Capitalism has turned us all into migrants. Not just geographical ones—though few these days do not travel for the sake of their work—but migrants of capitalist possibility. Many are innocents who walk out of school with neat and poignant folders, and who dream of becoming heroes of the interview, aristocrats of the gun CV—people who intend to go somewhere. Not everyone takes such journeys, of course. One can be disqualified before one starts: poverty, disability, lack of education. But the capitalist migration is widely portrayed as the shape of hope in a modern society. The search for the means by which as many people as possible can participate in such journeys is regarded as a central equity issue by all political parties, though they might approach the problem in different ways. It is one of the great matters of unfinished business in our democracies: the fitful, half-hearted attempt to give everyone a chance to participate.

What shape a life might take beyond that is a different question. It is one that gets asked too rarely, largely because our migrations—and the anxieties that accompany them—so dominate our imaginations that we think of it as a secondary matter: no point in wasting time on hypotheticals. We have to engage with the circumstances we find ourselves in: we have to survive and to work with the possibilities that present themselves. Ubiquitous as these journeys are, however, the mindsets required to manage them are neither innocent nor straightforward. For all their capacity to engender achievement, they also generate perspectives that are limiting and even self-destructive, and unless we can learn to think past them as well as within them, we will find ourselves trapped in the stagnant paranoias of the status-obsessed.