fact. Fergie’s Journal of Life in the Slow Lane charts quiet adventures in gardening, cycling and general unusedness during early retirement in a foreign land. Lovely stuff.
Letter to the Editor: How is Friend Henry Doing?
Hello Robert!
My brother and I are long-time readers of your blog and applaud your efforts to avoid work.
When we speak of the ills of technology, we often refer to Friend Henry, who you mentioned was quitting the internet for good. I’m curious: how is Friend Henry doing? Have they avoided the internet since then?
Hope you’re well and enjoying home ownership in idle bliss.
Warm regards,
Reader S
*
Hello S!
Friend Henry is still going strong. He’s uncommonly sincere in his escape from digital technology and I do what I can to support him (which really just involves sending him an old-fashioned letter in the post every few months).
He tells me about his successes and failures. A recent success was in his newfound ability to chop logs for firewood; he’s also building a tiny house and writing poetry. A recent failure was when he gave in to social pressure to buy a mobile phone, albeit an old Nokia-type thing and not a smartphone, but I don’t think he uses it much. He’s certainly never messaged me from it.
In my next letter to Henry, I’ll tell him that you asked after him. I’ve encouraged him to write a “Notes From [his house]” column for New Escapologist. He didn’t seem very keen but my original request was for Web content; he might be more willing now that we’re talking about print. I’m not sure. I do like to think of him writing his column by hand, Mark Boyle-style, perhaps even by candle light, filing it by post for Yours Truly to laboriously re-type.
Best Wishes, RW
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
An Escapologist’s Diary
Here we are again, thank goodness. Another annual report to my imaginary shareholders. Here goes.
An Escapologist’s Diary is a long-running series of posts at the New Escapologist blog. It is kept by me, Robert Wringham, to document a post-escape life and to help answer the “what would I do all day if I didn’t go to work?” question in a sarcastic level of detail. The latest entry to the diary is Part 69, an end-of-year review for 2022.
This newsletter will always be free as an uncaged hen, but if you’re feeling supportive you could buy my book, The Good Life for Wage Slaves, or sling me a derisory quid through Ko-fi (thus making a de-facto contribution to the magazine print fund).
Thanks for reading, my lovelies, and bonne année.
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk