The Good Life for Wage Slaves: How to Live Beautifully as a White-Collar Drudge

Are you satisfied by your job? Do you leap out of bed each morning with a song in your heart, eager to travel swiftly and painlessly to a fabulous workplace where the layout and technology are perfectly adapted to your goals and needs?

Do you thrill each day to be reunited with quietly brilliant colleagues whose personalities fill you with energy and whose values are in tune with your own? Do you see precisely how your daily actions connect with your company’s ultimate purpose? Do you approve of your company’s purpose?

What of homelife? Do you return from work each evening with time and energy to get stuck into your rewarding, creative side projects? Do you have a good grasp of the sort of “home economics” mastered by your parents’ and grandparents’ generations, or do you find yourself emotionally exhausted and ready for Netflix by 7pm, increasingly alienated by what is now patronisingly described as “adulting”?

Don’t blame yourself. Blame the whole idea of worker-consumer lifestyle. It was built on shaky foundations and is hardly all it cracked up to be.

If your experience of work and consumer life is a screaming Hell of clueless, unsatisfying, underpaid, carcinogenic, insecure shambling that you never signed up for and is an affront to your years of difficult and expensive study, this book might be the helpful tome–or at least the shoulder to cry on–you’ve been waiting for.

In Escape Everything!, ROBERT WRINGHAM showed how the worker-consumer treadmill can be escaped once and for all. Now, with The Good Life for Wage Slaves, he offers survival strategies for those who can’t (or don’t want to) escape. Caught up in the hostile environment for immigrants when returning from Canada to his native Britain, Wringham was forced to return to a day-job for three years. “How embarrassing,” he says. He used his time as a research project–how to live well when circumstances conspire against escape–and this pithy volume is his final (final-final-final) report. It contains swearing. Also cats.