Author: Robert Wringham

Originally published in Idler 51.

It’s sad how much has been sacrificed to convenience. Strivers shun idlers for our apparent laziness, but it’s they who shamelessly sing the praises of any undignified gizmo promising to make life easier.

What of the pleasure of doing things long-hand? What of time-honoured, analogue ways? What of the contemplative scenic route? If a technology is sold as liberating, it’s likely to be anything but. Guaranteed, it’ll seduce you into replacing something durable, social and stylish with something ephemeral, isolating and naff. Perhaps most emblematic of this problem is the mobile phone.

It’s beginning to seem unthinkable that a person might live in the modern world without a mobile, but (predictably) I believe it’s both possible and desirable to escape the tyranny of the network. If Houdini could escape a jail cell, we can escape a cell phone. But why, you ask? Hear me out before you have me arrested.

When you escape your mobile phone, you also escape your bosses. With no direct line from their office to your eardrum, they can no longer startle you into action when you’re lounging on the sofa or sitting on the bog. Without a mobile, you’ll never be caught.

Dependencies detract from your freedom. If you need a thing, you’re under it’s spell and therefore not free. This is much talked about when it comes to drugs and alcohol, but not often when it comes to technological or commercial dependencies. Sever all ties, my friend, and fly free.

No mobile means one less information channel. The best way to eliminate stress is to limit the number of channels through which you receive information. Be like the 300 Spartans: force your pursuers through a single gap and dispense with them at leisure.

To escape the mobile is to reject the myth of meritocracy. A mobile phone is an all-too conventional symbol of “success”. This sort of success—the kind evocative of hard work and hard consumption—is to be sneered at. Angry Birds is not the only game you should refuse to play.

To escape the mobile is to escape with dignity. Mobile phones were undignified when they involved a lazy thumbing of little Nokia buttons. Now they’ve got you aggressively jabbing at a screen like a moron.

To refuse the mobile builds muscles of resistance. “Anything popular is wrong,” said Oscar Wilde and I agree. You don’t have to do what you’re told. Finding your own solutions instead of defaulting to the standard one is always more creative and rewarding.

A mobile phone spoils the line of a suit. I finds my outfit looks better with one less lump in it.

Financial cost. In the second edition of this column (Idler 49) I encouraged you to cut yourself loose from commercial commitments wherever possible. This is a good idea because the less your life costs, the less work you must do in order to pay for it. If you can get your fixed monthly costs down to £500, part-time work and cottage industry suddenly become more feasible.

Social cost. There was a time when people stuck to their social plans instead of tentatively scheduling them and cancelling by SMS at the last minute.

Divest from unethical toil. Mobile phones are the product of big firms in which workers toil in near-slavery. It’s best not to give those companies your money if you believe in the idle life for everyone.

It’s entertaining to tell someone you don’t have a mobile phone. They’ll be either be curious or appalled. The way people respond to your eccentricity will help you decide if it’s worth talking to them for long.

Someone has to stay in control. What if it turns out that mobiles are cooking our brains or making us stupid? Wouldn’t it be a good idea for some of us to stay disconnected just in case?

Put distance between yourself and the alarm clock. Chances are, your phone is also the cursed, goddam thing that arrests you from sweet slumber in the morning. Why carry such a hated object around all day, so close to your heart?

Four things depress you: work, consumerism, bureaucracy and fear. A mobile phone contributes to all four.

There are some possible objections. The usual one is that you might need your phone in an emergency, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever be in an emergency: living in fear is for chumps, especially when the cost is so high. Apps? There was no such thing a few years ago and the old systems are all still there. Social ostracism when people can’t reach you? You have three things to help you here: landline, email, and personality. You’ll never hear the last of people.

If you’re on the fence about this because you can relate to the points above but you also like to play Pokemon Go, ask yourself: are you ever happy–truly happy–to hear the damn thing ring?

Escape the eye in the sky! Escape the dull gamification of quiet moments! Escape dependence on a little jabby screen! Take of your shackles and be free!

🐌

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Originally published in Idler 50.

There are many great things about living with someone you love. You get to see daily a person you’re fond of, you learn exciting new things about them, and it’s easier to warm a bed together than apart. There are also fine efficiency gains to be found when pooling resources: expenses divided, record collections merged.

Somehow though, the advantage of resource pooling is not commonly seized upon. Today, when a couple get married or decide to cohabit, it’s become conventional for them to acquire a bigger house together and to fill it up as quickly as possible with more than twice the stuff they owned separately as bachelors. The logic, presumably, is that because there are now two bodies in the home and double the income, it’s desirable to scale everything up. If this seems reasonable it’s because our culture of conspicuous consumption and devotion to work demands that we remain vigilant in looking for opportunities to spend, devour, and dispose of more.

This is a boneheaded interpretation of what it means to pool resources. Not only does entering the rat race together in this way put enormous pressure on a romantic relationship, it causes both parties to miss an easy opportunity of a life of leisure.

Few people see it this way, but sharing a home is a terrific escape route from the drudgery of work. Instead of using a partnership to maximise debt and consumption, why not escape together? We can do this by sharing duties instead of liabilities.

One wage slave, one free person. There are many ways a couple can ensure liberty for each other. Suppose, in the first instance, one partner continues to work in their existing full-time job and uses this money to pay the monthlies on a modest home, just as they did before cohabiting. With everything covered, could the other partner not go free? What finer gift to bestow upon the apple of one’s eye: total freedom from servitude. Go free, my love and write that novel, keep our new home smelling fresh, but of all things, loaf.

The system of a working partner and a stay-at-home partner has the whiff of a 1950s household about it, but there’s no reason a division of labour should occur at the fault line of gender. Indeed, a married couple of this century could be of the same gender. I suggest we leave the gender roles in the dustbin of history but think seriously about one partner shouldering the work burden so the other can go free. If we all did this, half of all wage slaves would be freed overnight.

Two part-timers. We can fine-tune this old system further. There’s a second way, and that’s for a couple to share the burden of work by both working part-time. If the couple were both to go out toiling for perhaps 17 weekly hours each, the combined efforts will be equivalent to one breadwinner and one freeman.

If it seems inevitable that the free partner will end up responsible for any domestic labour in the household, this “two part-timers” modality would mean both partners doing both types of work, equally responsible and equally benefitting. This is perhaps the fairest, most egalitarian and most agreeable way of keeping a modest household solvent until total escape from employment can be arranged.

One wage slave, one escape planner. Or: Two part-timers, two escape-planners. If you’re keen on total escape from servitude and see that neither system above will cater for this, you should use one of them in the first instance anyway, to reduce the amount of work required en-route to banishing it. While one partner works full-time, the free partner after a period of delicious indolence might point their finally-fertile, Jeeves-like mind toward the problem of freeing the other. The free partner, when ready, can concoct the cottage industry or the investment plan or the automated business required for total liberty. Otherwise, if you’re using the two part-timers scheme, the concocting of an escape plan can be shared and a scheme entered into hand-in-hand.

Two full-timers, two investors. A final option might be to both work full-time while living modestly, squirreling away the money in a joint investment and retiring phenomenally early. Very appealing, though the idler can be forgiven for wanting liberty, even half-liberty, a little sooner.

Whichever way it’s done, it can be seen that a couple might form an Escapologist tag-team and break free of the work trap together. Even Houdini couldn’t have done it without Bess, his partner and confidant. A “couple” need not even be romantically involved at all: two platonic flatmates could use any of the aforementioned arrangements if they were comfortable with it. After all, symbiotic relationships take place in nature all the time.

If you take nothing else from this or are committed to eternal singledom, it’s still useful to think of a home as a miniature economy with the necessary wealth coming in and ideas flowing out, a fruitful and non-competitive enterprise run with an eye to liberty.

🐌

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Originally published in Idler 49.

To escape work, we must escape consumerism. They are two sides of the same coin. “Consume less, toil less,” is the mantra of the successful escapee. Idlers will see the logic immediately: if we cease in our lust for daft commercial products, we’ll no longer need work to pay for them.

A full-time, high-stress job isn’t required to meet basic consumer needs. If all we wanted was food, rent and heating we’d not have to work very much, perhaps getting along on two or three days per week.

In 1930, Bohemian economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that a 15-hour week would be in place by 2030. “How silly!” today’s pundits say. But Keynes was “wrong” only in that he hadn’t foreseen the insatiability we’d develop. If we lived more like our grandparents did, without smartphones and coffee pod machines and other debt-generating gewgaws, the 15-hour week might be here by now. We could finally get back to the inexpensive things we really want to do, like reading, strolling, creating, dancing, making love and playing tiddlywinks.

We should stop chuckling smugly about Keynes being wrong and start living more modestly and in line with his prophecy. The essay in which he made this prediction was called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Let’s adopt Keynes as our honorary grandad, and consume less to work less.

“Consume less” need not be a tyrannical rule. If you want to, say, smoke, because smoking gives you pleasure, then you should go ahead and smoke. But know of the toil required to pay for the activity. At least then it’ll be a deliberate decision–a wholehearted commitment to pleasure–instead of an unthinking act of inertia. There are many well-known and celebrated ways to consume less.

Thrift. Where consumerism encourages buying solutions to solve problems, thrift suggests we be resourceful and imaginative. We can “make do and mend,” build, brew, cook, stitch or improvise our own things. Instead of condemning a half-finished item to landfill, let us apply a little patchwork and make a threadbare product into a trusted friend. Instead of trying to keep up with fashion, let’s learn to be stylish and timeless.

Minimalism. Where thrift is a matter of “waste not, want not,” minimalism goes further and says “want not, want not”. Learn to love empty space, quietness and a lack of clutter, and we’ll find ourselves wanting very little. It’s not a matter of resisting temptation to the siren song of consumerism as cultivating a haughty disdain for it.

Epicureanism. If we can find a fondness, philosopher Epicurus said, for something so simple as water or a sunset or the observation of garden insects, we’ll no longer be seduced by the promise of bigger, faster, louder, more violent offered by consumerism. Instead of shopping for leisure, we can look the other way and find myriad delights.

Appreciation. Psychologist Daniel Haybron says there are consumers in the world and appreciators. Consumers are the type to turn up at a lakeside retreat, blast around ostentatiously in a speedboat and spend the rest of the weekend complaining that there’s nothing to do. This mindset is encouraged by consumerism, making us constantly hungry for what comes next. Appreciation meanwhile is the skill to know when your surroundings are interesting and plenty.

Bohemia. Perhaps the ultimate in turning one’s back on consumerism, the Bohemians (such as Keynes’ own Bloomsbury Group) developed a distaste for the obvious and the mainstream and found pleasure in arts, crafts, parties and love. A Bohemian would rather live a threadbare existence doing what she loves than submit to financially-rewarding but soul-destroying toil: an outlook meaning, of course, turning one’s back on consumerism and finding rewards elsewhere.

When you start to see work and consumption as two side of the same coin, you begin to see what a scam the consumer society actually is. Here’s a terrible secret to help bring this home. To economists, work and consumption are the same thing. A country’s GDP can be calculated by adding up total production or total consumption. Both totals are the same. This is because one person’s work is another’s consumption and vice-versa. This will be mind-blowing information if you’re among the millions who work full-time in a hated job while trying to reclaim dignity on the weekend by going shopping.

If you’re amused by this because you’re part of the punk counterculture and not a shopaholic, you might want to keep in mind that the same law of economics means you can’t smash capitalism simply by not shopping. You must also reduce the amount of work you do, work and consumption being the same process, looked at from different directions. The idler-escapee is uniquely qualified to strike a direct blow to capitalism.

If we want to escape the daily grind and punch capitalism in the face as a pleasing consequence, let us go back to basics. Let’s make our outgoings wholly predictable and quit the full-time job once and for all.

🐌

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Originally published in Idler 66.

The occasional bout of illness can be a friend to the idle because it means we can stay in bed all day, responsibilities waived, surfing colourful cough-syrup dreams.

Fun though this can be, I’m forced to admit that there’s no substitute for good health. Not sort of health that comes from being a carb-dodging, 10k-running übermensch, I hasten to add, but at least the sort of healthfulness that means you can walk to the library without collapsing into a rubbery, wheezing heap. It’s also nice to go about your days without a Vicks Vapo-Stick hanging out of your nose. Besides, the proud idler needs no excuse to spend a day in bed. It is our god-given right and perhaps even a duty. I’m doing it right now, as it happens. And I’m wearing a fez.

It occurs to me that I haven’t been ill for ages, touch wood. The only explanation I can think of for this period of fine health is that I no longer go to work. Quit your job, fellow idlers, on health grounds. A job is like a gym class: a waste of effort, escaped with a note.

If the tyranny of what they call “practicality” means you’re unable to quit your job, perhaps you can still enjoy the health benefits enjoyed by quitters without actually requesting a P45. After all, you can benefit from the Mediterranean diet without moving to Florence. So let’s do it. Here’s my basic health programme for idlers, even those who have been cattle-prodded into work.

Take lunch. Taking an actual, proper lunch break affords you some privacy, a change of pace, a stretch, vital nutrition, and an hour away from the fluorescent lights, flickering screens and hot-desk bickering. Lunch is in decline, of course, today’s workers either too slavish or too frightened to take the full hour, even to leave the building and risk being late back to the desk. Idlers must reverse this trend. No more sad al desko sandwiches while gawping at social media (or, worse, continuing to work). Instead, go out for a stroll, eat good food, take the air, and reconnect with nature in small way by taking time to observe the antics of birds and ants. Short of feeding your head into a threshing machine, wilfully opting out of your enshrined-in-law daily lunch break is about the worst thing you can do for your health.

Walk to work. The sedentary nature of office work is perhaps the clearest way that it affects your health. Office managers are beginning to wake up to this and now offer “varidesks” (desks that can be adjusted to standing height) and “walking meetings” that serve to make everyone feel silly and unable to take notes. It’s too little too late and merely admits to the fact that office life is killing us. Workers need to seize opportunities to move, and a good way to do this is by walking to and from work. It’s a good way to escape the tedious Hell of a conventional commute (see this column in Idler 65) too. Walking to work can’t really count as flaneurism because the pre-planned destination deprives you of the dérive, but it’s the next best thing when you’re a time-starved drudge. It reconnects you with the streets and provides basic stretching of the leggies.

Say no to instant coffee. I’ve often felt that making coffee so readily available to a workforce resembles something from Aldous Huxley or a dystopian science fiction film. You can imagine a machine that vends little green hockey pucks of “phood,” which contain a productivity-enhancing drug and is welcomed by the workers as a cost-free perk despite it’s being an obvious measure to keep you down and toiling. Same thing, innit? There’s no way so much instant coffee can be good for you. Anything that purports to metamorphose into a consumable beverage from the state of industrial powder is almost certainly going to give you cancer. How can it not? It’s as far from nature as a CGI anvil.

Say no to office snacks. When I worked in an office, there were sugary snacks at every corner, which felt like compensation at the time but ultimately contributed to my depression and my pot belly. People would bring them in: souvenirs from Wage Slaves’ holidays, radially-sliced chocolate birthday cake, tubs of M&S rocky road, cookies and cupcakes from charitable bake sales. My theory is that workers bring snacks in such abundance as an inarticulate offer of friendship. Professionalism prevents you from saying “I love you,” which is also bad for your health.

Wear a micro-filter mask. When you pack a hundred white-collar workers, each from a different neighbourhood and each with their own families (who in turn work in other places or attend different schools), you’ve got yourself a mixing palette for GERMS. Some offices even add circular a air conditioning system to further guarantee that everyone breathes and re-breathes everyone else’s air. If you can’t work from home to escape such a plague pit, I suggest wearing a mask like a paranoid Howard Hughes type. Even if it doesn’t actually work as a pestilence barrier, it will serve as a visual protest to unhealthy office culture. It could be one of those dainty white surgical masks that Japanese tourists wear when visiting polluted Britain, or perhaps a full-head respirator thing like Darth Vader. Such a device would allow you to shut out some of the stressful office noise as well.

Oh, it’s hopeless isn’t it? Forget it. You can’t have good health if you work in an office. The anxiety, the sedentariness, the spine-contorting ergonomic swivel chairs, the viruses rattling through the ducts, the noise, the sugar, the screentime, the separation from anything that matters. It’s impossible. The open-plan office was clearly designed by an android ignorant of human biological needs, or else quite deliberately as a machine to wipe out a few of us. Just quit your job, I say! Idling is the only known cure.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Originally published in Idler 59.

If, like me, you’re not overly fond of lifting fingers and – even worse – wrapping them around the handle of a mop, you’ll have considered hiring a cleaner. I’ve never made good on this idea but it crosses my mind whenever I have have to clean the toilet (yes, every single year). Goodness knows I’ve tried to find pleasure in vanquishing the residual cack from beneath the rim, but it’s just not something I’m into.

I’ve long suspected, however, that hiring a cleaner is one of those throw-some-money-at-it solutions that’s more trouble than it’s worth and best avoided by the truly idle. Not only would you have to pay this person with money just as easily spent on beer, but you’d have to organise their tasks in some way, check that they’ve been completed satisfactorily and, of course, remember when the cleaner is due to come over. Anticipating that visit would be a source of constant anxiety to me: the bandwidth of remembering the appointment would either take over my life or I’d simply forget. Routinely, I fear, our cleaner would walk in on a horizontal Wringham, collapsed on the chaise in nothing but a fez, dozing stomach littered with pistachio shells.

Aside from these practical doubts, the moral idler wants to reduce the amount of grunt work in the world and hiring a cleaner is the antithesis of this. If you want to escape undignified toil, you probably shouldn’t generate it for others. Imagine the shame of your cleaner grassing you up in a future volume of Crap Jobs!

No, the net dignity and idle benefits of doing your own housework are perhaps greater than paying someone else to do it. Besides, how hard can it possibly be? I think I might have cracked it, so here are my solutions to escaping the ardours of house work without appointing a scrubber.

Small is beautiful. We’ve discussed the glory of minimalism before, notably in Idler 55, but it’s relevant in reducing housework. The less you own, the less you’ll have to dust or tidy or wash or otherwise maintain. Simplicity wins every time. Likewise, the smaller your home, the less space you’re responsible for. Instead of living like a bankrupt aristo — rattling around, alone, in an unmanageable stately home — live like Major Tom in a capsule, neat as a pin.

Don’t bother. Quentin Crisp lived in a small, rented apartment even after making his millions from The Naked Civil Servant. He also, reputedly, never troubled himself with housework. “After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse,” he famously wrote. It’s a matter of having courage enough to stare down the advancing dust without giving in. Crisp, apparently, would jump into his trousers “to avoid their trailing in the dust.”

Know that most housework doesn’t need doing at all. Even if you don’t go for “the full Quentin,” there’s all manner of shortcut to take. Your parents’ military standards need not be yours. A low-maintenance dandy, I’ve not ironed a shirt in about six years: if you hang a good-quality shirt immediately after washing, the wrinkles fall out on their own. I’ve not polished a shoe for a long time either; just wipe away any visible dirt with spit and a tissue. I’ve certainly not done anything as arduous as flipping a mattress recently, as you can easily buy one these days designed not to be flipped. The idea that bed linen should be washed weekly is absurd and washing trousers or jeans after just one wear is rather silly. While it’s nice to have a relatively tidy life, there’s no point inventing work for the sake of it.

Use housework to get out of other, worse things. If you need an incentive to clean just a little, you can at least trade it off against something even worse. “Sorry, I can’t come to your dreadful poetry night,” you can say, “only I’ve got a pile of laundry the size of the Matterhorn.” Personally, I use it as a reason to never, ever, go to the gym: if you use old-fashioned methods instead of technological ones (a brush instead of a vacuum cleaner) it’s tantamount to exercise anyway. I realise this isn’t strictly an “escape from housework”, but you can at least reduce strife elsewhere — like carbon offsetting.

Find someone who really likes cleaning. Everything is sexy to someone. Why not advertise in The Amorist or some kinky newspaper for an unpaid cleaner? You can sit back and bark commands through a megaphone while this poor, grateful, doubtlessly bald fellow scrubs your tiles. A helpful expression in this circumstance is “I want to see my face in it — not yours.” You might need to mop up one small stain at the end of all this yourself, unless you also happen to find someone who’s into that and before you know it you’ve got a fully-automated, housekeeping machine fuelled by deviancy.

Invite the kids do it. If you’re rueing your vain decision to help perpetuate the species, there might be a silver lining after all. Tom Hodgkinson writes in The Idle Parent, that it’s not difficult to enlist offspring in housekeeping efforts. Doing so will teach them responsibility while you rediscover Sambuca.

Don’t be messy. Instead of allowing the horror of housework to accumulate into the kind of super-chore necessitating a hazmat suit, it’s wiser to tidy as you go, or simply not generate dirt or untidiness to begin with. I realise this sounds a bit Mother Hennish but it’s the way to go. If you spill some sauce while cooking, wipe it up straight away. I haven’t “cleaned the kitchen” for years, I just keep it clean in this incremental, barely-noticeable way. If you couple this system with minimalism (having little to clean in the first place) and the rejection of less-purposeful cleaning tasks (giving bourgeois standards the cold shoulder) then it’s even easier. Take the garbage out when you’re on your way out to the pub. When you come back, hang your coat on its hook instead of tossing it on the bed. Put books back in the bookcase instead of leaving them lying around. There’s no need to hire a cleaner to do these things or even take off your fez.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Originally published in Idler 48.

With this column, editor Tom has asked me to share my escape plans and tips for breaking free of wage slavery and consumerism. I don’t mind sharing them: I want as many people as possible to escape the systems that ensnare us and juice us for our life blood. Besides, I have no shortage of escape plans. I collect them. I create my own. I dream them up in the night.

Over the coming months we’ll speak of exciting job replacement schemes, anti-consumerist wheezes, cautious half-measures, and philosophical internal adjustments. We can escape into an idle paradise of our own devising if we want to. I say “we” because I believe we’re all in the same boat, but you don’t need much social backup in order to escape: just do it yourself.

As an idler you’ll already have come to the conclusion that career is the single most obvious scam ever devised. And yet, it can be awfully tempting to get mixed up with it. If you haven’t already, I implore you to put the whole silly idea out of your head this very minute. Abandoning the idea of career altogether is the single most practical thing you can do today and here are my tips for doing it.

1. Know that it’s a scam. You know it intuitively, but you must place this knowledge at the very top of your consciousness and act upon it. Much like motorcars, wristwatches and fancy hats, career is sold to us a way to distinguish ourselves. It’s a product designed to appeal to our need for identity but ultimately to pump our energies off to wealthy folk at the top. It’s really a kind of pyramid scheme and no matter how clever you are it’s quite impossible to beat the system. Seeing work as identity instead of the soul-crushing waste of time it clearly is might be a good deal for those born into political or showbiz dynasties, but a poor one for the majority doomed to be salespeople, quantity surveyors, or (shudder) “co-directors of digital innovation.” So know it truly, reject it, and tell others: career is a scam.

2. Understand that it’s socially irresponsible. We’re encouraged to get onto a career path as soon as possible, told that thoughtfully selecting our GCSE subjects at the age of 14 will give us an advantage. But even if this were true (and it isn’t) what is meant by this advantage? That upstreaming your peers is somehow good or noble or right? Only a sociopath would believe that. Once you understand that career requires you to clamber over the corpses of your friends, it will hopefully be less appealing.

3. Choose to live in the present. Career requires us to live in the future by instilling a constant need for progression, and ultimately to live in the past with its promise that we’ll one day look back on a glorious toil narrative from an armchair somewhere. Bugger that. Get yourself an armchair today instead. Sit in it, take a nap, and gradually come up with more exciting ideas than ogling the ever-advancing next rung of the ladder or some distant retirement vision. You can’t win at careerism, so my advice is to stop trying before it’s too late.

4. Put career into perspective. If you want to put your mind off the siren song of career, it helps to embrace the full glory of reality by recalling that no action matters very much. We’ll all be dead one day and that’s fine. Put your feet up. You’ve got a hundred years at best and you’re already a good way through them. And imagine dying in pursuit of a career, cracking your nut on a shelf edge or choking on something unspeakable in a staff canteen. It’s better to enjoy the gentle ride down the river on your own terms.

5. Revel in the vagaries. To be successful in a career you must have a goal and scramble towards it with single-minded vigour. Instead, be vague about your ambitions and enjoy life. Thus spake Oscar Wilde: “If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

When you see career as a scam, that it encourages you to act in ways contrary to your interests and even those of society (which needs compassion, not careerism), it will be less tempting to involve yourself and far easier to escape for good. Career: just walk away.

🐌

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Originally published in Idler 61.

Thanks to my tenuous association with workplace psychology, I was invited to attend a managerial conference in a corporate hotel on the sunkissed banks of the M8. It was always going to be dreadful, but I attended out of anthropological interest and also because I thought there might be some free wine to be had. There was no wine, only orange juice, but I found the strength not to tear the place to pieces.

My souvenir of the day (or my “take-home” as these managerial types strangely say) was a single word: “rustout”. In contrast to the more familiar “burnout,” when a wage slave’s head pops from having too much to do, “rustout” is when he or she simply decays, physically and spiritually, because of boredom.

At first, it looks like just another pro-work idea. It makes me think of a Thomas the Tank Engine character who, not one for pulling carriages all day long, stays in the engine shed and falls to rust. “It’s train cancer, Percy,” says the Fat Controller, “and wholly deserved.” That is surely the intended implication of this “rustout” and apparently the word comes from a German expression that “he who rests, rusts.”

But what caught my attention is the distinction between burnout and rustout, partly in its own right as an observation of the two ways a job might destroy the soul, but also the that the managerial creed know about this, its headmen perceiving two diagnosable workplace conditions.

Unfortunately, the treatments they’re currently peddling leave a much to be desired. The working theory is that while burnout comes from too much stress, rustout comes from too little. Give the rusting worker more to do, they say.

My own experience tells me that office rustout comes not from being unstressed but from not valuing the mission of work full stop. It comes from knowing that no matter how you slice it, the whole thing is ultimately a waste of human life and you’re only there because there’s rent to pay. Boredom springs from the fact that office life doesn’t — can’t — provide spiritual rewards for a moist, creative, human brain. It’s not even supposed to. It’s an economic arrangement.

Under these conditions, even when you’re challenged by quantity or quality of your tasks, the challenge only exists within the meaningless confines of the Holodeck of the workplace. So how can one really escape rustout?

Don’t go to work in the first place. There are many ways to avoid reporting to a job every day, some of which have been covered in previous editions of this column. Avoid jobs wherever you can as, in the modern age, they are uniformly unsatisfying. Never accept a job and you’ll never experience rustout. With so much to do and experience, rustout does not happen in the real world.

If you must go to work, use your time at the desk to plot your escape. Instead of fantasising about a lottery win or a distant pension like other wage slaves, actively plot your escape. Consider self-employment, creative practice, reducing expenses and saving the difference to bring retirement radically forward; plot the steps you’d take to get such a project of the ground. A sitting position with the access to the Internet and a notepad to hand is no bad starting point for an escape attempt. The very act of finding moments at work in which to do this without the knowledge of one’s supervisors will keep things interesting and help to avoid oxidation.

Work part-time. Find a way (see this column in Idler 53) to reduce your employment to three days instead of five. Embrace minimalism and the anti-consumerist mindset so that you can afford the reduction in income. A three-day work week is not so bad: you have the novelty of a first day in the office after a long weekend, the relief of a hump day, and then the Friday Feeling before another long weekend. The diversity of feeling along your three days and the reduction in resentment about the work’s infringement upon one’s life will help you to avoid becoming a rusting shed engine.

Lead a good life outside work. Harry Hill once said a bizarre thing to a heckler, a retort now famous among comedians. He said “You say that to me now, but I know that when I get home, there’s a nice roast chicken in the oven.” What he meant is that he’s got other stuff going on, a private treat waiting for him outside his rather silly job. It’s easy to fall into a cycle of returning from work at 6pm to nothing but television and some utilitarian cookery before the desperate need to sleep. This is a considerably rust-promoting pattern and it’s a life your managers and employers are perfectly happy for you to lead, regardless of any noise they like to make at conferences about reducing rustout. Defy them.

Despite learning of the condition they’ve dubbed “rustout,” the solution proffered by office managers is to pile more work onto the bored wage slave, to find a balance between explosion and implosion. What kind of a world is that? Escape it.

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If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Originally published in Idler 62.

Patience, at the risk of sounding like an aunty, is a virtue. It really is. Patience keeps you sane when you’re waiting for a bus and, more vitally, is the key to escaping The Hot New Thing.

The Hot New Thing is a kind of curse. It leaves you forever dissatisfied, slurps the money from your wallet, shatters your sense of perspective, and wastes your time. It is fuelled rather negatively by what the kids on social media call “FOMO,” the Fear of Missing Out. It requires a lot of undignified chasing and “keeping up,” two things that are inherently anti-idle.

The Hot New Thing is also anti-idle in that it requires you to act! You have to tune in at a particular time, get yourself down to a certain place before it all runs out, gobble it up before the world moves on. Meanwhile, what we might call The Good Old Stuff doesn’t require anything of you at all. It’ll just float into your lap when you need it. You’ll be browsing the shelves of a library or flipping through the sale rack, and there it will be.

The Hot New Thing is expensive, not because it’s good but because it’s hot. It’ll be cheaper later on when it’s cooled down. In fact, it will probably be free later because the world won’t care about it anymore, and supply and demand will have relieved it of a price tag.

The Hot New Thing is rude. It jumps the queue. There you are, in your idler’s deckchair, minding your own business and savouring a lovely old Penguin, when suddenly The Hot New Thing pops up and demands attention. Well, I’m sorry but it can wait. You’re not obliged to pick up the telephone just because it’s ringing. Culture is not a whack-a-mole, to be anticipated in a state of urgent readiness and then seized upon and savaged. Life is not about rolling as much claptrap through your system as possible and getting it all safely into the outbox.

Worship of The Hot New Thing would have the world in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. Even as it’s happening, what professed to be The Hot New Thing is cooling and The All-New Hot New Thing is on its way. In the cinema, they show trailers for movies due for release in a month’s time or “next summer” or “in the fall,” and you think “Jesus, I’ve only just sat down to watch this one.” The film industry wants you excited for dinner before you’ve even had your breakfast.

The cultural filter that comes to your rescue when you escape The Hot New Thing is remarkable. When you live perpetually five years behind everyone else, only the finest things reach you because history has already had its way. This week I watched two good movies — Birdman and Nightcrawler — because their reputation as films worth watching has remained intact for five years, not through marketing but through evolution. The most popular films of the same year were called Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and Maleficent. Who cares about any of that lot now? What a load of junk! And yet at the time, they were The Hot New Thing. If you’d gone to see Maleficent on its opening weekend like a good little consumer you’d have wasted your time and money. You could have been enjoying the very best of 2009 instead and then, five years later, watching Nightcrawler and Birdman for 50p from a Glasgow Cancer Research shop, bypassing Maleficent, whatever that might have been, entirely.

And that’s just the five-year filter. I recently saw Network (1976) and Some Like it Hot (1962) for the first time. I read Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941) — as recommended by John Newlands in the Idler letter pages — and Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). These were joyful and surely among the finer fruits of the twentieth century, and yet cost not a penny thanks to the public library and a little patience. Good things remain fresh almost forever or are, better yet, timeless. A Beano from five years ago (5p on eBay or free in a dentist’s waiting room) is basically the same thing as this week’s Beano (£2.75). Good things come (there’s my aunty again) to those who wait.

Older books or films or records are too often seen as landfill or yesterday’s news. Worse still, anything with a whiff of “classic” about it might be consumed as some sort of wholesome moral roughage — that terrible feeling of “I really should have read Of Mice and Men by now.” Something old and whose reputation has survived is not necessarily high-minded or highbrow though. Think of Gremlins (1984) or Stephen King’s first five books (1974-1978) or Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927).

Speaking of Holmes, I broke my ethic of patience in 2010 to watch Sherlock on the BBC iPlayer as soon as it came out. I didn’t care for it. Cumberbatch is acceptable as Shirley but at least half the enjoyment of Holmes is the escape from modern life and onto the frosted flagstones of 19th-Century Baker Street, so a modernisation would need to add something extraordinary to make up for all those dreary, managerial skyline shots of the Oligarchs’ London, gherkins and all. Andrew Scott’s portrayal of Moriarty is almost as cringeworthy as everyone’s pretending to like it. Today, Sherlock, The Hot New Thing of 2010, is barely remembered and nobody seems to like Cumberbatch anymore at all. It never became The Good Old Stuff. I should have trusted my rule and waited.

You can enjoy The Good Old Stuff in peace without being cast asunder in The Big Conversation. Nobody’s interested in your thoughts about a movie from six or sixty years ago. Unless they are, of course, in which case you’ve got a friend worth keeping.

The wise idler allows things to age a little — to congeal and marinate in time — before letting them in. The wise idler is patient.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Originally published as “Cut Back” in Idler 64.

Hairdressing? What a scam! Just because hair growth itself is inescapable–advancing like the undead, imperceptibly but inevitably–the barbers think they’re inescapable too, that we’ll come crawling back in six weeks’ time for more of the same abuse. Well, I’m calling them out. You think you’re so special with your handlebar mustaches and your oh-so-hilarious “cock grease,” but it’s just a pair of scissors, mate! Anyone can do it.

Samara and I have been cutting each other’s hair. It hasn’t even made us look insane and it categorically has not involved a pudding basin. Once every couple of weeks, we put a beach towel down on the floor, position a chair on top of it, and once the sitter sits, we get stuck into our loved one’s head.

I was nervous at first. I didn’t want to give my favourite person a wonky haircut and for her to have to go out the next day looking like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber. Worse still, I was afraid I might hurt her. I didn’t want to sneeze and then to look down and see my beloved’s ear floating in a cup of tea.

But fear is worth fighting–and so is the world of barbering–so the experiment was worth a shot. It would feel good to learn something new after so many years of unlearning things while sitting in barbers’ chairs, staring mindlessly into the purple parallel universe reflected in the barbicide. “I’ll do it,” I said, and we invested in a pair of cordless hair clippers. Here’s what we found:

1. You save money

Our journey into skull topiary began when Samara was charged £30 at a women’s hairdressers for a cursory trim. She’d recently had her hair cut into the rather fetching pixie style, and while £30 always seemed pricey in the past, it was now downright ridiculous.

This has been a longstanding inequality, hasn’t it? That women should pay so heavily for the haircut a man would get for a fistful of bollock-warmed pocket change including various expired coins and a small plastic washer. Women with short hair could conceivably go to a men’s barbershop, but they’re often refused and frankly, even I with my humongous penis don’t feel comfortable in the hyper-masculine world of the barbershop with its football and “banter” and somethings-for-the-weekendses. My girlfriend’s desired Mr Spock haircut can be achieved in about five minutes, so such a high fee is illogical, Captain.

2. Never talk to a hairdresser again

I wish I could agree with friend of the Idler Bill Drummond that barbers are worthy of being interviewed for an art project. I’m sure they’re as interesting as anyone else if you get to know them properly, but in the fifteen-minute intervals I’ve spent with them on a strictly economic arrangement, they usually expose themselves as, well, somewhere on the reactionary side of normative and, in any case, incapable of following instructions. I’m absolutely certain they’re not all like this but my last hairdresser, after muttering something appalling in response a radio news item about Israel, scratched my ear with the scissors, drawing a spectacular geezer of blood. Being able to say “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” was almost, but not entirely, worth it. Also, my unasked-for Playmobile haircut looked like it was on sideways. So yah-boo to the lot of ’em, all the way to wherever it is hairdressers go when they die. Hell. That’s the one.

3. Stay sharp

Thanks to the frugality and convenience of home barbering, you can do it whenever you like and, as such, stay perpetually sharp. It becomes regular maintenance like shaving or trimming your toenails. You never have to endure periods of having slightly-too-short hair or hair that is overdue for a cut. You can do it on a whim, whenever you like. We now cut each other’s hair every couple of weeks, a regularity that would have been too expensive before.

4. It’s easy and fun to learn

There is something in the region of seven million styling tutorials available, for free, on YouTube, and the people who present them tend to me funny and adorable. It also suggests that removing one’s own surplus fur in the interests of creativity and self-sufficiency is on the rise among young people, which is a heartening thing.

5. Creativity

I like how hairstyling is a bit arty, a way to bring some creative sauce to everyday life. We can take inspiration, bring ideas into life with ease, follow up on styles we’ve seen about town or in films. I’m currently working towards a David Lynch look myself–that is, the hairstyle of David Lynch himself, not a hairstyle inspired by the general ambiance of Twin Peaks. That’s too creative.

6. It’s a nice way to give each other attention

As a way to spend time together, it’s a nicer and more engaging activity than watching the latest platter of twaddle served up by Netflix. If you do each other in the same evening, it serves as a little bonding exercise, like a couple of monkeys grooming each other. I like to luxuriate in combing her hair and generally paying tribute to her through this small act of personal service. It’s nothing short of a way to show love.

It makes me think of my Grandad whose hair was trimmed weekly by my Nan. We all found this very, very funny at the time (why didn’t the tightwad just go to the barber like anyone else?) but the decision to bring this particular service in-house now strikes me as wise, loving, and frankly, a little bit punk rock.

You don’t have to have a partner to bring hairdressing in-house. Your hairdressing technique can be completely self-sustained so long as you’re happy with a simple style. Some Japanese monks shave their heads themselves, every morning according to writerly monk Shoukei Matsumoto. You can even buy a special gizmo for a fiver on eBay that lets the monastically-inclined make quick work of a one-man crewcut.

6. Bring it in-house

Cutting your own hair or that of your partner is part of a broader parable about ceasing to outsource important duties. Duties like cleaning, repairing, gardening, cooking and childcare can be outsourced to professionals in various ways, but these are precisely the things we should do for ourselves if we seek to bond with our immediate environment (as a flaneur does), to live mindfully, to live beyond commercial or consumer concerns, and to live the truly idle life. It was always a paradox of idling that we take personal responsibility–the DIY ethic of punks–to live more freely in the long run.

So give it a go, I say. You’ve nothing to lose: in an absolute worst case scenario, you’ll need to shave your head down the wood. But you’re unlikely to trepan anyone. If you have a significant other, cut their hair (if they want you to — and not in their sleep — or yours) and ask them to cut yours. It’s a lovely night in, saves money, lets you be a bit creative, and gives you an enshrined-in-law right to chuck a brick through any barbershop window*.

*it does no such thing — Ed.

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If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.