A book about breaking out of the status quo, ESCAPE THE SYSTEM: A Pocket Book for People Who Are Done explores how we are socialized into fighting for hierarchy, status, or external approval. How exhausting this system can be: keeping people striving towards a trajectory like a hamster on a wheel. The anonymous author (whose pen name is Mister Nobody) asks what it means to take a step back and disengage, rest, find out what you love and what fulfils you—and then choose to respond by building your life on your own terms. It might not be comfortable, and you may get many objections; but there are still pathways to fulfilment without the motivations of external approval, acknowledgement, or rewards.
The text is short, simple, and written in the style of a children's book (with only a few sentences per page). Mister Nobody argues that it's made to make the reader feel uncomfortable, to question. Although it seems simple (and it is), it's also profound. Such sentences as "Skill exists without credentials" and "The system inserts itself, then claims credit" ask the reader to question whose knowledge is taken into consideration. This fits, for example, with questions about disregarded knowledge systems that may not be shared within a university context, or systems that claim knowledge while shutting out those who share it. Mister Nobody is inviting us to see that the emperor might not actually have any clothes on.
Likewise, the author asks readers to reflect and move towards autonomy by pointing out that each person has an inner compass: "Freedom is… the moment you stop asking, 'What should I be doing?' and start asking, 'What do I want to build next?'" There's no argument, no call for anarchy; just the move towards a simpler life, filled with less obligation and greater choice. Though some readers may want more guidance, ESCAPE THE SYSTEM practices what it preaches. Rather than spelling out how to get there, the book simply hands you the space to figure it out.
Mister Nobody's text reads as bullet points in places, and there are no examples—which means that every reader is likely to fill in the gaps in a unique way. Ultimately, ESCAPE THE SYSTEM is a truly systems-free text: a move beyond systems of knowledge to the point where each person will interpret it based on their own experience. This is very clever. The final irony is that a book focusing on autonomy is authored by Mister Nobody.
Mister Nobody's ESCAPE THE SYSTEM: A Pocket Book for People Who Are Done is a short, radical little book that's deceptively simple, genuinely thought-provoking, and terribly clever. It won't tell you what to do, and that is entirely the point.
~ Nicci Attfield for IndieReader