How do you prepare for living better with money? (aka National Service, personal-finance style)

If there were a form of National Service designed to best prepare people for living well, what would it look like?

‘Are there perhaps,’ wrote Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, ‘colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life?’

‘No,’ he concluded, ‘there are none.’

‘Thoroughly unprepared,’ he continued, ‘we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto.’

The hallmark of foolish ‘retirement planning’ is exactly this. However well someone is prepared financially, and even psychologically, as near as makes no difference every retiree is unprepared philosophically – their ‘truths and ideals’ are not set up to serve them in the wise deployment of their financial and experiential resources.

We shouldn’t wait until we’re in our forties to do something about this, though.

By then, most dedicated retirement-chasers have long since squandered far too much of that which wiser folk would call ‘life’ in favour of spending 30-40 years waiting to retire so that they may then spend another 30-40 waiting to die.

Bring back National Service (sort of)

National Service, in the form of giving real explosive things to potentially explosive youths, in the hope of making them grow up psychologically and/or blow up patriotically, has long disappeared from most countries’ compulsory career paths.

What if we were to bring it back… but in a better, wiser, way? A way to satisfy Jung’s desire for personal-life preparation rather than other-life protection?

Because of the unique way in which it’s woven into our minor day-to-day decisions, as well as our massive life choices, and because of the unmatched way in which it messes people up, ‘money and how to live with it’, would certainly be fighting for the top spot on any list of ‘demands of life’ it pays to be prepared for, whether you’re 40 or 14.

If you make the experience visceral enough, you wouldn’t even need two years. Two months would probably be enough.

In the first month, recruits would be really rich. They’d party on yachts, travel first class, and all that sort of stuff. A big enough supply of enormous houses for them to live in may be an issue, but if you’re really rich your mansion/lair is under almost permanent construction while you travel between branches of your chosen characterless expensive hotel chain, so hopefully this won’t matter, and the experience can be replicated with a few phone calls from pretend project managers about recalcitrant builders.

In the second month, recruits would be really poor. They’d learn to mend things, to cook, to shop cost-effectively, and to generally live without everything that didn’t really matter (and a few that did). They’d be forced to come up with things to do that weren’t spoon-fed by the Netflix algorithm. They’d be given some basic therapy training so they could struggle through helping each other rather than relying on their £100-an-hour shrink. They’d be issued with a library card and a pair of decent walking boots.

Both experiences would hopefully be harrowing at times. This is National Service, after all. Both experiences would hopefully leave these impressionable youths haunted in some way.

With minds duly shaken between these extremes in a way that cracked them open enough to let a little beam of examination sneak through to illuminate the muddy morass of nonsense into which these youths would then be cast, the hope is that whether or not they then decided to dedicate their lives to owning the fast car or avoiding the slow-cook cuts, they’d do so at least a touch more consciously.

One would hope, too, that the chances a youth so trained would allow their creative energies to be neurologically cleansed by years of recursively narrow life choices that prioritised measurement over meaning, and hiding inner worlds from the outer world over cultivating a wiser worldview, would be at least a little trimmed.

The real beauty of such a system is not only that everybody gets to experience it, but that everybody knows that everybody else has experienced it too.