There will still be heartbreak in Utopia.

We are living in a climate emergency. We survived a global pandemic. We are literally neurodivergent. We suffer under generational trauma. For one reason or another, we are unable to cope.

There’s a lot that I can respect about this. First, I have to complain. No matter how well things are going for me, giving voice to my grievances is delicious and cathartic.

Gratitude is only for the humanities. Secondly, talking about dropping out and starting anew can be enormously productive. Sometimes attempts at improving your life are merely resembling adding epicycles in Ptolemaic theory — if I get up at 5:30 and meditate and get to mind of zen and am then on my most important work, only then will I have won my day — where what one needs is a Copernican revolution in how we use our time. Yes, breaking down, dropping out, and starting anew can be enormously productive. They can free up your energy for new pursuits and endeavours.

Or at least you can learn to cope with your shortcomings. For a thirty-something adult, sometimes I am barely functionalget out of bed until 11 am, there are unwashed dishes in my sink, my career progression has stalled. Learning to cope is a human ritual, everybody struggles; and only fans of spreadsheets insist we can eliminate it — coping can be eliminated.

There’s a variety of excuses going around, mostly on social media and mostly espoused by the subtly noble class that insists that basic problems in day-to-day life — and our inability to cope with them — are in reality political problems. This is “the personal is political” taken to such a degree that any distinction is dissolved.

How can we be expected to order DoorDash, when we have neurodivergent? How can we be expected to turn up to meetings at work when we are literally neurodivergent? How can we be expected to meet friends on our days off, when we have to exist under Capitalism?

These pleadings have a ring of truth to them. Yes, meetings at work are difficult — they can have no agenda, people can “contribute” and prolong the meeting but add nothing, and it’s often unclear whether we need a meeting in the first place. Visiting friends as an adult can be harder if you live in different cities (or countries) then the travel to meet your friends can be longer than the time you spend with them. Easier just to FaceTime. If you live in a different country to your family, then moving home means essentially forgoing retirement, being at the mercy of a capricious rental market, or staying means you miss your parents’ final years.

Entrenching “the personal is political” so deeply that you turn all personal friction into a political problem guarantees that you will never make peace with your demons. It’s also a way to never really ease your climate grief. If you have subsumed your anxiety into climate grief, then you will never move through the world with ease—every decision becomes a calculation in outcomes you can never know. If you have sublimated your resentment at having a female product manager boss you roundly hate, then you will never become the man you long to be.

The kernel of truth in these complaints is that you face an unpleasant tradeoff. Getting to the point where you can give voice to that unpleasantness is the first stage in making an authentic choice. If the tradeoff weren’t unpleasant, then you would just have gone and made your choice. If you didn’t complain, then you wouldn’t have made a choice at all—you would instead be carried along by some flow and whatever you did couldn’t really be said to be yours (except in the trivial sense that it was you who did it). Getting to the stage of recognising that you have a choice, and that it’s unpleasant is the first step in making that choice yours, and living a little. So the fact that we are complaining about the tradeoffs we face is a sign that, collectively we are starting to make authentic choices as a polity.

But I want to zoom back in on one aspect of “the personal is political” that this anguish illuminates: there will still be heartbreak in Utopia. Heartbreak is unavoidable: certain things (some of them very important like love and children and making your own art) we will simply never get around to. We may write our novels, and go on our travels, or scale the mountains; but we will never do all three. There will always be missed opportunities; the real cost of what we acquire is what we set aside in acquisition.

It gets sadder. We never find ourselves in the field of infinite possibility and choice that our ethical thinking takes as a given. We are always here: in a concrete situation, at some distinct point in history. Some possibilities are open before us—I could travel to India, or become a carpenter—some are forever barred from us—I can neither become a knight errant, nor an astro-tourist—and some are to be rendered meaningless on the shore of the past. There are inexorable limits history sets to individual as well as collective praxis.

This is what gives inequality its sting: that for some, they can do much more with their lives; whilst others are condemned, by accidents of birth, to toil. We need to think through what Utopia means, collectively and individually, apart from our personal concerns. Abundance for all will still mean that we let down our parents or that our relationships will fail. We will still have to cope under Late Capitalism. The point is to build a world where some don’t need to move across the Globe to deliver food by bike, get paid half minimum wage, and are stepped over when they collapse from overwork. Or where teenagers don’t lose their hands working in a meat-packing plant because the boss couldn’t be bothered with Health and Safety. Or where line cooks and food workers didn’t die en masse because we decided that we could keep society running by driving our tractors over their bones. Despite reactionary onslaughts, its nevertheless worth continuing to tilt at those limits.