The belief that anyone can “have it all” is one of the most destructive falsehoods of our generation. In an interview with the Sunday Bulletin in 2013, the Australian deputy opposition leader, Julie Bishop (1956 – ), stated that she believed women could not have it all. “I’m in the Anne-Marie slaughter school”, Bishop said, “women can’t have it all. They can have plenty of choices, but at the end of the day, they choose something which means they can’t have something else.” In a later interview with Sky News, Bishop reiterated her point by stating: “if you make choices you rule out other alternatives.”

The problem with the ‘you can have it all’ philosophy is that it does away with the very necessary doctrine of sacrifice. The psychology of sacrifice is based on the law of opposites: the idea that a conscious experience has an opposite unconscious experience. Put simply, it is the discovery of the future. Society is set up in such a way that people are encouraged to make sacrifices for the benefit and betterment of the community.

The truth is that we live in a world of scarcity. Every decision has a price. This occurs for two primary reasons. First, nature imposes limitations on us. One of the greatest errors of the animal’s rights movement is the belief that human beings are able to “share” resources with animals. This ignores the simple fact that survival requires competition between species. And second, society imposes limitations upon the individual. If the individual wishes to be successful in a particular endeavour, for example, it is necessary for them to learn to distinguish the value of one activity over another and prioritise their time accordingly.

The ‘you can have it all’ message denies a simple fact of existence: in order to have one thing, you must be prepared to give up something else. And, needless to say, functioning societies are set up so those sacrifices are met with reasonable rewards. The person who works in a job they dislike at least has the benefit of knowing that they will earn an income and may possibly be able to buy a house and raise a family. The fact is that you can’t “have it all”, not by any stretch of the imagination.