Maybe we greyhairs could learn from younger people, tired of their own daily grind. A few years ago, Mika and Jesse, a millennial couple from Vancouver, moved to Japan and discovered, on the island of Shikoku, an abandoned house –or akiya — that they could move into for $300 [per year]. At least nine million akiya dot the Japanese countryside, the result of changing demographics and the mass exodus of young people to the cities.

Indeed. I have heard of this. In Japan it’s more usual than in the West to knock houses down and rebuild them instead of moving into an old house. This mentality, combined with the usual tendency for populations to gravitate towards cities, has led to quite a few traditional old houses (often in poor condition, unfortunately) just sitting around. They’re perceived as practically worthless so those unafraid of “a fixer-upper” can pick them up for a song.

They contacted the owner, signed a rental agreement (around $300 for a full year), cleaned the house up and began their new existence, about as different from their old urban life as possible. Jesse works as a blacksmith, forging cooking knives, and Mika as a YouTuber, crafting hypnotic videos of their “akiya life.”

A YouTuber you say? This seems to be them:

These are the adventures of two people who skipped the line of the Western retirement-woe shitshow and found joy in a life that’s sustainable: economically, ecologically, psychically. Their first video has been streamed more than three million times. Three years later, they’re in the black.

They have a blog with important guides to Akiya escape planning, including posts about the real process, things to consider and everything you need to know about akiya.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

There’s a few ways to read that sentence. Maybe retirement is dead because the whole idea of conventional employment — the conveyor belt from school, to work, to grannification, to grave — is out of date. After all, if you bow out of the rat race with a relatively beefy escape fund while generating a small income through investment or by monetising your creative interests, retirement doesn’t make a lot of sense any more. Why would you want to stop if you’re having fun?

The article acknowledges that “an abrupt phase change from productive, useful working life to complete non-work is pretty bizarre on the face of it.” It is quite extreme isn’t it? No wonder so many people struggle to adapt to retirement.

Alas, the focus of the article is that Canadians (i.e. the people of one of the most civilised and efficient countries in the world) can no longer afford a comfortable retirement. The writer clearly has high ideals about what comfort should entail, but the sentiment is probably accurate. It’s not uncommon to see elderly people working in American supermarkets and fast food places. It’s not right.

My 22-year-old daughter is convinced that, for her cohort, communal living will be the norm. I’ve asked her to save some space in the yard for us to pitch a tent — with an extension cord to plug in my laptop.

Meh. As fates go, is that so bad? It’s just a shame (a scandal really) that people might be working for forty years or more, just to reach the basic setup that any barely-employed person can have immediately. It is to toil under a scam.

Reduce your material needs. Adjust your ideas about comfort. Research the alternative models.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

All Ryan wanted to do was escape at the earliest possible moment — to run for his life, in fact — and here was the chance.

I like this. It reminds me of Hannibal Lecter seeing the glint of the tiny pin that will allow him to pick the lock of his cage and presumably to slice off the guard’s face to make a mask.

Not that I’m saying Escapologists should aspire to be like Hannibal Lecter. Be like Ryan. Run for your life.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’
Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’
They just use your mind and you never get the credit
It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you?
It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet
9 to 5, oh, what a way to make a livin’
Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you?
It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet
9 to 5…

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

The reason I post so many quotes from literature is to show that the desire to escape is neither uncommon nor certifiable.

On the contrary, it’s perfectly normal and has been with us since, oh, around the time of the industrial revolution. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Here are some diary entries from 1909, written when W. N. P. Barbellion was but 19 years old. He wanted to escape the career chosen for him by his father (“journalism,” which actually meant the transcribing of local council meetings) and to take up his ikigai of zoology.

June 2nd. I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of escape.

October 14th. Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the threshold. It was so obviously returning after an unsuccessful flight.

December 23rd. I nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory, and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat … seems very hard, and it is very hard.

Self-absorbed? Well, it is a diary. On the other hand, H. G. Wells, writes in a preface to the published diaries:

An egotism, like an eggshell, is a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape.

He escaped in the end, by the way. To rockpools and countryside woods in the short term, then all the way to the British Museum.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

He drew charcoal portraits for extra money, but talent didn’t save him from [unpleasant work in] the tannery. After work, he would lie down in a corner of the shirt factory where some apprentices slept. He would hide beneath a sheet and try to ignore the rats as they scurried over his face. In sleep he honed his talent for escape.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

Reader A writes:

Hi Robert,

Firstly thanks for all you do for the escapologist movement, I’ve loved reading all your newsletters and magazines since I stumbled across a copy in a Hackney coffee shop.

It struck a chord. My girlfriend and I had been asking ourselves if this (corporate London etc etc) is really all there is. We were pondering our own escapes but we didn’t have the words to express these plans nor the knowledge that we were missing out on a whole community of escapologists that you’re smack in the centre of!

We’ve since quit our jobs, travelled for 6 months and are now trying to find work on our own terms, which is scary but thrilling in equal measure.

In our final weeks of travel I ordered Issue 19 from my hostel in Mexico to ensure I had the fresh copy waiting at home for my arrival.

Kind Regards,

A

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Wringham Wresponds:

And no matter what happens next, you have lived. You made the uncommon choice and actually lived.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

did it even make sense to compose an anti-technology manifesto on an internet-connected device? Would I be able to resist the pull of email, news, and “research” in a time of unbearable stress? No, I needed to write my book the old way. I needed to prove it was still possible.

The artist and writer August Lamm — who gave us a great interview in Issue 18 — lives and works without a computer or a smartphone.

That’s what her forthcoming book is about and, obviously (or perhaps not), it was written by hand.

She’s not the first to do this. Mark Boyle used to submit his Moneyless Man column to his newspaper each month, hand-written. And as August herself says, this was how all books were written prior to the 1980s, albeit not as a form of tech protest.

Doesn’t this take absolutely ages? No, so says. Because one of the advantages of writing long-hand, she says, was to rid herself of internetty distractions:

Distraction is not a new thing, of course, but I think we can all agree that there’s a difference between old-school distractions—looking out a window, flipping through a book, tidying the office, calling a friend—and modern ones.

I wouldn’t mind reading a book whose author compulsively snacked, or smoked, or paced the room after every page. I do mind reading a book whose author was inundated with the voices of a thousand other people, platforms, brands, algorithms.

It’s a good point. Let’s keep the algo out of our literature.

The book’s about an actor who must wear a black leather bag over his whole body (except for his feet) after precariat desperation leads him to take work as the subject of a psychological experiment.

Anyway, these quotes aren’t particularly representative of the book, but they’re nice as Escapological moments:

About a job (but not the black bag one):

I don’t want to do this forever … Too many people feel like they own a little bit of me — it’s like I accidentally sold 500 per cent of the shares in my soul. And I’m getting deeply sick of people and their bullshit. It’s not a good feeling.

And a retired man speaks:

Retirement feels rather like being expelled from a cult … Everything you measured your life by is proved to be utterly senseless and haphazard. You went along with a set of precepts because you had little choice in the matter once you’d signed up, and then it’s suddenly over and the prevailing feeling is, Well what was all that in aid of?

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

This was a fiddly business and I probably made mistakes. If I’ve missed you out, misspelled your name, used the wrong link to your website, or listed you in the wrong section of the page, please grab me roughly by the collar and shout the correction into my face.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.