Latest news with #oikos
Times
08-07-2025
- General
- Times
My five favourite words of the year (not all of them are English)
When I was younger, I didn't have much stuff — there was a three-year period where I didn't even have a coat and simply used a stout woollen dressing gown during the winter months. But humans wish to collect things, no matter their cashflow situation, so I used to collect words instead. I had a blank postcard on my wall on which I would write — in my poshest handwriting — all the words I thought most beautiful. Cathedral, shagreen, mercury, zaftig. I remember discovering 'corybantic' ('Wild, frenzied: like the first chord of a big rock song') and wearing it, conversationally, like a new hat. Obviously, I have more stuff these days— I have three coats and a dressing gown now, so don't worry about me — but I still have a postcard on my wall where I collect the year's best new words. Halfway through 2025, here are my favourites so far. The ancient Greek term for the house or home. It's a better word than home, though — because it's more of an ethos. The oikos is the entirety of your home life — the cutlery drawer and the daughter sitting on the table, drinking tea and telling old jokes. The pot of soup and the friends staying for the weekend. Oikos includes your wider community, your beliefs, your pets. 'House' simply sounds like bricks and windows; 'home' is too simple; and 'domestic' has an element of drudgery to it. Whereas oikos feels more representative of the kingdom a middle-aged woman usually presides over: the laws and loves; the routines and comforts. I am not a wife or a mother or the head of a household — I am the ruler of an oikos. I dig oikos. An incredibly useful Danish word that translates as 'tooth butter'. It describes the wonderful and correct set of circumstances wherein you've buttered bread so thickly that, when you bite into it, you leave gouge marks like the White Cliffs of Dover. As someone who believes wholeheartedly in excessive butterment — I find those tiny, individually wrapped pats of butter offensive: I WANT BUTTER, NOT SOME MIMSY GHOST-SMEAR — tandsmor speaks to me on a visceral level. Unless you are leaving tooth marks in butter, you are not experiencing butter. You're just making some bread a bit greasy. And particularly 'haptic memory'. This is the recollection of touch — how it feels to stroke the swollen belly of your just fed baby. The relief of applying a cold hose to hot feet. I have a very vivid haptic memory of what it felt like, in 1990, to finger the puncture mark on the small, cardboard bus ticket as I took the 512 up town. Similarly, I can recall the exact sensation of running down St James's Street in Brighton in Birkenstocks and smashing my little toe into a bag of pulpy rubble against the side of the kerb. Haptic. Limerence has had quite a year, as the singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus had a track with this title that 6 Music played a lot. Limerence is when you are obsessively, addictively infatuated with someone who almost certainly does not reciprocate your feelings. That rollercoaster between ecstasy and despair, where your day can be completely derailed by the object of your love merely looking your way, or not. Although it's usually employed to describe a lovesick crush, I've found it more useful to describe people's relationship with social media. Social media is also almost certainly not going to reciprocate your feelings. Social media also puts you on a rollercoaster of ecstasy and despair, depending on whether it looks your way or not. Social media is basically the boy who made your teenage years a misery, as you desperately hoped to get his attention by looking sexy or telling loud jokes. And yet, still, millions of people are hunched over their phones, ecstatic when they get three 'likes', despairing when they get none — in a state of technological and communicational limerence. This is a Gen Z term, and I feel it represents that adorable, pressurised, striving generation perfectly. Mid is basically the 21st century 'meh' — 'The party was giving mid'; 'Her outfit was pretty mid' — but somehow it seems far more polite. Meh sounds emotionally dismissive — it's a tetchy snort — but mid sounds like it is based on inarguable data. As if the mid-ness of Scarlett's new fringe has simply been aggregated through reviews on Tripadvisor — no personal judgment involved. As a way of understanding how Gen Z has tried to retain the birthright of every person on earth — to be bitchy — but also attempted to be #bekind and reasonable about it, I find it quite moving. It's definitely another one for the collection.
Forbes
29-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
From Oikos To Office: Did Ancient Greece Pioneer Modern Wealth Stewardship?
The ancient Greeks defined several concepts in their ways and estates that remain relevant today. On a sunlit slope above the Aegean, the ruins of an old Greek estate whisper stories of power, legacy, and familial pride. Here, under the shade of fig trees and crumbling stone walls, you begin to understand something timeless: the structure of wealth is never just about capital and physical wealth. It's about people, place, and purpose. Today, we call them family offices the preferred engine of private capital stewarding multigenerational legacies. But long before the term existed, the ancient Greeks were already building the foundational principles behind them. Their word for household, oikos, didn't just mean a physical home but also family and shifted meaning within texts. It was a complete unit of economic, moral, and strategic life. And perhaps now, as family offices evolve in the face of AI, new asset classes, and societal shifts, it's time we revisited some of that ancient wisdom. The Oikos as the First Family Office In classical Greece, the oikos was the cornerstone of society. It combined estate, family, servants, and philosophy under one umbrella of stewardship. The head of the oikos, the kyrios, managed everything from trade to inheritance to civic duty. Sound familiar? Like today's family office principal (and sometimes the CEO), the kyrios wasn't just tasked with preservation, but direction. Their role was governance, leadership, and long-term resilience. They didn't just own assets but also embodied responsibility. In this light, the family office isn't a modern invention. It's a modern name for an ancient idea: the professionalisation of stewardship. But an oikos wasn't only measured by the strength of its structure, it's purpose was continuity. Who would carry the values forward? This brings us to succession, which the Greeks understood not just as a legal mechanism, but a deeply personal rite of passage. Succession as Character Formation, Not Just Planning While succession planning is now a technical line item, looking at legal structures, governance frameworks, and next-gen education, the Greeks had a more human view. Through the concept of paideia, they focused on the cultivation of character through education and training, not just competence. The goal wasn't just to prepare heirs to inherit wealth. It was to prepare them to take on the purpose, values, philosophy, and public spirit of the oikos. This mirrors what many of today's next-gen family members are asking for: not just assets, but meaning. As family offices mature, a question surfaces again and again: what are we really transferring? The Greek answer was clear—ethos as much as logos. 'Ethos' is more around values and guiding beliefs, and 'logos' is speech, reason, or principle to bridge the divine and the human. Yet even with character in place, a household (or today, a family office) needs structure. The ancients knew that legacy could only endure within a framework of order and justice. That's why the great philosophers turned their attention not just to ethics, but to governance. Plato's Republic as a Governance Manual It's easy to forget that many of today's governance terms such as 'stewardship,' and 'resilience' have philosophical roots. Plato, Aristotle, and others weren't just thinkers. They were architects of order. In "Republic", Plato's best known work, he describes a society founded on harmony, clearly defined roles, and a shared vision. These are all concepts that resonate with the internal governance of high-functioning family offices today. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that equality was needed for stability and cautioned against the concentration of power. Unlike many other philosphers, he emphasized the importance of shared values. Today, family governance is often reduced to mere legal documentation, but it may benefit from returning to its philosophical roots: a shared vision, sound judgment, and a balanced distribution of power across generations. Effective governance requires more than just strategy; it demands a clear and steady mindset. In times of political turmoil, personal ambition, and economic fluctuations, it is philosophy, rather than mere power, that provides stability. This is where the Stoics come into play. Stoic Capital Places Mindset Over Market The Stoic philosophers, many of whom walked the same Athenian paths as the early economists, believed in fortitude, perspective, and clarity. For them, wealth was never the point, it was the test. In today's volatile world, these ideas are more relevant than ever. The family office of the future will need tools, sure, but it will also need temperament. As AI accelerates decision-making and capital becomes more fluid, it's mindset, not machinery, that will define resilience. As capital moves faster and structures grow more complex, it's tempting to think the future lies in ever more sophistication. But the ancients remind us that sometimes, it's simplicity, clarity of role, purpose, and values that endures. A Return to Purposeful Stewardship What if, in building the future of wealth, we're actually returning to its origins? The oikos wasn't just about wealth preservation, it was about responsibility. The Greek household wasn't a vault, it was a vessel for values, anchored in community and vision. Family offices today stand at a similar inflection point. Surrounded by opportunity and uncertainty, they can choose to double down on complexity or iterate towards clarity. The ancients would have chosen clarity.
