On reading your June 19th email exploring the lives of back-to-back cruiseniks, I was reminded of these passages from “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst”, which elegantly combines Escapological ideas with the desire to live differently.

Moitessier — a contestant in the 1968 race to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe — writes in his logbook why he’s decided to give up the contest and remain at sea:

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

Check out these pics taken by Heather. They make a decent case for it.

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

Further to yesterday’s post, here’s Dickon Edwards (in his diaries) on work:

I’ve tried Normal Life on so many occasions. By which I mean, doing a job you utterly feel at odds with purely for the money. It seems to work for many people, and I admire them immensely. But for me it’s living a lie to the point of nausea. I feel a trespasser. A fraud.

The World Of Work doesn’t like me very much. It brings out all my most useless qualities, though they make for quite good reading in a diary. It’s my Borderline Autistic Buffoon side that is brought to the fore in such jobs. I have spilt soup in an old lady’s lap when working as a waiter, and have been sacked. On more than one occasion, I have accidentally deleted an entire firm’s computer records, in circumstances bordering on the poltergeist-esque, and have been sacked. I have broken the frame of a priceless gilt mirror and kept quiet about it, but decided it was best to leave the employment of the museum in question, before it happened again and I was sacked. I didn’t break the mirror itself, just a bit of the frame.

Actually, I wonder how that works with the superstition about seven years bad luck? Because this would have been seven years ago.

I have been sacked from your basic office admin job. Admittedly, this was because I kept phoning in sick and deciding instead to go to the cinema or the park. I don’t really blame them for sacking me. But on most days, the idea of going into that office per se made me feel sick, so I phoned in sick. I was merely being honest.

I’ve just remembered that this office job involved being the secretary to a lawyer. The weird thing is, although she’d been to university and I hadn’t, I had a much larger vocabulary than she had. She would ask me how to spell words, and what words meant.

She once asked me, “Dickon, what does the word “pretentious” mean?”

I resisted the temptation to reply, “You’re looking at a definition.”

I seemed over-qualified for the job, though I have no A Levels let alone a degree. To remedy this, I have considered Adult Education, and enrolled for an Evening Class last year. But all I learned was that I have trouble working in a class environment, that I really need help meeting deadlines and finding an incentive to write (hence the Angels). And when the teacher of the class in question turned out to be someone I knew, whose pyjama party I’d once attended, it was hard not to take a hint from the universe. I was always closer to the teachers than the pupils.

At the age of 35, I have learned beyond a reasonable doubt that the World Of Work is mutually incompatible with me. It makes me ill, or I break valuable things, or computers mysteriously crash in my presence. We are better off without each other. It’s a waste of time all round, just adding to the amount of sackings in the world.

I cannot convincingly play the role of a normal person in a class, or a normal person in a group workplace. But I can be Dickon Edwards. So if we’re all agreed about that, it’s just a question of developing a work ethic and treating Being Dickon Edwards like any other job. The only problem is how to earn money from it, and how to develop it so it produces something people might want. And want to pay for.

Though I know some people regard my entire existence as a form of sarcasm, I am serious about the Diary Angels scheme. I no longer view the diary as busking with words. From now on, this is Work With Sponsorship. I write to a regular body of readers and seek to provide an interesting and unusual read which they cannot get anywhere else. Tales of dipping in and out of worlds, of being a London Dandy, of oddness against the world, of being the unlikely connection between many diverse people and social scenes. I feel I don’t particularly belong anywhere. This is my greatest hindrance, but also my greatest asset.

This was all back in 2007. Dickon has since achieved a first-class degree and a PhD. from Birkbeck University. He remains, however, unemployed.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now. The fascinating Mr. Edwards is also interviewed in Issue 18.

A gem from Dickon Edwards’ diaries:

A frequently asked question: Why don’t you just get a job?

Answer: Because I’ve got too much else to do.

Answer: Because I’m too busy to get a job.

Answer: Being unemployed is a full-time job in itself, involving skills and time in order to survive. So I do have a job. It’s just atrociously paid.

Answer: Because I’ve never lasted in the many Wage Slave-type jobs I’ve had in the past. It’s only a matter of time before I’m dismissed, or have to leave to avoid collapsing in tears on a daily basis.

Answer: I _am_ trying to find something, it just has to be something I can do well, as opposed to pretend to do well.

Answer: I’m too far gone.

Answer: This _is_ my job. It’s a kind of busking with text. I just haven’t managed to earn money from it. Yet.

Answer: Don’t you know who I _am_?

Having said all that, of course, I do engage in a small amount of perfectly normal things for the Green Party: envelope stuffing, posting leaflets through hundreds of letterboxes, helping out here and there. It’s just that that’s all voluntary work.

It’s the view that some things matter to one, and some things don’t. We should be free to choose how we spend the time of our lives without threat of destitution.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now. The fascinating Mr. Edwards is also interviewed in Issue 18.

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

A moment from a brilliant sitcom called Such Brave Girls.

Mum: Good morning! Time for work.

Josie: I don’t think I’m up for it. I’m just not creatively fulfilled in retail.

Mum: Josie, we’ve talked about this. Work isn’t about fulfilment. It’s about making money to buy stuff that will make you feel fulfilled.

Josie: I think…

Mum: No, stop. Too much thinking.

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

This comes from Étienne de La Boétie, boyfriend of the essayist Montaigne:

You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.

From The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, which has much to say about “leaders” and liberty.

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

My mom used to get really upset at what she perceived as my half-assing. I’m 48 now, have a PhD and a thriving an influential career, and I still think there’s very little that’s worthy of applying my whole entire ass. I’m not interested in burning myself [out] by whole-assing stuff that will be fine if I half- or quarter-ass it. Being able to achieve maximum efficiency of ass is an important adult skill.

*via Oliver Burkeman’s recent book, in a chapter called “On the False Allure of Effort.”

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New Escapologist Issue 19 (in print and digital formats) is about to drop. And the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! already has.

At its core is the concept of sufficiency – the idea that people can enjoy a prosperous, healthy life without constantly striving to consume or accumulate more material possessions that degrade the natural world on which all life depends.

To achieve this, the authors envisage […] more than halving average working time from 2,100 hours a year to 1,000 hours, roughly equivalent to a two-and-a-half-day working week

We’ve been saying that for *looks at watch* how many years now?

It’s part of a three-step “vision for planetary survival” set out in a report by the World Inequality Lab. It “aims to be the most comprehensive attempt yet to navigate the polycrisis that is pushing the world toward climate breakdown, political extremism and ever greater economic and social tension.”

The news item is accompanied by some analysis and an op-ed by the academics behind the report.

The latter begins:

Imagine a future in which everyone enjoys high levels of wellbeing; where 90% of the world’s population doubles their income but works half the hours we work today.

[We] need a major shift away from overconsumption towards “sufficiency”. This would involve a sharp reduction in labour hours and the use of raw materials,

Remember: work less and use less. Reduce. It’s what we always say at New Escaplogist. It’s really the only way to save the world. It needs to be done en-masse and worldwide through policy. But until that time, Escapologists can do it themselves. If nothing else, we can set the example.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 (in print and digital formats) is about to drop. And the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! already has.

I’ll spend the next few days gradually shipping the copies ordered through the Kickstarter campaign. I should have some extra copies though, so if you’d like one here’s where to get it.

The main idea behind bringing the book back into print is to push it into bookshops to hopefully reach some new people in a nice, old-fashioned analogue way. This means copies available on our website will be limited for now (though I’m also quietly hoping for a second print run depending on how things go in the shops).

Thanks to everyone who backed the Kickstarter and to everybody who grabs a copy now.