“Creativity is dependent entirely on mess. We need scrap, junk, or any old rubbish to exert our creative muscles and this book is no exception.“
Mess Theory is the first in a planned series of fictional works that explore ideas borrowed from — and deliberately misapplied to — Theory.
It is not theory in the academic sense.
It is theory as lived experience.
In this first volume, Mess Theory, the focus is on work: how people get jobs, fail to get jobs, survive jobs, and convince themselves that what they are doing has meaning — even when the systems around them clearly do not.
The book is set largely inside the absurd machinery of recruitment, employment, and “creative” labour, where rules are rigid, outcomes arbitrary, and everyone pretends that the process is rational.
Why Mess?
Mess Theory has been inspired by my belief that creativity is dependent entirely on mess. We need scrap, junk or any old rubbish to exert our creative muscles and this book is no exception. Mess Theory plays with the challenges of getting and securing gainful employment in the creative industries whilst providing an alternative insight into what that work can entail. ‘Creativity’ is one of those words which conjures up all kinds of shiny, warm and cosy feelings: but there is a darker side to that moon and Mess Theory pulls no punches in showing us what that is.
It’s in two parts: “How Not to Get a Job” and “A Day in the Life of the Creative”: whilst it is borne out of seriously lived experiences, we hope it offers you the opportunity smile, laugh or guffaw at those experiences, revisit your own experiences of employment and reflect on the job decisions you will have made during your own time. Mess is where things begin.
Creativity, employment, institutions, and identities rarely emerge from clarity or order. They emerge from:
- improvisation
- misunderstanding
- power imbalances
- rituals that no longer make sense
- and rules that exist only because they once existed
Mess Theory argues — through fiction, satire, and exaggeration — that mess is not a failure of the system, but its operating condition.
As the foreword makes clear, this book grew out of lived experience in the creative industries, graduate employment, and institutional culture — but refuses to tidy those experiences into advice or guidance.
The form of the book
The book is structured in two parts:
Part One: How Not to Get a Job
A series of interconnected episodes set inside an interview process run by a permanent panel — a hive-mind institution that follows “The Process” with unwavering seriousness, while producing outcomes that are arbitrary, cruel, and darkly comic.
Candidates are:
- interviewed for jobs they didn’t apply for
- rejected for reasons that don’t exist
- ejected politely and invisibly
- or, in one case, disappear altogether
The interview room becomes a closed system: logical on the surface, incoherent underneath.
Part Two: A Day in the Life of the Creative
The perspective shifts to “The Creative” – a singular figure inside a multinational organisation who is expected to solve every problem while remaining endlessly grateful, flexible, and disposable.
Here, creativity is no longer liberating.
It is instrumentalised, mythologised, and quietly weaponised.
The Theory sequence
Mess Theory is the first volume in a planned fictional sequence exploring different “theories” as ways of thinking about contemporary life:
- Mess Theory — institutions, work, creativity
- Complexity Theory — systems that cannot be controlled
- Chaos Theory — unintended consequences and instability
- Quantum Theory — uncertainty, observation, and narrative collapse
Each book will stand alone, but together they form a loose investigation into how people pretend the world is ordered while living inside systems that clearly are not.
A final note
This is not a guide to getting a job.
It is not a guide to being creative.
It is not a guide at all.
It is a book about what happens when everyone follows the rules — and nothing works anyway.
Where to go next
- For work and ethics → The Business Allotment
- For bodies and institutions → Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers
- For irritation and satire → There’s No Such Thing as an Englishman
- For the next step in the sequence → Complexity Theory (forthcoming)