When I was a child there was a popular song whose chorus repeated this line: “Everyone is searching for utopia.” And we all are. Every one of us longs for a world without limits, for a life where nothing goes wrong, for a place where there’s no tension or frustration. But it never happens. There’s no such place.
Anahid Nersessian recently wrote a book entitled Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, within which she criticises various ideologies for, naïvely, giving the impression that we can have a world without limits. She particularly blames liberal ideology which, she submits, privileges limitlessness by setting itself “almost by default against the governing and guiding of desire”. But, she argues, limitation is what’s life-giving. We will find happiness only when we accommodate ourselves to the world by minimising the demands we place on it. For Nersessian, if utopia is to be had, it will be had only by finding the realistic limits of our lives and adjusting ourselves to them. Overexpectation makes for disappointment.
