Why we are trapped in The Cave and how you can get out

Everyone loves caves right? Right? OK, maybe not everyone, but when they look like the one below then I think you’ll agree that they look rather pretty. No? Suit yourself.

Anyhoo, what I think we can all agree on is that we don’t want to be trapped in them (and as an aside I loved the news this week about the Thai football team that was trapped in the caves earlier this week getting to meet Manchester United).

This post is all about why and how most of us are trapped in The (metaphorical (allegorical?)) Cave. It’s also about why, even worse, we don’t even realise that we’re trapped. It’s also about my solution for how you can get out (and if you’re short of time – or just can’t be bothered to read the rest of this – then you can jump straight to the end)

So what’s The Cave?

First up, if you haven’t already read it, have a wander over to my idiosyncratic take on the story of the cave dwellers. Given that this is a Plato-Socrates one-two, I’m not even going to try to explain what it really means there are plenty of places you can go to do that. And frankly they don’t always agree with each other. So, given that neither Plato nor Socrates are responding on WhatsApp I don’t think we’re going to get a definitive answer.

So, what I’m actually going to do is to tell you what I took from the story and why it is helping me to live a better life.

Now to be clear this isn’t a cave. It’s The Cave. Capital letters and everything. It’s also not, yanno, an actual cave. No actual rocks and stalagmites and stuff. No bats, or bears. Not even a spider.

No this is a place that we keep ourselves in because it’s familiar and because it seems unthreatening. It’s a place we stay in looking at things that we think make us happy while refusing to believe that there is a better way to live our lives. Where we look at money, and objects, and promotions, as the end not the means. It’s a place where we lurk in the gloom because that’s where everyone else is and because that’s all we’ve ever known.

Why leaving The Cave is scary

As a result it’s not a surprise that we get scared when someone comes into The Cave to suggest that there may be a different way to live, that there may be wonderful things outside of The Cave that we have only ever had hinted at in the past. That person is suggesting that everything that we have ever known is a lie, they are cutting at our entire belief system. If what they say is true then that means that we are wrong. That’s not an easy pill to swallow.

So that automatic reaction to that is to lash out. To try to prove that it’s wrong, or misguided, or unattainable. And if you don’t believe me have a look at most of the comments under this article from The Guardian. Rather than considering whether the end goal was something worth having and then exploring whether there was anything in the ideas that they could apply to their lives the commentators did the opposite.

Some ignored a core concept about FIRE that it is about having the choice of whether to work or not and instead set up a strawman to argue that they wouldn’t want to stop work. Ever.

Others agreed that they would like to leave work but argued in various ways that the route to FIRE was too hard. However there were also strawwomen here. One was that the only route to getting there was the Early Retirement Extreme route with added deprivation. The other was that the only way to be able to save so much would be to have an unattainably high salary in the first place.

My point in this post isn’t to try to rebut those points (although others have already done an excellent job of it already and I may have a crack myself in the future). No, my point is that this is what happens when you spend too long sitting the dark of the cave looking at the shadows of reality on the cave. It is all too safe and too comfortable and you fear anything that may take you from it. It’s not that you love sitting in the cold and the dark, it’s that you can’t remember any other way of being.

To quote from the excellent “Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

How to escape The Cave

So if you’ve made it to this point your probably thinking, “OK, Caveman. I buy all of that. So what’s the solution? How are you going to get me out of this Cave? C’mon, get to the good stuff. I don’t need problems I need solutions. Don’t waste my time.”

Well the first thing I say to you young lady/man is that you need to learn some manners (*kids today* *grumble, grumble* *wasn’t like that in my day* *grumble, grumble, grumble* etc).

The second thing is that I have good news. There is a magic bullet and it’s only eight words long. Here’s what you have to do to get out of The Cave.

Breathe. Move. Sleep. Talk. Save. Learn. Eat. Breathe.

Simple right? That’s what you need to do to get out of The Cave. Or, more specifically, that’s what’s working for me as I grope my way towards the light. (Yes I know that Breathe is there twice. Yes it’s deliberate. No I don’t have time to explain why right now. Yes I know that there is more than a hint of Dodgeball about it).

OK, OK. Stop throwing things at me. I realise that there is rather a lot behind each of those words. In fact I would be amazed if you knew exactly what I meant by each of them. I also know that a single word by itself poses more questions that solutions. So, over the coming weeks I’m going to unpack them for you and I hope that you will help me to refine, test and improve that list for us all. Happy now? Hot dang, you kids can be hard work sometimes…

Thoughts?

Does that any of that resonate with you? Do you feel like you might be in The Cave? Do you think that there may be a way out? Does my way out mean anything to you.

Let me know