One of the characteristic flaws of our minds is to exaggerate how fragile we might be;
to assume that life would be impossible far earlier than it in fact would be. We imagine
that we could not live without a certain kind of income or status or health; that it would
be a disaster not to have a certain kind of relationship, house or job. This natural tendency
of the mind is constantly stoked by life in commercial society, which adds to our sense
of the number of things that should be considered Necessities rather than Luxuries. This kind
of society goes to extraordinary lengths to get us to feel that we really do need to go
skiing once a year, to have heated car seats, to fly in Business, to own the same kind of
watch as a famous conductor and a jumbo-sized fridge, and to lay claim to lots of friends,
perfectly muscular health and a loving, kind, sex-filled relationship. In fact, our core
needs are much simpler than all this. We could in fact manage perfectly well enough with a lot less.
Not just around possessions but across every aspect of our lives. It’s not that
we should want to: it’s simply that we could. We could cope quite well with being rather
poor, not being very popular, not having a very long life and with living alone. We could
even, to put the extreme instance forward, cope with being dead; it happens all the time.
But we forget our resilience in the face of the risks we face. The cumulative effect of
our innocence is to make us timid. Our lives become dominated by a fear of losing, or never
getting, things which we could (in fact) do perfectly well without. The ancient Roman
philosopher Seneca had great success running what we would now call a venture capital firm.
He owned beautiful villas and magnificent furniture. But he made a habit of regularly
sleeping on the floor of an outhouse and eating only stale bread and drinking lukewarm water.
He was reminding himself that it wouldn’t ever be so bad to lose pretty much everything
– so as to free himself of nagging worries of catastrophe. The realisation gave him great
confidence. He never worried so much about what might happen if a deal went wrong because,
at the very worst, he’d only be back on the kitchen floor next to the dog basket,
which was – in the scheme of things – OK. Seneca was initiating an important move. By
continually renewing our acquaintance with our own resilience – that is, with our ability
to manage even if things go badly (getting sacked, a partner walking out, a scandal that
destroys our social life, an illness) – we can be braver because we grasp that the dangers
we face are almost never as great as our skittish imaginations tend to suggest. In the Utopia,
our culture would stop continually presenting us with rags to riches stories. It would instead
do something far kinder – and, incidentally, far more conducive to the kind of courageous,
entrepreneurial optimism our societies currently ineptly try to foster. Our culture would be
continually presenting us with charming non-tragic tales of riches to rags stories, stories in
which people lost money, partners and social standing but ended up coping really rather
well with their new lives. We’d see them moving out of the penthouse into a humble
cottage and having really rather a nice time tending to a small flower-bed and discovering
tinned food. Our culture would not be recommending such scenarios, just lessening the grip upon
us of certain deep but misplaced fears that so often hold us back from trying and succeeding.
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