Try to describe what you actually need in order to live a flourishing life – including taking responsibility for others. It’s important to be explicit when undertaking this exercise. It’s not yet about cost.
The desire to be realistic means that we cut off avenues before we have had time to think them through and work out what version of them might be viable. In other words we tend to be realistic about what we can afford. But first we should be realistic about what we need.
Actually, there’s a refining process, by which you identify what are the fantasy elements and what are real – this takes time, but can lead to crucial gains in self-knowledge or collective knowledge. So, for most people, it’s not going to make any sense to say ‘I need a private jet’. Because, although that would be great fun, not many people truly need to travel at maximum speed very often in order to flourish.
Now try to cost these things that you need for a flourishing life.
Over the page is a breakdown of levels of expenditure for the flourishing of my family. It is an attempt to work out how much money my wife and I actually need, year by year.
* At the time of going to press £1.00 equated to 1.50AU$.
Rather than try to cut back on expenses, the ambition here is to be as accurate as possible about the things one needs for one’s flourishing – fully accepting that one may not be able to afford certain things that one actually needs. It’s painful. When I look at this account I get a bit desperate. We’re much closer to the ‘minimal’ column than the ‘true needs’ one, and the ‘expansive ideal’ feels very far away. But the point of the exercise isn’t meant to be self-humiliation. It’s meant to be a sober reality check. With this in view we can go on to consider what we need to do in order to get closer to meeting our true needs.
I want to look at a couple of cases in which people I know have adjusted their way of life to reflect their needs. It’s not that, on balance, they now spend less. It’s rather that they have focused their expenditure on what’s most important to them.
i. Derek and Jasmine
Derek and Jasmine have long been fascinated by architecture. But it’s not just that they like looking at buildings or reading interiors magazines. They want to live in interesting buildings. But in London this was completely beyond their means, so, about three years ago, they took a big decision to move to rural France. They were trying to find a place where they could live in what would really be quite a grand house, given their fairly limited resources.
Moving was difficult in some ways, because it meant leaving some close friends, and Derek had to change career. They were gambling on self-knowledge. They took the view that it was really important for them to live in a very old, fairly big house with an orchard. Near London that would have cost millions of pounds. In Normandy, the price tag was radically lower. But they had to believe that this kind of environment was so important to them that they should seek it out – even though that meant giving up on other things.
ii. The Jennings Family
The Jenningses decided to give up celebrating Christmas and birthdays so that they could go on extremely interesting holidays. It was really quite hard for their children who had to cope with many awkward moments amongst their peer groups – they never had new bikes, they didn’t have the status-giving gadgets and complicated toys their friends did. The gamble, in their case, was on the belief that spending time together walking across Scotland or visiting the classical ruins of Turkey would do more for their collective flourishing than getting a lot of presents.
In each of these cases there was a commitment to something that cost a lot of money. Derek and Jasmine and the Jenningses were asking themselves, in a strenuous way: what is it really important for us to do or to have? We should take guidance from their example:
Ask yourself first: In the long run, what are the activities, experiences and possessions that I should be concentrating on? Is a holiday more important than presents? Is the kind of house I live in more important than where it is? Amongst the great number of things we want, what are the most important for our flourishing? (These should be classed as needs.)
Then ask: What wants do I have that are, in fact, less central to my long-term well-being? It can be painful making these decisions. They require downgrading certain wants and leaving them unfulfilled. But that is the price of concentrating money resources in the most important places.