After the pandemic is before the crisis: Why the world is changing

Icon: enlarge

This remainder of summer is a great time to think about what really makes you happy, says Sibylle Berg.

It's about to end, summer. The first leaves are already turning brown and the year, well. For many people that meant grief. Because someone you love was sick or died. Or because the dream ended up being inviolable.

Sibylle Berg arrow to the right

Photo: 

Joseph Shrub

Sibylle Berg is a writer and playwright. In 2019 her bestselling novel "GRM. Brainfuck" was published, and in 2020 the discussion volume "Nerds save the world". Berg has received numerous awards for her literary work, most recently the "Bertolt Brecht Prize" and the "Swiss Grand Prix for Literature". Together with Matze Hielscher she can be heard every 14 days in the podcast "Wesensfremd".

Amazing, this feeling of insecurity all of a sudden. This knowledge of the fragility of the world, health and habits could be with us all the time. And because nobody can take it, you usually suppress it and pretend everything is forever. As if everything were a law of nature. Our life, the family, the job, the garden, the vacation.

This new year shows us our own impotence. Nothing has been promised, nothing is certain. A virus, a war, a natural disaster, an accident, a lightning bolt - can take anything away from you. It's hard to bear that nothing is indestructible.

And didn't we want to reduce everything?

Some suppress, others are full of worries and many wanted so much to reward themselves for their newfound knowledge. One would have to travel. But where? And with what? And didn't we want to reduce everything? Away from consumption that doesn't make you happy, it was said. But it makes you happy to tiger the Brocken with your own people, or to Lake Murten, or to the wine country, and all you see are people like you, and what you hear ditto. Then you'd better stay at home on the balcony: Come on, let's make it nice on the balcony.

But it doesn't go away, the feeling of being just one person among billions, at the mercy of nature, a part of which most have forgotten how beautifully we had sealed and fenced it off. And now should that be all? The view of the parking lot, the shade of the trees that you always see, and now they're turning yellow?

Somebody wrote somewhere in the vastness of the net that I always act morally. Yes well, I thought. What should be? Should I dig into the depths of my mind to write them down here? Enough other columnists are already doing that. Lame, as we British women say.

I don't think twice, I'm trying to figure out how to cope with this short life without doing too much damage and without being too unhappy. To rebel against the world as it seems is one way. But he is insecure, because no one is allowed to grasp more than a tiny fraction of the whole.

Maybe yes, maybe no, rather no

The fraction that I understand is, our lives will all change. The capitalists' excuse that progress will fix the earth cannot be fulfilled. Nobody knows whether AI will clear the oceans of plastic or stop global warming and replace resources. Maybe yes, maybe no, rather no.

And that's why almost everyone's life (except a few billionaires) will change. Flying, shopping, consuming, eating, living and driving will not go on as before. Maybe everything will stay as it is now, with the renunciation of something that was never due to anyone. You can regret that, you can demonstrate against it, but it won't change anything.

After the pandemic is before the crisis. This rest of summer is a great time to think about what makes you really happy. People who were young adults in the eighties and nineties might wonder whether they were in deep grief then, with the smaller apartments, the non-happening short trips and shopping weekends, without flat screen TV and smartphones, with fewer cars and Stress and without the feeling that everything that matters can be acquired with money.

Those who were born then and later already know. Most of them have understood that this great growth only means: obscene wealth for a few at the expense of almost everyone.

And now I sound like I know everything better again. I do not know anything. Like all of us.