A common enough question, usually one of the first questions anyone asks when they meet someone new. It always bugged me a little, is someone's job the most important thing about them? Does it define them? Assign them a label? For many people it turns out that yes, to an extent their job is who they are, their passion, their focus in life. For other people maybe your job gives an insight into the type of person you are, but for many many people a job is just what you have to do to earn money. Yet it's often the first label you get assigned when meeting someone new.

Alan Watts talks about dividing the world up into a grid to make sense of it all, and this seems to me an example of that. But we don't just label ourselves through our job, we also define ourselves in other ways. By the places we live, the things we buy, by our hobbies, food etc. This is generally pretty harmless as long as we're aware of it for what it is. But when we forget those labels are not reality and we allow ourselves to be boxed in by them then we hit problems. We force ourselves into unnecessarily restrictive positions, and we try to shoehorn other people into boxes that we think they should be in based on the labels we've assigned them, making sweeping generalisations about whole groups of people. 

One of the ways vanlife helped me understand this was, unsurprisingly, by being put into a new box, that of a ‘vehicle dweller’. Suddenly that became part of who I am, and a lot of the negativity towards people in that box came into view. The dislike of having people sleeping in vans on ‘your’ street, the no overnight parking signs, the height barriers, the general lumping together of anyone who lives in a vehicle for any reason as ‘undesirable’. I hadn’t really changed, I wasn’t suddenly a different person, and yet I found myself cast into another box. It just reinforced the point that these boxes aren’t real, and they are not always useful.

It also helped shift the lens on the larger society-wide box we have been locked in for the last 40 years. Namely neoliberalism.

There are consistent boxes we all recognise. A good person is a good consumer, a productive member of society. A successful person should have a big house, nice car, go on lots of holidays. We pursue lives that may not be what we genuinely desire because that’s what we are encouraged to believe constitutes success, we actively harm the planet producing things we don’t need to satisfy desires we are told we have. But who decided that this is what success looks like, and why does it happen to require earning lots of money and buying a lot of things?

For me, this obsession over money, productivity and excess consumption all stems from the neoliberal ideology we’ve been living under for the last 40 years. This is hardly revolutionary thought, neoliberalism is all about individual choice, free markets, increased productivity and by extension increased consumption. There is no place for communities (Thatcher quite literally said there is no such thing as society) and no morality beyond what the markets define. As far as neoliberal thought goes, money is what matters, if you can afford something you deserve it and have the moral right to have it. So naturally over the past few decades people have become more attuned to the system we have been placed in. We become more accepting of the invisible rules guiding our society, we start to think that always wanting more is natural, that competing against everyone else is just basic human behaviour. We reference the ‘rat race’, ‘dog eat dog world’, ‘survival of the fittest’ and frame them as positive ideals, we should all be hungry, eager grifters working side hustles to get rich because that's just human nature. But it's not, of course it's not. We are living up to an ideology that has been imprinted on us without us even realising. People think that humans are by nature competitive, they always want to one-up each other. There may be a hint of truth in that, humans are many things after all. But one primary trait of ours is adaptability. We have adapted to environments and situations all over the world for millenia. We also adapt to political systems and modify our traits to fit those we find ourselves in. That is the case here. Certain people designed and built a box for us, we adapted to fit into it perfectly, creating our own labels and boxes to file everyone else in.

Neoliberalism is the result of economic and political choices made in the late 70s/early 80s which essentially led to deregulation, austerity, privatisation of public services, financialisation of the city and ceding more control of our economy to the “power of the market” over our democratically elected government. However, despite being the result of deliberate choices, neoliberalism has become so pervasive and all encompassing that it seems to be accepted as some sort of natural law. You get people like Rory Stewart bemoaning the fact that no politician has any grand vision any more, that they're all technocrats fiddling around the edges, yet as soon as anyone comes close to challenging his neoliberal centrism, as soon as they even point out that there is an alternative to remaining in this box and try offering genuine alternative visions for the country, he derides them as extremists, as fantasists. 

As far as he and many like him are concerned, neoliberalism is a box we cannot leave, it contains the totality of their understanding of politics and economics. Leaving it means leaving their world behind. This bind was always intentional. As Thatcher famously said “there is no alternative”. Except there is. In fact thinking about it for even 5 seconds makes it obvious - human civilization has been around for thousands of years. Neoliberalism for 40. And yet “there is no alternative”? Nonsense.

Just like the boxes we put ourselves and others in, the neoliberal box is not an immutable law of nature, it is made by people, it can be unmade. The difficulty lies in finding people - politicians in particular - who are able to see the box for what it is, are willing to stand up to the mainstream neoliberal voices with their huge financial backing, and can articulate an alternative for the future. This can only be possible with a groundswell of popular support for alternatives, with people around the country recognising that the answers can’t be found in this box we’ve shut ourselves up in for 40 years and being prepared to stand together and reject the false answers given by the rich and powerful. Can that happen? Maybe, but it would take more than the 5 people who read this blog!