In Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, a lesson on responding to circumstances

Today, I want to talk to you about Prince Harry’s memoir Spare. I was unsure about choosing his memoir as a starting point. What inspiring stories can be there for us in a book written by a prince?

There appears to be no comparison between his life and ours. He lives in palaces so large that even he has not seen all the rooms. When he goes with his father for a work trip, he ends up hobnobbing with the Spice Girls.

When he wants to borrow a costume for a party, he calls on Tom Hardy. When he feels a bit low, he goes to Europe and stays with Elton John for a bit. I don’t know about you but my life is a lot different from Prince Harry’s. He might well be living in another universe from mine.

Someone in Prince Harry’s position has access to people and opportunities you and I can only dream about. He can fly helicopters, ride horses and give keynote addresses because he is, by birth, put in a position where he is enabled to do so.

Yet, him, you and I are trying, in our own ways, to make the best of what we have been dealt with. All of us want to lead the good life. But the way in which we understand the good life makes all the difference.

Let’s begin by asking ourselves what amounts to a good life? I will eliminate at the very outset any alternatives based on hedonism. For example, ideas that the good life is a life spent on acquiring luxuries or a life spent on the most pristine beaches.

These arguments are tempting, much like the luxuries and the pristine beaches. However, on reflection, they might not be something we would like to say have enriched our lives.

Our lives might have been more pleasurable with luxuries and beaches but not necessarily more meaningful or successful.

A philosopher I have a lot of time for, Ronald Dworkin, used to write about two models of the good life. The more dominant approach, the one that I think is followed quite widely in the west and increasingly in the east, is to consider the good life as a life of achievement.

One has had a successful life if one has achieved something. The success of our lives is measured by some objective measure such as how much money we have earned, or how many degrees we have acquired or what position we have managed to occupy in terms of an organisational hierarchy.

Increasingly, these achievements are translated by our societies into numbers and statistics — he scaled a mountain with the height of 10,000 meters and was in the 0.001 percentile of climbers who did so.

The narrative of our success has become an argument in and about numbers and statistical patterns. On the other hand, there is the response model of the good life. According to it, the success of our lives is measured by how we respond to the individual circumstances of our lives.

Each of us face different kinds of challenges in our lives. Some of us are born wealthy but suffer from indifferent parents or an intrusive media. Some of us are born poor and suffer from inadequate education or poor peer support. We lead better lives when we respond well to these challenges.

The response model is a bridge between our lives and the lives of people like Harry. We don’t have to dismiss his life as a life of privilege unavailable to many.

Instead, we can notice how he responded to circumstances peculiar to him. Despite his wealth and his privilege, he enrolls in the Army and goes through a gruelling induction programme, his skin literally coming off the soles of his feet.

He gets the opportunity to pilot helicopters but has to overcome his fears and self-loathing to complete the training regime. I don’t know about you but whether I am a prince or a pauper, flying a military helicopter is a tough proposition. The Royal family sits on money but there is stiff competition amongst themselves on what they do with the money.

There is a “court calendar” at the end of the year that tracks each member’s contributions to their public welfare portfolio. It’s easy to dismiss the royal family. Hilary Mantel, the famous British author, described the royal family as a bunch of pandas, expensive to maintain and quite useless.

But perhaps we can be a bit more indulgent — it is not what they have, but what they do with it that might give us a clue about their lives. Prince Harry’s memoirs are full of events that we can expect, like palace intrigue and royal glamour. However, what intrigued me, and might interest you as well, is how he navigates the aggravations and frustrations like the rest of us.