New Escapologist

Issue

Preview contentEdited by Robert Wringham

Typeset by Timothy Eyre

MMX

‒

Published August

© Copyright .e copyright for each article and illustration

in this publication belongs to the respective author or artist.

About this publicationWhat is this document?

It’s a sample selection of four items from a

magazine called New Escapologist. Each issue is

a compendium of funny and existential essays and

anecdotes relating to Escapology. To learn more

about our publications or to order a copy, visit

www.newescapologist.co.uk.

What is Escapology?

It’s about deftly avoiding the potential traps

of modern life: debt, stress, unrewarding

work, bureaucracy, marketing, noise and

over-government. It’s about embracing freedom,

anarchy and absurdity. It’s about overcoming

miserliness, passive-aggression, mauvaise foi and

submission. Escapology asks you to consider the

circumstances in which you would most like to

live and encourages you to engineer them.

Why produce a print magazine in the digital age?

We love the Internet and maintain a website

but theWeb has its limitations. Blogging and

podcasting are nicely guerrilla but don’t lend

themselves well to true quality. e old-fashioned

publishing process involves lots of editing and

sub-editing: it has the quality control that a web

production doesn’t have.

Can I write for the magazine or website?

Absolutely. If you want to write for the magazine,

please see the contributior guidelines online. We

also accept guest entries at our blog. Get in touch

via the website.

It’s alright for you with your publishing business but

how am I supposed to escape?

Actually, New Escapologist makes no money. You

can escape by embracing minimalism, embracing

simple pleasures, defeating Bad Faith and learning

how to use money. New Escapologist, we hope,

is a great source of information on how you can

escape.

An Invitation toNew Escapology

By R W

Illustration by Samara Leibner

If [the populus] were not mentally deficient, they would of their own accord have

swept away this silly system [of work, money and status] long ago.

—

Run Away! Run Away!

See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many

cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few

times in a dark alley on a Moroccan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.

—

D s, Ehrich Weisz—better

known as Harry Houdini—made popular

the art of escapology. By he had become a

sensation, performing his astonishing routines on

the Vaudeville circuits of Europe and America.

He could defy handcuffs, explode from the beery

guts of wooden barrels, flee locked jailhouses and

escape unscathed from the maddening Chinese

water torture cell. He was the David Blaine of his

time, except for the fact that Houdini was adored

by women and was seldom, if ever, accused of

being a wanker.

It was surely no coincidence that Houdini’s

popularity as an escape artist came about during

a time of technological and political revolution.

It was during the s that Ransom Eli Olds

implemented the first mass production of

marketable cars, omas Edison’s phonograph

made a commodity out of music and the colonial

expansion of Europe and America prompted the

birth of the somewhat unpleasant political period

known now as New Imperialism. Technologies

and movements initially plugged as liberating

would soon be discovered by thinkin’ types to

be nasty, horrible traps designed only to placate,

segment and enfeeble. When people become

dependent upon companies or governments to

entertain them, to transport them, to plan their

days and to import their goods, they forget what

it is to be free, alive and autonomous. It must’ve

been around this time that the concept of a

person being owned by his or her property rather

than the other way around was developed and the

nostalgia for simpler times kicked in along with

the desires to backpedal or in some other way

escape this new world of consumption, detritus

and gimmicks. And so the work of Houdini and

his contemporaries escaped the world of mere

curiosity into the world of metaphor.

is is not to say that progress should be

resisted, nor is it to suggest that there was ever a

time of perfect psychological or technological

harmony. Nonetheless, the ideal of a less

consumer-oriented, free and easy time provides

something to aspire to and to consider when

sitting in an open-plan office, doing pointless

work to pay off your pointless debts or to secure

your pointless social standing in a pointless city.

We are told to work hard and to appreciate

our freedom to do so; to pay into a pension

scheme; to pay money to the government; to pay a

mortgage or else suffer the humiliation of hunger

and squalor or be accused of being a crazy radical.

But what if there were another way? What if it

were possible to actually escape like Houdini and

get away from it all, permanently, ethically and

rewardingly? is is what New Escapologist was

founded to discuss.

e first rule of leading an interesting,

enriching life is to recognise your escape routes.

e second rule, of course, is to know when to

take them.

TWO TYPES OF ESCAPE ROUTE

W begins to think about the

various ways in which people try to

escape the boredom of the prescribed, expected

life, two major types of escape route emerge.

e first involves the temporary retreat into

simple escapist pleasures—going to the pub,

reading a cheap fantasy novel or consuming

vast quantities of hallucinogenic drugs as

though they were Jaffa Cakes. e second is

the attempt at permanent resettlement—by

moving to a countryside ecovillage, by escaping

to a lottery-funded villa on the seashore or

giving up and becoming a tramp—and involves

working toward a self-sufficient lifestyle and

the marvellous feeling of turning your back on

expectation.

So there are two types of escape route: the

active (running away and starting a commune)

and the passive (watching s every night).

Both allow for escape from normality but the

approaches to each are worlds apart.

e latter is done every single day by every

single one of us: it is the cigarette break at the

office; it is the me-time at the end of the day; it is

a cheap vacation in Prague or Ibiza or Blackpool.

e former, however, is a path for the hardcore

Escapologist: breaking out of the prison warded

by managers and conventional thinking once and

for all into a self-controlled world of one’s own

creation. But this is frowned upon by those in

charge: try getting planning permission for a tiny

woodland shack or see what the waiting list is

like for a humble city allotment. e bureaucrats

don’t do much to help freewheeling Escapologists,

even if we’ve been funding their systems one way

or another for the whole of our lives.

Paradoxically, the first escape route—the

hardcore church—is essentially the easier of the

two churches to which one might devote oneself.

Despite the bureaucratic problems involved and

the being branded as eccentric or a boat-rocker,

it is comparatively easier to be hardcore than

softcore. e ‘simple pleasures’ model involves a

lifetime of dedicated scheduling and the constant

seizing of spare time and stolen moments not

to mention the continuing struggle of actually

attending your unfulfilling job or checking bank

balances or shopping in supermarkets. e

hardcore church, on the other hand, involves

submitting to one simple direction: walk away.

Yes, you can walk away. Jean-Paul Sartre

tells us that all human beings are essentially

free: there are no physical shackles keeping us

in these awful places. You can get away from it

all at the drop of a decision—the stinking cities,

the traffic, the stress, the daily commute, the

mind-numbing boredom, the tabloid witch hunts

and the carcinogenic food—by simply walking

away. is is the one doctrine of the church of

hardcore escapology: walk away. Remember that

song from the mid-nineties by a band called Cast?

One of the verses went like this:

If you’ve played all the games they play

You played them yesterday

Walk away, walk away

If you’ve been, where they want to go

Seen all they got to show

Just walk away, walk away, walk away

T to the church of simple

pleasures and temporary retreats, we can

see that there is very little walking away involved.

In fact, the central doctrine of this church is to

continue plodding through the tough, prescribed

life of work and government but to make the

most out of those oases of me-time. It is the

‘fight’ to the hardcore church’s ‘flight’. e

problem, however, is that it’s a losing battle.

Our grandparents (and some of our parents) all

fought in at least one Great War on behalf of

their government and all they have to show for it

in the winters of their lives is a beat-up old Volvo

and a house on a council estate in which they live

in fear of the various anxiety-producing fictions

generated by the Daily Mail and the Sun.

e church of simple pleasures is healthy in

moderation. Even if I were to escape properly

and were to live on an arable farm in the middle

of nowhere with my best friends and some

Playboy bunnies and a solar panel, I would

probably want to take e Simpsons and Stephen

King along with me. Let us not throw out the

baby with the bathwater. But it is important to

remember that this church, while acting as a balm

to sooth the modern ailment, is temporary and

ultimately only goes to further feed the systems

of oppression. ese escape routes have, after

all, been provided by what Ken Kesey would

call e Combine to act as distractions from the

ideas of anarchy or more permanent channels of

escape. e doctrines of this church, while being

immediately liberating, are ultimately fallacious

and should ideally be employed as a stepping

stone path toward the hardcore church. It is a

recreational drug and it is important not to be

sucked in entirely.

e hardcore church is about anarchy and

self-sustainability. It is about the rejection of

government, the rejection of corporations and

the rejection of dependency at large. It is about

liberation and self-empowerment. Once a fully

paid-up member of this church, one will not

need anything from anyone else other than good

company. e comedian Simon Munnery once

opined that the only way to escape the rat race is

to refuse to be a rat. is sounds logical enough

to me and this is what the hardcore church

preaches. If you can grow your own veggies

and milk your own cow, you don’t need Tesco

anymore. If you can recycle your own poop and

filter your own water you will never again need

to tangle with those goobers at the council. If you

have a solar panel or a small wind turbine or both,

you can forget the meaning of electricity bills. You

will at last be able to say that you have escaped

the rat race.

MANIFESTO

I , the gay poet and journalist Brian

Christian de Claiborne Howard wrote a

sort-of manifesto of Bohemianism. He divided

a page into two halves labelled J’Accuse and

J’Adore and listed within the two halves the

things of which he approved and disapproved

and by extension what should and should not be

tolerated or aspired to when enjoying a Bohemian

lifestyle. It was a bit like a Facebook profile

but ninety-odd years prior to their invention

and less ugly. Among his J’Adores were

love, food, freedom and art and among his

J’Accuses were missionaries, bureaucrats and

other self-righteous party-poopers. It is with

Howard’s model in mind (for the Bohemian

tendency to be free and to rebel is at the

heart of Escapology) that something akin to

an Escapologist’s Manifesto can be drawn.

E F E T

Protestant work ethic Idleness

Convention Rebellion

Boredom Excitement

Consumption Creativity

Celebrity Equality

Cars Public transport

Noise Sound

Greed Humanism

Stagnation Exercise of mind and body

e corporation Self-sufficiency

Supermarkets Cottage industries

Television Books

Anxiety Rationalism

Government Anarchy

Solitude Community

Vanity Altruism

Objects Information

Fear of otherness Enrichment by otherness

NEW ESCAPOLOGIST

is is where New Escapologist comes in. Here

at New Escapologist we believe that the retreat

into fantasy and consumption and vice are valid

elements of everyday life and a result of uniquely

contemporary boredom, strife and pointless toil.

At the same time, we take the stance that these

retreats are temporary at best and that there are a

multitude of ways in which one can discover that

another world is possible.

e Anti-Cliché ManifestoHow do you live a life of originality? N S provides ten pointers.

A is a dead thought, one that drains all

the wit, youth and freshness from the world.

We use them when we have renounced beauty

and are content to eke out a miserable existence

consisting of stock phrases and stock experiences.

e path of originality is more challenging, yet

also far more exhilarating.

In this -point manifesto, I outline the

strategies that allow you to escape the heavy

chains of cliché and really fly.

. You see that

pavement, there is no reason why it has to be

like that. You see that blue sky, we can paint it

red if we want to. Nothing has to be the way it

is. We are blinded by convention and assume

that we have found the most functional way of

doing things. Forget so-called functionality! It is

based on a mean and mindless attitude towards

existence. Question everything and think what it

would be like if we could start again from scratch.

. Your personality is

like a garden. It can be neat and barren, wild and

messy, fragrant and colourful, or somewhere

in between. e sooner you realise that it is

cultivated by small interventions rather than

by razing it to the ground, the sooner you can

start being creative with your self. What seeds of

thought will you plant? If you do too much, will

some parts become neglected? When do you give

up on a patch of ground and start again? Cultivate

yourself a little bit each day and in Spring you will

flourish.

. Most people start from their

ego and look out on the world. At first it feels

comfortable, sitting within the big armchair of

the ego, but soon enough your thoughts ossify

and your feelings become stale. Ignore your ego

and keep nimble by being mindful. Don’t let the

‘I’ turn the experience into a cliché. If you are

picking your nose, channel all of your energy and

attention into picking your nose. Feel the clefts

and crevices, explore the hairs and catch that

bogey, experience the fullness of breath that you

get from a clear nose.

. If you really want to

build up your anti-cliché muscles, you have to

go against the flow. e current of modern life

is strong, but through various refusals, you can

explore other, more interesting tributaries. Once

your muscles are exercised by going against the

flow, it makes it much easier to swim to where

you do want to go.

. All that stuff that you

don’t use but think you might use at some distant

point in the future, lose it. To make space for

your new, non-clichéd self to flourish you have

to get rid of the things that are constricting your

growth. Anything that you haven’t used for a few

months is ripe for disposal.

. Find something that you find

interesting and then obsess about it. Learn as

much as you can about it, lose yourself in it.

Don’t just learn facts to impress other people,

learn things that no one else would even think of

asking. By making something your own, you lose

the indebtedness that prevents originality.

. Neuroscientists tell us

that if we change our bodily posture, our mental

chemistry is likewise changed. e same principle

applies if you decide to act in a certain way, your

brain will change. Act seriously, act as a parody

of other people, experience things as you want to

experience them rather than settling for reality as

it is. In the Victorian period, people had a public

persona that they separated from their private

self. We tend to look down on this nowadays,

but perhaps it is the only way to experiment with

your self successfully.

. Ultimately, nothing really matters.

In the short term, there may be consequences

for your actions but long term we are all just

temporary blips in an enormous and uncaring

universe. Don’t be scared, let go of your anxieties

and doubts.

. If you have a strong

opinion about something, change your mind

about it. Opinions are never so dull as when they

are adhered to without perspective. We believe

things because we look for evidence to support

them, blocking out anything that causes us to be

uncertain. By reversing your opinions, you can

see how the other side live. If you’re a lefty, try

being a righty, and vice versa. Discern your own

set of opinions rather than accept a pre-packaged

collection.

. If you’re looking at all of these

thinking that it sounds like a lot of work, then

don’t worry about the previous nine and just do

number ten: take action! Original or not, you

are worth nothing if you’re not prepared to take

action, make mistakes, and learn what fits with

you. Experiment and liberate yourself from your

old clichéd self.

Plot your escapeR W offers a ten-step escape plan.

W employed, it can be difficult to

find the time and energy to seriously

plot your escape. at’s why most people don’t

escape or even recognise that it’s a real option.

You’re too preoccupied with doing your job, with

commuting to and from it and with recovering

from the associated exertions. You also have

to contend with your own fears and internal

resistance. ankfully, New Escapologist is at

hand.

Your job is probably one of the main miseries

from which you would like to flee. Fortunately,

being paid to sit in front of a computer is a very

healthy circumstance from which to start plotting

your escape. My escape began in precisely this

environment and it is from here that you might

also begin:

.

is is the average weekly income for

a citizen and to settle for less is to squander

yourself. If you must sell a portion of your youth

for money, make sure it is at the going rate. If

your weekly income is significantly less than ,

your first task is to get promoted, to secure a pay

rise or to get a better job elsewhere.

. You will need moderately healthy

financial reserves in order to fund the first weeks

or months of your escape. Aim to save a useful

sum of money—I recommend no less than .

Let us call this sum your escape fund. is will

be harder to achieve if you’re in debt or subscribe

to unnecessary services. ere’s more on saving

money later in this section.

In order to get to your target more

quickly, sell off unnecessary assets. In business

this is called liquidation. Escapologists might

want to consider also being minimalists. Convert

unwieldy ‘stuff’ into mobile, liquid cash. You may

only want to do this for high-value goods: selling

individual s is seldom lucrative. Take a look

at Tim Eyre’s primer on simple living on page ??.

. Like the

convict who uses the prison gym to get in shape,

get as much experience as you can and of as many

flavours as possible: do favours for people, run

meetings, attend training courses, generate ideas,

talk to the boss, talk to the cleaners, manage a

budget, write reports, deliver presentations, make

the tea. Record all of this on your . As anyone

with an office job knows, most of your time at

work is spent skiving or doing useless shit. ere’s

even a word for it: presenteeism. Use some of

this time to maximise your skill set. is will

provide a safety net: you need to make yourself

re-employable in case your escape plan fails.

. It’s probably obvious

that your income must exceed your outgoings.

Bills can be avoided if you gradually eliminate

your dependencies on the services for which you

pay. Get rid of your car and become a pedestrian.

Get rid of your mobile phone by telling people

to use your house phone or email instead. Get

rid of home Internet if you have it at work. Get

rid of any other false liberty that only results in

bills. You will soon find an optimum outgoing:

the true cost of living. It will be much less than

it was before your elimination process and will

usually be the sum of your rent, food, house

phone, council or municipal tax and electricity.

Let us call this sum Cost of Living, for it will come

into play again later.

. is is the end of your career.

. Put

your stuff into storage (I can vouch for a company

called SafeStore, but there are lots of others).

Cancel all Direct Debits, except for the one

paying for your storage. Up until now, everything

has been prologue. is is the real beginning of

your escape.

.

e official

best cities in which to find this combination are

Zurich, Vienna, Vancouver, Geneva, Auckland,

Frankfurt, Sydney, Munich and Dusseldorf.

I can also personally vouch for Berlin and

Montreal. Rent a cheap apartment there. As

a rule of thumb, immigrant-heavy areas (such

as Kreutzberg in Berlin and Saint-Henri in

Montreal) are alive and inexpensive, have good

food, public transport and are popular with the

creative classes.

Use half of your escape fund to enjoy a long and

restful vacation. Explore the city; relax cheaply

or for free in parks, museums or libraries; make

friends; invite old friends to visit; eat, drink and

read. Enjoy yourself and celebrate your escape.

. Use the rest

of your time here—however much time your

escape fund allows—to invent a way to ensure

you’ll never have to go back to work. Remind

yourself of why you wanted to escape in the

first place: the drudgery, the early mornings, the

mindless submission, the waiting on pay cheques.

Never forget the conditions from which you are

escaping. ink up a cottage industry for yourself.

It must be either (a) fully automated, requiring

little work on your behalf or (b) fun. In either

event, the income generated by your cottage

industry must be equal to your Cost of Living.

Don’t try too hard. rough your period

of inactivity, you will probably discover over

poolside Margarita what you want to do. If you

need advice on how to concoct an automated

company, try e -hour Workweek by Timothy

Ferriss in which he describes such a self-operating

machine as a ‘muse’. Fabian Kruse writes about

this on page ??.

. from your

apartement or from a public library. When

the money starts to come in, you will have found

yourself either a muse or a vocation. In short, you

have escaped.

Try it. e worst case scenario is that your

cottage industry fails and you have to go back

to office drudgery, tail between your legs. If

this happens, you will at least have enjoyed an

extended vacation, lived abroad, tried and failed

at entrepreneurship. is is better than what

you’d have been doing otherwise. You’ll have some

interesting items to put on your and some

great stories to tell in the pub. Best of all, there

won’t be anything to stop you from trying the

whole thing again.

Editorial: For madmen onlyR W invites you to banish

Bad Faith and to embrace motility.

Illustration by Samara Leibner

[Aborigines are] dyed-in-the-wool free. ey go where they want, when they want,

doing what they want. […] Walkabout is the perfect metaphor for their lives. When

the English came and built fences to keep in their cattle, the aborigines couldn’t

fathom it. And, ignorant to the principle at work, they were classified as dangerous

and antisocial and were driven away to the outback. So I want you to be careful:

the ones who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive best. You deny that

reality only at the risk of being driven into the outback yourself.

—

F is our natural state of being. We’re

generally born with the capacity to make

our own decisions, to propel ourselves to where

we physically want to be. is natural state

should be inescapable, but we often convince

ourselves otherwise: we’ve found excuses (careers,

bureaucracies, class systems, strange correlations

between spiritual belief and how we behave)

to distract us from the vast and terrifying

wildernesses of absolute freedom and total

opportunity. We put together foolproof systems

of procrastination to prevent us from truly living

and the whole of society has agreed to go along

with them.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that our refusal to

embrace freedom makes complete sense. After all,

why would anyone want to be free? It’s hard to

deal with. When contemplating how free you

truly are, you experience a giddying vertigo unlike

anything else: thank heavens for mundane jobs.

Freedom may be natural, but so are

earthquakes and knob-rot. In a free state, you

must embrace nihilism, yet be self-motivated

enough to do things with no orders or job

description to guide you. Since nobody else

wants to join in with your experience of giddying

freedom, you have to to go against the grain,

defying the expectations of people who care

about you, building muscles of resistance to the

conventional distractions. It takes great personal

energy and courage to live in the free state offered

by nature.

Civilisation goes against nature. Jean-Jaques

Roussau wrote that all civilisation grows from

the erecting of fences: to curb our wanderings.

e exception to the rule, according to Japanese

novelist Haruki Murakami, are the Aborigines

of Australia: a native civilisation whose way of

life (until their enforced marginalisation) was a

perpetual walkabout.

e consolations of freedom barely make up

for the hard work of maintaining it, nor do they

compensate for the steadfast attitude required to

go against the grain. To return to the natural or

Aboriginal state, as Hermann Hesse might say, is

for madmen only.

ose madmen are Escapologists: the people

who rise to the challenge of freedom (or, more

specifically, of not being unfree), who decide to

cease daily pragmatism and, instead, chisel out

an unrestricted life, shrugging off the crippling

effects of Bad Faith.

e consolation of freedom is the exhilaration

of escape, the mule-stubborn pleasure of doing it

your own way and nobody else’s. Above all, it is

to experience the liberation of looking over the

default requests and saying ‘I’d rather not’.

BAD FAITH

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialist philosopher

and, surely, the mascot for this issue of New

Escapologist, said that this fear of freedom results

in Mauvais Foi or ‘Bad Faith’. Instead of seeking

freedom, we convince ourselves that everything is

hunky-dory in the world of ‘the trap’.

Perhaps, this is the biggest obstacle to

overcome on the path to freedom: realising

that nothing is actually preventing you from

escaping other than imaginary things: etiquette,

a perceived lack of time, money, career, social

status, expectation, commitments to things that

don’t really matter.

In a legal sense, Bad Faith is to deliberately

betray the spirit of an agreement. Sartre used the

term to highlight the gravity of the betrayal when

a person denies his or her own complete self. Like

it or not, human beings are usually born free. We

can overcome the imaginary things that make us

feel trapped at the drop of a decision. Bad Faith

is the natural enemy of the Escapologist, because

it is one of the main powers preventing us from

silently walking out of our offices, never to return.

Escape is possible. It is not an idealist fantasy.

To help overcome Bad Faith, it is prudent to

consider the worst case scenario of quitting your

job in search of pastures new. It is possible for an

escape plan to fail and you’ll later have to look for

another boring job. But who cares? If you have

to return to the office, you would still have an

extra-long holiday under your belt, along with

some stories to tell at the water cooler. On the

other hand, you’ve a very real opportunity to

escape. Ask yourself: what precisely are you afraid

of and how would you deal with it?

MOTILITY

No more dress codes, clockwatching, or

institutional twatspeak. All you have to do

is shrug off your mauvaise foi, as if it were a

no-longer-required evolutionary vestige, and

decide to be free.

Possibly the worst thing about holding down a

miserable corporate position is the fact that you’re

obliged to report to a specific place at a specific

time. I hated this aspect of work even more than

the unrewarding nature of the work itself, the

passive-aggressive colleagues and the constantly

changing organisational goals. No matter how

liberal the working conditions, I would always

resent the fact that I had to work to someone

else’s schedule: there’s no greater infringement on

personal liberty than shaping the way in which

people behave. Certainly, a degree of cooperation

is always required; at some point we’ll always

have to meet with certain people at certain times

in order to make mutually-beneficial decisions,

but, in the majority of workplaces, in which

people have their own job descriptions, their own

projects, their own set of aims, there is simply no

reason to have an entire department present at

the same time under the same roof.

ere’s a concept in biology called motility.

It refers to an organism’s ability to move

around freely. is is science’s analogue to the

existentialist observation that human beings are

essentially free. A spermatozoon, for example,

has motility, in that it will swim, freely, toward

its eggy goal. An ocean-dwelling sponge, on the

other hand, is almost entirely non-motile, or

‘sessile’. It just sits there in the sea, respiring and

excreting and watching True Blood on Sky .

Human beings, like cats or iguanas or toucans

or centipedes, are inherently motile. As long

as there’s no physical encumbrance, we can

run around, jump up and down, or roam

the Earth until our energy runs out and we

need to recharge. It is within our biological

means to move around without restriction. As

individuals, however, we would probably vary

along a spectrum, from motility to sessility.

How motile are you? A practitioner of

jumping—a fringe sport characterised by the

act of free-falling into natural ravines or from

the tops of skyscrapers—is extremely motile. A

coma patient, incapable of any physical movement

or independent cognition, would be extremely

sessile. Needless to say, we are somewhere on the

spectrum from one extreme to the other.

So that’s the question. How motile are you?

One secret of happiness would be to find the

right level of motility for you and to engineer a

life that sits precisely around it. An Escapologist

would probably be happiest with a fairly high

level of motility: to throw off the shackles of

traditional commitments and to hone a life of

proper freedom. is may not involve leaping

from the Chrysler Building in the style of our

-jumping friends, but simply freeing yourself

of the burdens of debt, material ownership, and

working too hard.

We limit our motility by saying we

‘must’ attend a depressing job or tend to

things—Orwell’s ‘everlasting idiocies’—with no

real benefit. You can escape these commitments,

but you must want to.

Banish Bad Faith. Embrace motility.