It’s significant because it was written by David Allen, someone who has devoted a career to encouraging productivity in others. He’s the guy behind Getting Things Done or GTD:

All this fuss and bother about personal organization and information management and knowledge work and AI and the increasing stress levels of our culture. It’s enough to… what?

How about pruning my Japanese maple this afternoon, with a fabulous bottle of Belgian ale to assist? How about some sweet schmoozing with our two little spaniels? An ad hoc hug with my wife in our kitchen, as she does what she does so well there? How about just taking time to take time for — nothing?

It’s a reminder that “activity” and getting your shit together should really be in service of something: our humanity. If we take our eye off this prize, work so easily takes over. And becomes pointless.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

Most people’s Saturdays, it seems, are as busy as any weekday, while Sundays are no longer sacrosanct.

The weekend was once the week’s well-earned dessert but its ice-cream has long been melted by the burdensome breach of busyness. The slop we now have can perhaps be refrozen, but it will never again be the confection of yesteryear.

Besides, if we’re gradually learning to escape work, the weekend doesn’t make much sense anymore:

Weekends were built for factory labor, not Zoom meetings. The global rise of four-day workweeks show how arbitrary our current set-up is. Why not two-day workweeks if the work can still be done?

Sabbaths began as days of rest. That antiquated thinking dangerously frames such rest in service of labour. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I think God wants more for me than the life of a dishrag whose only peace is on the drying rack in between meals.

So what to do? One way or another:

Make time for yourself. For your loved ones. For your hobbies. For your ambitions. For your booty calls. For your bubble baths. For sushi. For tennis. For tattoos. For book club. For therapy. For karaoke. For leg day. For Lego. For mahjong. For your journal. For your marathon. For your second helping of cheesecake and your umpteenth viewing of The Golden Girls. For Final Fantasy Resonance or Grand Theft Auto VI – or both. For that trip to Japan. For that colonoscopy. For whatever you want whenever you want – because nobody, absolutely nobody, logs their achievements or fond memories in categorization by days of the week. We cannot list the top five Wednesdays of our lives.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

Aged about 28 and working at General Electric, Vonnegut Jr. writes to Vonnegut Sr.:

I sold my first story to COLLIER’S. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent’s commission) yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future.

I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account, and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at G.E. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare of a job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.

I don’t know when my first story will be published. It may take several months. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m happier than I’ve been for a good many years.

Come east soon.

Love,
K

And the rest is history.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

I found myself wondering what came of him. Did he win his case? Did he find another job? Did he take his winnings and live on a yacht?

The myth-busting website Snopes has part of the answer:

a court in Paris ruled that Frédéric Desnard’s employer had subjected him to “moral harassment” and bullying, including deliberately subjecting him to “bore-out” at work.

And:

Mere boredom was far from the only mistreatment suffered by Desnard, who argued he was deliberately marginalized and humiliated at work for four years, causing him to become withdrawn and clinically depressed.

But:

While Desnard had asked for hundreds of thousands of euros in damages and compensation, the court ultimately sanctioned just €40,000.

It’s a pretty good moral victory and 40k is certainly a healthy escape fund to get you on the road, but I’m worried about Desnard now because 40k probably wasn’t enough to retire on (though maybe it was?) and because all that comes up when you Google his name now is his kooky employment tribunal. This help him to get another job.

I decided to do some modern “journalism” and ask him. I found his LinkedIn page, which was plastered in profile updates about bore-out, which made me wonder if he’s become working some sort of anti bore-out consultant. But when I tried to befriend him, he deleted his page. Good!

We respect your right to disappear, Monsieur Desnard. Good luck wherever you are.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

And you know what? You probably don’t need a smartphone. Personally, I’ve made peace with having one, but it repays to rethink these things. The considered life and all.

In August’s latest newsletter, she explains that publishers no longer send authors on book tours, so she’s decided to cross the USA on her own terms and at her own expense.

For a book like mine, addressing the decline of culture in the digital age, in-person events are crucial. Only by convening in a physical space can we escape algorithmic pre-determination and open ourselves up to the organic, unpredictable unfolding of Real Life.

This is great. Her position of integrity reminds me of my favourite Jaron Lanier quote, which I find genuinely empowering. I carry it in my heart:

You, you, you, have the affirmative responsibility to invent and demonstrate new ways to live without the crap that is destroying society. Quitting is the only way, for now, to learn what can replace our grand mistake.

If you happen to be America, please consider visiting August on tour and buying the book. It’s one in the eye for the supremacy of boring digital business practices that are wrecking the world and a vote for personal integrity.

Sure enough, Wikipedia explains:

Escaping from prison isa criminal offense in countries such as the United States and Canada, and usually results in time being added to the inmate’s sentence … In Germany and a number of other countries, it is considered human nature to want to escape from a prison and it is considered as a violation of the right of freedom, so escape is not penalized in itself (in the absence of other factors such as threats of violence, actual violence, or property damage).

The countries who see the desire to escape as human nature include:

Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Iceland, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil

“Isn’t it interesting,” writes Fabien, “how they recognise our desire to be free from confinement as a natural given?”

It is. It’s something I’ve often wondered about because the alternative seems So disingenuous. Other illegalities I’ve wondered about are suicide and “resisting arrest.”

It’s unsporting if nothing else. Catching and retaining people the law sees as guilty is surely the law’s job, not that of the so-called criminal.

The only reason to obey these laws is the fear of legal consequence. There’s no moral reason for laws like these; they exist only to make rozzers’ jobs easier. I don’t think they should exist and I salute the legal systems who respect this.

The Wikipedia page for prison escapes, by the way, is great fun. It’s full of great stories about how people have busted out of prisons using spoons and helicopters.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

Petersen was a pipe-smoking Danish humorist whose writings and cartoons regularly portrayed vagabonds as philosophers. Our kind of guy.

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Escape with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

In the moment, not quitting in some ways feels heroic, like you’re martyring yourself to your own capacity or grit. In fact, you’re actually limiting yourself, because you’re not walking away from things that are failing.

A little bit of Escapology from Lindsay Crouse who quit her job this year and has published a book called The Case for Quitting:

Staying [as opposed to escaping] is a decision, too. I’ve heard people say: “I really want to quit, but I can’t.” I think you have to ask yourself: why can’t you? If you think you can’t quit your job because you need money, have you actually run those numbers? Maybe you have, and you don’t like them. That’s fine, but you need to own that choice to stay.

If you want to leave your relationship, but are afraid of starting over, own that. Maybe you just want to get married. Down the line, tell yourself that was a decision you made, and you knew what you were getting into. Otherwise, you can quit and do your future self a favour – your partner, too. Who wants to be in a relationship without investment?

Being only one foot in is a very passive and kind of cowardly way to live your life. You need to ask yourself: “Am I hoping that this doubt, or deliberation, is just going to abate?” That question helps you reframe the situation – and the answer is no. You have to act: either own it or leave, but don’t think that these problems will just disappear. Maybe you can put up with them, but is that the life you want?

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Quit with the best of them by reading New Escapologist Issue 19.

It’s not entirely our fault, as individuals, that we’re unhealthy or suffer a low quality of life. It’s that public policy currently nudges us away from making the obvious healthy choices when it should do the opposite. And we shouldn’t be at risk of random agonising deaths from, say, cars and guns, when such things could be spirited out of our lives if only the political will could be summoned to do so.

Lucky for me, Devi writes quite regularly in the Guardian, meaning I get little top-ups of her writing. This week she speaks of AI and what it might be doing to our brains and the world.

AI bores me as a topic, but it might be of interest to Escapologists dreaming of a low-work future for all and who might advocate (or not) for the automation of everything.

[we’re] moving closer to a world where we don’t have to see anyone, move anywhere or use our brains, seemingly at all. And [that’s] wonderful for the tech companies and those looking to cut costs by replacing humans with automation, but certainly not for the rest of us.

I agree, but only inasmuch as there’s no collectively arrived-at vision for a world after work. We may well be sliding into a future where we sit around with phones and laptops like the people in WALL-E. But in those circumstances, at least putting down those devices and doing some something would be a choice instead of something we’re economically bullied into. We shouldn’t have to “do” when we don’t want to. People should decide to get off their arse, not be cattle-prodded into it each morning by a job they despise. We just need to find the imagination to see beyond the world of work.

As an academic, Devi is worried specifically about “generative” AI and how it’s currently used:

As we look to the future, will thinking, reading, writing and actively using our brains become activities from a bygone era? If we stop using our brains to think, socially interact, concentrate or problem-solve, what will be the impact on our quality of life and our chances of ageing healthily? Will we see a rise in chronic disease linked to the brain?

And, maybe just as importantly, does anyone even care? It’s certainly not the concern of tech companies, which are in an arms race to go faster. And so we’re heading in that direction and being told it’s all wonderful. Yes, it is wonderful for certain tech companies. And probably terrible for the mental health and wellbeing of the rest of us.

We do seem to be automating the wrong things: students using AI to write essays when the whole point is to use the brain, publishers using AI to write books when the whole point of books is human connection and to send human thought into the future.

At the same time, I quite like the idea of putting the whole economy on automate. You could have bots buying from other bots in service of GDP (if people insist on that mattering) while we get on with things that matter, no longer motivated by money. The economy could be forced into a data centre where we don’t have to think about it anymore. We do something else instead, even if it just comes down to lazing about and exploring our inner realms.

What it comes down to is: I don’t want work and money to be the motivators for how we live. I don’t want artists to be forced to work primarily so that they can escape destitution. Instead, we can all make art for its own sake and as a means of connecting to each other. Can’t we? We need to find the imagination of what to do after AI, what to automate, and what to reclaim for ourselves. That should be the new system of public policy nudges we should be looking for.

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Connect with real human thought by reading New Escapologist Issue 19 and/or by anonymously mocking your useless workplace in our Workplace Woes section.