As part of its work towards its mission Good Stuff International presents "Plan B" a guide to family risk management. It is our experience that feeling prepared to deal with risks makes you feel more comfortable and relaxed. We have written up this experience in the guide.

We live in highly dynamic times. People around the world face many different types of crises at the same time. Right now, financial, social, economic and environmental crises unfold. Their impact is real and direct on people's lives. The result is that people feel more insecure and anxious in our nowadays society. We all know these feelings of insecurity. And, intuitively we sense the risks we run. Insecurity and risk can generate anxiety, restlessness or fear. And if that happens, you generally do not feel very well. In the spirit of the mission of Good Stuff International, we are continuously trialing ways to generate better quality of live for ourselves and our families. It is our experience when you are prepared to deal with the higher levels of insecurity, the quality of your life increases . In other words if you know and are prepared for the risks to you and your family, you generally feel more comfortable and thus your life improves.

We thank Wouter Bakker, www.wouterbakker.info for the illustrations in the guide.

Check out our family business planning and financial planning tools to see how you and your family can live a happier and more sustainable life. Just use a spreadsheet, word processor and some common sense.

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Often,  people say to me that I should feel lucky that I am so happy with the work that I am doing. The sentence that follows generally is: “This is rare and not the case for many people”. I do fully agree, however, the odds of being happy in your work and life in general can in my opinion be vastly increased. I do not want to give a full guide on this here because I am not a happiness specialist, but I do want to share one thing. Me being happy in my work (and life) relates for a large part to a feeling of material security while not being rich at all. What I want to share with you is how me and my family came to that.

Humans behave as humans, It sounds like an open door. We often forget what it is to be human. Humans are social animals and thus we behave socially. Human social behaviour is founded in the brain and the genetic programmes. Our social behaviour is subject to selection. Different types of social behaviour lead to differing outcomes. For example, social behaviour can yield better relationships and more societal success. We are aware of and want to influence what our surrounding society thinks of us. We do this by assessing and improving our reputation. Among other behaviours, morally and ethically just social behaviour¹ adds to reputation²³. A lot of humans say they aspire to behave morally. However, when out of sight, humans can easily behave in ways conflicting with the morality and ethics the say to aspire. Experience tells me that a lot of us lie and cheat up to a certain extend when the odds are that nobody will find out. Apparently the human brain is able to express itself through morally conflicting behaviours while at the same time being convinced of the necessity to display morally just behaviours. It does so without being overly troubled. This is also shown by the relative ease with which humans exchange one coalition for the other, most of time based on self interest. This happens a lot in politics and violent conflict. When one's side is losing, people are able to run to the other side. Becoming part of the other alliance means underwriting the new and often previously conflicting views, opinions and even morality of the new group. Humans are very effective in reasoning that moving between morally conflicting behaviours is 'rational' and “not a bad thing to do”. Whole religions have been founded on this notion. For example, the practice of confession in the Catholic church provides its believers with a way out for behaving immorally at least up to a certain extent. Just by confessing afterward, God will forgive you and in the process you will clear your own conscience.

Humans compete with each other. This is clearly seen in markets where businesses compete for clients. But this is not solely confined to businesses, individuals compete in schools, in the job market and in society in general. Humans also collaborate with each other. Either formally or informally, humans create groups to get what is in their interest consciously or unconsciously. Collaborative behaviour normally exist within groups. ⁴And these groups while internally they are made up of mostly collaborating humans, externally they most likely compete with other groups of humans.

Every human is dependent on material resources like water, food, clothing, shelter. Every human wants the highest security possible in having access to these material resources for its survival. It seems one of the main reasons why humans forms groups. It is to increase the security of access to material resources. Through in-group collaboration, the group tries to secure access to material resources in competition with other groups. We see examples of this competition between businesses in the market, between cities and provinces within nations, between nations in geopolitics and in the global economy, between tribes or races within regions, or between the global religions etc. Often this competition leads to a form of conflict with the most intense one being war. The conflict seems to be always underpinned by competing groups trying to increase the security of access to resources in competition with other groups.

Because the human is dependent on material resources, the human by definition alters the environment in which it lives. The living environment of the human is currently confined to Earth. Since its occurrence the modern human has been altering the Earth living environment in many and major ways. There many examples in our days like climate change, increased water scarcity in many places, the rapid decline in ocean, river and lake fish stocks⁵.

Humans invent stories to make sense of their behaviour and to also guide it⁶. Stories change according to the circumstances that humans are in. Formally we had the story of good and secure banks lending us the money to buy nice houses, now we have the story of crook banks filling their pockets and strangling societies and their citizens. Stories are fiction, they are unreal, they are unscientific. Yet stories guide our behaviour. Stories often incorporate true scientific findings but tend to interpret these in order to make sense of the world. While more and more is known scientifically, we weave stories around a minimum of scientific fact. And then we rely them to guide our behaviour. Because stories are mostly made up, the behaviour that they guide can actually be not our own best interest. In short we believe many stories and behave accordingly which tends to give us problems that we do not foresee because of the fictitious nature of stories.

Let us talk one of these stories, the one of sustainability. Following the Brundlandt definition: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” Sustainability implies solidarity between and within the human generations. By my online dictionary, solidarity is defined as an entire union or consolidation of interests and responsibilities; fellowship; community. If we go back to how humans behave, the story of solidarity is very much in sync with the collaborative behaviour that we display. And it feels morally just to do. However, humans are just not completely like that as we know. Humans not only collaborate but they also compete. The fact based conclusion should be that solidarity with everybody now and in the future is not likely to exist. It is likely that solidarity will exist but within restricted groups. The sustainability definition implies solidarity between all including the future generations. This group does not exist. And with that the notion of solidarity underpinning of sustainability has become a fictitious story. And by that, the definition of sustainability has become by definition a story. A nice story but a story.

Based on my own research and experience I have only experienced a few moments that felt like something working towards sustainability through solidarity. These moments can be described as moments where a relation with another human felt in such a way that I myself had become less important. My own interests moved to the background and made way for the shared interests or even fully, the other person's interests. While often we think about sustainability in legal, institutional and technological ways, these experiences tell me that we are forgetting something crucial. We need to better understand the way in which human relationships come about and in these relationships can spur solidarity. If we go by the story of sustainability, is time for a new and at least partly scientifically founded story about human solidarity. It is an area of science that is lying barren and needs attention.

Sustainability is mostly seen as a technical subject. We think of sustainability in the light of working on efficient resource use technologies, recycling and upcycling like cradle to cradle, clean energy production by windmills and solar panels and calculating sustainability indicators for carbon, water, wood and the environment. But in essence sustainability is not technical at all. In essence, sustainability is an agreement on what we decide it to be. This sounds a bit vague, I know. Let me say it differently, sustainability is what we agree is sustainable. And thus, sustainability is a social process or set of social processes.