The desire to escape the day job expresses longing without a positive object
Evidence
‘I respect working hard but I dread a day job,’ asserts Burial. ‘Or a job interview. I’ve got a truant heart, I just want to be gone. I’d be in the kitchens, the corridors at work, and I’d be staring at the panels on the roof, clocking all the maintenance doors, dreaming about getting into the airducts. A portal. As a kid I used to dream about being put in the bins, escaping from things, without my mum knowing she’d put me out in the bins. So I’m in a black plastic bag outside a building and hearing the rain against it, but feeling all right, and just wanting to sleep, and a truck would take me away.’ — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 229
Categorization
- SEED: Burial’s fantasy of being put out in the bins as a child — refuge inside a black plastic bag — is a ready-made surrealist image of escape-as-disappearance.
- DEEPTHINKING: A longing-to-flee that cannot characterise what lies beyond — truant desire as pure negation without a utopian content — is a finely drawn existential hinge connecting work-avoidance to metaphysical homelessness.
- XREF: connects to: Downcast angels figure exiled ravers longing for guardianship — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 225; The desire to do ultimately reduces to a desire to be; Adolescent daydreaming is a narcissistic compensation for felt inadequacy (+1 more)