How Does It Happen?

The average cost of raising a child to adulthood in Australia is about $250,000. Then add on the costs at the end of life and all the things that can and do go wrong in between. From a purely economic point of view, a high ROI (return on investment) requires a life that has a reasonable period of productivity.

But that’s a very mercenary view. There’s more to life than being productive. We are all intrinsically valuable in and of ourselves.

Nevertheless, an idle life is incomparable to a rich one, full of contribution. Fulfillment is found in different things by different people, but what appears to be the most enriching all round (having met one’s own needs) is doing what one enjoys that also happens to genuinely improve other peoples’ lives.

That could be singing before thousands or cleaning someone’s home. It could be serving in high office or research that expands the frontiers of knowledge.

There’s nothing quite like knowing you’ve done your best to be a good citizen and be a net contributor. People instinctively appreciate someone who is there to serve the greater good.

Not everyone appreciates these efforts. There is always the possibility of envy and bitter accusations from those who disagree. It’s impossible to please everyone.

Longevity is not an end in itself. Someone who survives a long time with little interest in the world becomes deadwood, possibly even a dead-weight, a complaining recalcitrant. A life-long learner improves with age, especially one who thinks of the many arts of living; relationships, general knowledge, maintaining curiosity, practical life hacks… the list is endless. Paramount among these is health. Without health, you have a much diminished life. Dying early of avoidable and preventable causes due to unhealthy habits is the epitome of self-sabotage and short-sightedness.

A Product Of Our Past

We are none of us in control of everything in our lives. We can only make the most of the hand that is dealt us. Sigmund Freud claimed to discover the Forth Great Humiliation of Man; that we are not in control of our minds. Having well and truly lost mine once at the prime of my life, I can assure you he’s right. But we can influence our minds, as the Buddhists have shown. Over time, with persistence, tenacity, love, nurturing and some help from others along the way, I healed my mind and have become who I hoped to be; a kind (I think) yet unequivocal, confident participant in society. Just this much is a considerable achievement for me, taking my background into account.

I don’t have a high-flying career behind me. My start in life was, like my dead twin’s; a rough one. Dad died of leukemia when we were one, leaving my disturbed mother to raise three infants. We weren’t materially impoverished, but it was an emotionally disadvantaged upbringing. I know I’m not the only one like this. But it was not one that set me up as a confident, well-adjusted young man, ready to make the most of life early on. It was hard for a long time and lost potential haunted me. In time, I learnt to learn from bad examples, as well as the good ones.

My mother was in her late teens when she enlisted in the army for WWII. She became an ammunition truck driver loading boxes of bullets which left her with life-long back pain. This didn’t stop her getting me to do something similar (lifting bluestone pitches) and consequently suffering the same fate. I’m not resentful, I only mention it because therein lies the folly of hard work; it sabotages our longevity. On the flip side (there’s always a flip side), I learnt to drive from the best of them; an ammunition truck driver.

My upbringing obviously wasn’t all bad. It was culturally rich and stimulating. It got me into home-ownership very early and taught me the value of self-reliance.

How Influential Can I Be?

How much impact can an individual hope to have? Life has a trajectory of its own and where it leads, no one can be sure.

Bruce Buchanan founded Rokt, a digital marketing business now worth a cool $US3.5bn ($5.6bn). In March, he entered the annual list of the nation’s richest 250 people. Rokt is now operating in 15 countries.

Buchanan calls his paper wealth and rich-lister status “bizarre”. “It feels uncomfortable, knowing the environment I came from,” he says, in reference to his working-class upbringing at The Entrance on the NSW Central Coast.

When he was just 12 years old, after his parents divorced, his mother, Linda, was diagnosed with cancer. He looked after his younger sister on his own for the next four years but his mother lost her battle to live just before her 40th birthday.

“Those four years were probably some of the hardest years of my life because they are the years where you are supposed to be growing up. Instead I had a single, very sick mum who was slowly deteriorating and a sister six years younger,” he says softly. “It is a sort of feeling of isolation, but at the same time, a responsibility that I think forces you to grow up.”

The Rokt star whose tech wealth hides humble beginnings, The Australian, Feb, 2025

Bruce shouldered a heavy burden far earlier in life than a boy should have to. (I wonder where his father was?) Difficult as it must have been, to me it looks like a promotion – to male head of the family – compared to the denigration my brother and I received from our older sister and mother. I’m not bitter, but being emotionally undermined over a long period of time is a different kind of trauma and lost childhood.

“I think the people that have had to fight and have resilience, tenacity and drive are some of the most impactful people in society,” Bruce says.

This is true, if you live long enough to overcome life’s early adversities and those adversities aren’t unsurmountable. It took until I was 30 to be able to say I was happy more often than I was unhappy. It took another 30 years to become a confident participant in public life.

Bruce is a well-rounded, compassionate and lucky guy who was forged out of a tough start that in fact set him up for an elite world of business competitiveness. “Buchanan says the most important piece of advice he received at Rokt was to ensure the back end of the business keeps up with the speed of its front end growth.” It may seem bizarre to him that he’s now extremely wealthy, but surely that’s the outcome you’d expect from successfully competing in that kind of industry. The truth is, advertising is a BS industry; with Internet search engines, it’s easy to find anything you need to buy.

His airlines and food ventures are more useful. Even more useful is his philanthropic organization Scamander. Bruce is the kind of Australian philanthropists, like Dick Smith, Alan Kohler and Matt Barrie the country needs to persuade the other elites to bring about another Great Compression that restores the middle class.

“I don’t think wealth is a positive thing per se. I think one of life’s joys is actually defining your own path and I think what makes people really interesting and impactful is the struggle they have had.”

So true, within reason. The struggle needs to be character-forming, not damaging. Restoring the middle class is a baseline requirement for a society that is materially secure. Beyond that, maximizing the number of children who grow up in emotionally functional families requires a functional society; one in which dysfunctional people are identified as such rather than going unrecognized. My mother was a professional educational psychologist who thought she knew everything about human relations. It came as a surprise to me the day she told me about a school official who had the courage to tell her she was being an overprotective mother.

In my own little way, I have carved out a lifestyle that has allowed me, after a lifetime of healing, to start having an impact. Where it goes, we shall see. But I’m a collaborative type, not a particularly competitive one.

Recently I got the most views any post has had since I started this blog 12 years ago. Local news posts shared to Facebook have attracted the most attention. It’s encouraging to see that people are interested in their neighbourhood. The page that gets the most views consistently over time (from the U.S.A.) is the Fixed Calendar.

I write voluntarily for several online news services (IA, Richardson Post and Brisbane Suburban Online News. I’ve never charged for my work and never will. I don’t need more than the modest lifestyle I have. It’s a labour of love that I’ve become more dedicated to and it has a life of its own and a small following of about 55 subscribers.

Our competitive society is engineered to rely on ‘shakers and movers’ like Elon Musk to achieve big things. But it is cooperation that makes things happen, as Peter Turchin said when asked by Nate Hagen what he’d do if he was a world dictator – ‘good things come out of collectivist action’. (Great Simplification Podcast Feb, 2025)