One of the most common regrets of parents in the developed world is the lack of time to spend with their children when the children were growing up. For these precious childhood years, when gone, are gone forever. You would have missed the most magical part of your children’s lives. And yours, too.

Yet not all parents who would like to spend the whole day baking or reading with their offspring are able to do so, because economics drives at least one parent out of the door into the world of work. If one chooses to live in an expensive city such as London, the household often requires two working parents to keep it afloat financially.

I would like to write a little piece on heart-centred capitalism. I am not trained in classical economics, though in my varied career, I once worked for an investment bank where I managed over U$800milion in equities for institutional clients. I, the scientist/medic, ended up working in an investment bank because I needed to pay the mortgage on my Knightsbridge flat. It cost me dear.

It led me to think, maybe economics in the capitalism-as-we-know-it framework does not work?

Many men – and I am being sexist here – work for big corporations. The so-called multinationals, which are often as large as a small country, proudly trumpeting their global reach as well as their ability to understand the local markets. But do these conglomerates practice what they preach when it comes to their employees, or are they proletarian in nature? In the olden days, these powerful large companies use their considerable assets to look after their employees, providing loyal staff with cradle-to-grave job security. The company was like one big, happy and close family where members look after each other.

I do not think that mentality exists now. The world is more dog-eat-dog, more competitive, and the job market is more fluid. Technology has changed a lot of things. Big structures have found to be unwieldy and unsteady, as the former Soviet Union proved, and as the current precarious state of the European Union shows. The economic crisis of 2008 was yet another indication that we have to rethink our current framework. I do not think global economy has fully recovered from 2008, and we are bearing the pain through a rising pension age for the workforce, privatisation of education and healthcare, and a huge burden of debt for many ordinary young people. For me, this smacks of a return to slave capitalism that predates industrial capitalism.

But if you look beneath the surface, you will find a thriving alternative economy based on collectivism and solidarity. If you are a parent, you would be familiar with carpooling. You would be familiar too, with babysitting arrangements with other parents. You might even do group-buys. Expand that into the world of work, and you get Wikipedia, which has $3billion in revenues, which put the encyclopedia business out of existence, which was built solely on collectivism. In 2006, Mohammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. He developed Grameen Bank. Grameen Bank lends to those that commercial lenders would not touch: the bank is founded on the belief that people have endless potential, and unleashing their creativity and initiative helps them end poverty. And despite never ever having any legal agreements with those whom it lends money to, there have been very few defaulters. Contrast that with the now defunct Lehman Brothers. We are still paying back Lehman’s fallout one way or another.

Isn’t it about time we rethink capitalism? Do we live to work until we are 70 years old, merely to buy the things that we do not need or a lifestyle that we do not want?

I am hoping to persuade my partner that after over a decade of serving as a loyal servant in the corporate world that he should step out of it and into this wonderful place with me where we will live on fresh air, sunshine and love. This is the time to abandon the sinking ship of slave capitalism and dissolve the punishing market forces to create a paradigm of parallel currencies, cooperatives, non-market products and shared resources of heart-centred capitalism. We will live well, and with meaning.