In How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden, Shannon Drifte offers the most comprehensive articulation to date of what scholars are now calling the Domestic Petroleum School of existential thought — a loosely affiliated movement which argues that the human condition is best understood as a form of amateur backyard prospecting.
Drifte’s thesis, though deceptively practical in tone, is resolutely metaphysical: life, she posits, is a plot of land — owned, borrowed, or inherited — beneath which lie the raw, untapped hydrocarbons of purpose and fulfilment. The central task of existence is to locate, drill, and refine these subterranean reserves before one’s personal lease on consciousness expires.
Her methodological contributions are considerable. Chapter 4’s “Seismic Mapping of Emotional Topsoil” synthesises Jungian archetypes with the soil composition charts of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. In Chapter 8, “Derricks of the Soul,” she proposes a typology of psychological drilling rigs, from the Stoic Auger to the Freudian Rotary Bit. While some critics have accused Drifte of intellectual overreach, her unabashed interdisciplinarity is precisely what gives the Domestic Petroleum School its vigour.
It is in her praxis, however, that Drifte’s work becomes truly radical. The now-famous London Signing Marathon — in which she autographed over 12,000 copies without pause — is widely interpreted by Drifteans as a performative act symbolising the ceaseless, unglamorous labour of inner excavation. The feat, like her prose, was both monumental and faintly absurd, a combination that is the hallmark of all great existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus to, now, Drifte.
Ultimately, How to Find Oil in Almost Any Back Garden is less a self-help manual than a manifesto for dignified survival in a capricious universe. Whether one accepts her petroleum metaphor as literal, symbolic, or purely satirical, Drifte has ensured her place in the annals of philosophical literature — somewhere between the compost heap and the crude oil barrel.
Selected Reading List for those interested in exploring Driftean Studiesfurther.
1. Balthorp, H. (2019). Petroleum as Psyche: Hydrocarbon Imagery in Late Capitalist Self-Help. Salford University Press.
2. Delgado, M. & Simons, F. (2021). “From Derrida to Derricks: Post-Structuralist Approaches to Backyard Extraction.” Journal of Semiotic Geology, 14(2), 57–81.
3. Drifte, S. (2017). Preliminary Notes on the Backyard Sublime. Self-published, spiral-bound edition, withdrawn after hosepipe ban.
4. Hargreaves, L. (2022). “Hydrospirituality and the Auger of the Soul: A Comparative Analysis of Drifte and Teilhard de Chardin.” The Theological Mineralogist, 8(1), 112–143.
5. Kwon, Y.-S. (2020). “Refining the Self: Petrochemical Allegory in Contemporary Motivational Literature.” Critical Reservoir Studies Quarterly, 33(4), 211–239.
6. MacIntyre, A. (forthcoming). Ethics in the Age of Backyard Oil: Virtue Theory and the Domestic Petroleum School. Weston-Super-Mare University Press.
7. Pritchard, D. (2018). “Emulsions of the Heart: On Love, Loss, and Lubricants in Drifte’s Early Work.” Romantic Mineral Studies, 2(3), 87–104.
8. Zheng, R. (2024). “Pipeline as Pilgrimage: Infrastructure, Ritual, and Self-Discovery in Drifte’s Later Essays.” Anthropology of the Unrefined, 5(2), 9–35.
