Five Points

Even in our own version of Utopia, we would likely be uncomfortable, anxious, and dreaming of alternatives. Reality can't compete with our imaginations, and emotions. The best I think we can do is find more beautiful questions. In the mean time, it is easy to spin our wheels, and feel stuck. The Yogi who brought Sivananda Yoga to the West felt it was best to keep it simple. While you are searching for difficult answers, set a solid base by answering 5 much easier, beautiful questions. Are you exercising? Are you breathing well? Are you making space for proper relaxation? Are you eating properly? How is your mental health? Proper exercise, breathing, relaxation, diet and positive thinking is a great base for coping with whatever life throws.

City States

My first trip to one of the original City States

City States make more sense to me than Nation States. We underestimate how modern cultural identities are. Not that they don't have flavours that run deep, but that the combinations are new, and the sources not as obvious as we think. Ideas have a long history of wandering free and ignoring the Game of Thrones. Our identities are connected ideas, not a fixed essence.

Standardised languages, money, flags, anthems that brought together warring smaller groups often squashed uniqueness out of existence. Conquerors regularly won by feeding and supporting local divisions. Our memories are shorter than the lingering influences of our experiences. Our identity can be that of the conqueror before the current conqueror. 

A Nation State combines and tries to create a supra-culture within borders. Most modern borders have been drawn up in the last couple of hundred years. Borders were flexible and fuzzy when Empires ruled the world. 

Ultra-local politics allows for conversation and community. My Utopia would be Global league of Cities partnered with surrounding Rural areas. With free movement of people between them, and paths to citizenship. Global Citizens with local power.

A 1999 Sketch of the Parthenon

Interdependent Utopias

Utopia's are important. They allow us to dream. As long as they don't distract us from the beauty of the world we are in right now. When we arrive, we will still have our dreams. Our dreams will still be different. We think in contrasts.

I dream of a world full of flavour. A world where we have conquered the restraints of physical scarcity. Where we are able to invest our time in the creation of meaning rather than surviving.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

I believe in a combination of Human Rights and the Rule of Law that allows agreement on trade-offs between freedom and compromise. We have lots of things that are important to us. Jonathan Haidt calls them our Moral Foundation - Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Respect/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation. We also don't know what works. These common ingredients get combined in different proportions in different societies. I believe in the free movement of people, goods, services and ideas between societies, where these smaller societies may have social contracts that differ from each other. The individual societies can have rules for how that assimilation of the free moving parts would work. Human Rights should provide the foundation for that. A world that finds a balance between our tribal instincts and the desire to build a global society where we experience our shared best. Where we can protect the things we love. Where we can learn from each other.

 

The world is on path to this Utopia. With a step back for perspective, it is getting safer and we are getting richer. We are chipping away at our prejudices - gender, social class, age, religion, race, ethnic group, language, sexuality. There are ideas like a Universal Basic Income and Open Borders which could end poverty. Enough is less than we think. There is enough for all of us to have enough. Then we can dive deep into whatever unique or combined flavours and emotions give us the meaning we seek. We can create stories. We can dance. We can sing. We can find something that challenges us and develop a sense of mastery. We can find flow. We can savour relationships. 

I am a strong believer in a world where we empower each other. We don't need to look towards grand plans. We should be micro-ambitious. If we work on our own basic competence and we build relationships with people outside our bubble, we will chip away at the big problems. Big plans have unintended consequences. The bigger the gap between the plan makers and those the plans affect, the bigger these consequences can be. Instead, we can focus on cooperating and seeing each other. Central Planners can never substitute for real Community. Our path to our Utopia is our Central Plan. 

The heart of my Utopia is community, and that community already exists. I just have to make the time for it. Two years ago today, I declared 'Independence'.  I had got to the point where the engine I had built could finance my own basic income. My money could be the breadwinner while I was a homemaker. By deciding I had enough, I could focus on using my time in ways I wasn't trying to monetise. Capitalism is designed around scarcity. In the specific cases where there is supply and demand, it can shift resources in a way that is astonishingly good at creating wealth. It isn't great at distributing it. It isn't great at community. By creating limits around my Capital's world, I could free my Labour to do what it was designed for. Capital is designed for work. Labour is designed for love.

I want my labour to be directed to helping each other find and share our Interdependent Utopias.

Building a Community

At some stage I would like to start a company. I have been plotting for years with some friends. The name of this company has shifted from 'Happiness Inc' to 'Savour Centre' to 'Muse'. The name doesn't really matter, nor does the company. What I am interested in is how we go about community building.

150 People

There is a magic number below which a group of people can know each other, and know how the others know each other. This reduced size also means Tacit Knowledge can be shared. Tacit Knowledge is the stuff we know, but don't necessarily even know we know. Tacit Knowledge is the stuff that can't be explained other than through interaction. We can learn from each other by spending time with each other. Tacit Knowledge is the reason honesty isn't about telling the truth in words, it is about spending time with people. 

Sustainable Community Wealth Fund 

I would like this company to be able to pay everyone a Universal Basic Income. This income would be independent of whether they showed up at work. It would have no strings. It would be for life. I would like the company to be able to build up a fund to be able to support this independently of any other activity. Like a Sovereign Wealth Fund. This fund would act as a muse for the ideas that get generated. The company would be free from thinking only about ideas that can be monetised. Someone's job may then be to visit people in Retirement Homes. Someone else may work as a sport's coach in poorer communities. A UBI would free members of the community to lift their eyes from living hand to mouth.

Representative

We tend to end up working largely with people with similar skill sets. There may be some variety, but only where those are seen as complementary to each other in pursuit of a very narrow shared goal. I would like this company to be able to break down the obstacles the people in it have to understanding other people in the world. It should be diverse enough to open paths of communication between different world views. The hiring process at most companies is a filter, trying to find 'the best of the best'. This type of hiring process reinforces the walls between us. I would want to build a community that helps us see each other.

Relationship Focused

Most of our grand plans have unintended consequences. The world is too complicated for us to understand in any other way than our own chosen story. If we can be micro-ambitious, and work on the relationships between any two random people, I believe we can tap into the tacit knowledge we have. If interactions encourage creativity, reward creativity and constrain activity that doesn't benefit both people - the knock on effect to the broader community can only be positive. I believe the big problems will solve themselves if we focus on creating more friendships.

Catalyst

'Utopia for Realists' talks about a 15 hour work week. Some people would still work 60-100 hours even if they didn't have to. They love their jobs. My concern is that sometimes work becomes a default and we lose perspective about the other things that matter. We become defined by our jobs. We become seduced by our success. I would want to see a company that enhances the other aspects of peoples lives. That supports and strengthens other relationships. I like to see work as a catalyst for life.

Building Communities = Building Meaning

Post Work World

I regularly write about my excitement about a 'Post Work' world. I am not against the idea of work in the sense of engagement. I consider myself far more engaged since I stopped 'working'. What I am excited about is moving to a world without the Monetising Filter. Not all ideas make good business ideas. There are quite specific criteria about what makes a good business. The best books I know of on the subject are Michael Porter's 'Competitive Advantage' and Benjamin Graham's 'The Intelligent Investor'.

I have been writing daily for a year and a half, and have yet to earn £10 from that endeavour. That doesn't make writing a bad idea. Having studied businesses for several years, I have a good idea of what I would need to do to monetise my writing. Frankly that is a bad idea. If I want to make money there are better ways for me to go about it. For me, it was a case of sitting back and deciding what was important to me. A lot of the things I enjoy doing are really cheap. Wikipedia is awesome. I can get lost in it for hours for free. I have amazing friends and spending time with them is my idea of the good life.

I actually enjoyed my job. I loved studying businesses. I loved understanding how they worked. A lot of investment is very philosophical. No one really knows exactly how things work. There is a lot of trial and error, and huge scope for learning. What I found frustrating was the constraint on my time. I felt time impoverished. I felt that I was prioritising work over other things that were important. In my view more important. I am now in a position to make time for people who make time for me. That is the most important thing for me.

I know this puts me in an incredibly privileged position. Most people can not simply decide to cut back drastically on their expenses and live a simpler life. They don't have the finances to sustain that. I think more people could do this than realise it, but I also know that is not the choice many would make. Cutting back expenses is emotionally difficult. We are used to trying to steadily improve our lives through a capacity to slowly increase how much we spend. Either because of savings or career progression. The idea of stopping that progression is not attractive to a lot of people. A lot of people love their work. Awesome.

So a 'Post Work' world doesn't mean people would need to stop doing things they find fulfilling because a machine can do it better. It just means that in deciding how to spend our time, we will be able to expand our options beyond things that can be monetised in some way. 

In my Utopia, there would be a Sovereign Wealth Fund for Global Citizens. It would pay a Universal Income sufficient to cover the first few rungs of Maslow's Hierarchy. Everyone would be able to afford food, water, warmth, rest, safety and security. This doesn't mean we would need to stop working, and people who like fancy stuff can still work for it. It just means that we would be free to work on things that provide other incentives like relationships, mastery, and actualisation.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Rank That Reeks

I am all for being visionary or idealistic and imagining your version of Utopia. I am all for working towards it. But:

(1) My version is very different from other people's versions

(2) My version isn't going to happen, and 

(3) Being in Utopia is less Utopian that getting there.

I have always had a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to authority. I don't like being told what to do. I don't like feeling like I am doing something that anybody else could do. That whole wiring of 'wanting to be special'. I also get very uncomfortable telling people what to do. Particularly if you know the person doesn't want to do it, and you are having to 'pull rank'. I don't like rank. My favourite successful people are the ones who don't reek of rank. Most times when you are particularly competent at something, you have cultivated another area of incompetence in exchange because of the focus required.

I am also a sceptic when it comes to delegation and outsourcing. I know people who will laugh at me for this. I used to be very keen on getting rid of tasks I wasn't better than other people at. The theory of competitive advantage is that if everyone focuses purely on what they do best, and trades, we all do better. I think that is theoretically true, up to a point, but that it comes at a cost. The cost is empathy and communication challenges. If you don't try a task, or see it as beneath you, your rank is likely to reek. At some point, you can get to enough. Beyond that point, I think the cost of outsourcing outweighs the benefits.

If a task is purely repetitive with zero creativity, we are probably going to be able to get a machine to do it. I am not a work for works sake person. I get that repetitive tasks can be meditative. They can become an artform. Sweeping can be Kung Fu and all that Jazz. Most people who are sweeping aren't doing Kung Fu and would rather be doing something else. If what they are doing is creative, it hasn't been done before. The person delegating the task doesn't know what it involves. They are just setting a challenge.

Yes Yes, Sweeping can be Kung Fu

The problem comes in when work becomes a continual evaluation. The subordinate is constantly trying to impress their boss, and so is unlikely to be able to be completely honest about the difficulty of the task. One of the best measures of happiness is apparently how far away from you your boss is. An easy task may be hard. A hard task may be easy. The structure of a Boss-Employee relationship is that the aim of the employee is to prove themselves, and improve themselves. It isn't a partnership. The only way to understand a task is to roll your sleeves up and get involved. Again, the successful people that have impressed me are never the ones in the Ivory Towers. They are the ones with dirt under their fingers.

So my Utopia involves a world where we don't work for work's sake. Machines do that. In my Utopia we work on creative problems. We work for flow. Or we sweep for Kung Fu's sake. But we do it together. The issue we have to figure out is that in a lot of people's Utopias, rank features quite strongly. In a lot of people's Utopias, climbing the ladder is Utopia. Utopia is relative.

Escape Hatch Problem

I have always felt very uncomfortable when I don't feel understood. When thoughts are bubbling round my head, I am able to recognised that they are only partially formed. Some will die. Some will survive. They will all change. I used to think honesty was about opening your mouth and letting those thoughts run free before they were ready. I really struggled with this. Often my ideas change as they are leaving my mouth. Often they change as I read the body language of the person who is hearing them. Speaking is one way of giving ideas life. Of testing them out away from the relative safety of our minds. 

Unless you feel like the person listening is on your side, it can feel like each utterance, each action, even each thought, is a test. Will the person stay? Rich and I talked about the 'escape hatch problem'. The world is so big now, and we are so mobile, that as soon as things become uncomfortable, we can move on. We don't have to fight with ideas that conflict with ours. We don't have to sit with things we don't like that aren't going to change. We always feel like the world is so big, we just have to find our own individual Utopia.

The Escape Hatch Problem

My Utopia hasn't solved all its problems. It still has death, disease, fighting, and disagreement. It still has people who do things completely differently to me. It still has people I don't understand. The thing that defines my Utopia is that issues don't get more mental space than they deserve. Suffering is normalised. If a pain is Chronic, it is recognised. The sufferer receives empathy. The sufferer is not defined by their Chronic pain. They are able to participate and enjoy the other things life has to offer. My Utopia is defined by improved communication and an expanded definition of who we are.

I believe we are made up of connections. These connections are formed every time we interact with the world. What we do matters. What we touch. What we taste. What we say. The more we connect, the more meaning we create, and that is who we are. We are the meaning. I believe the more we are able to provide space for people to communicate without angst that connections will be severed, the more we will move towards my idea of Utopia.

Honesty isn't about the words. Honesty is space and time.