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Sleeper: Do we all have the same nightmares?
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The nightmares at night, are they different for all billions in the world?
Or are they just providing a few standard horror dreams sent into the brains?
Walking naked through the village, spinning on the plane, failing the exam, dying, always dying, or the house is on fire, the forest is on fire, the water comes or the mother goes.
Sibylle Berg arrow to the right
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Joseph Shrub
Sibylle Berg is a writer and playwright.
In 2019 her bestselling novel "GRM. Brainfuck" was published, 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".
If you break down all the bad dreams, which mean fears, to the lowest common denominator, the truth remains: Most people fear nothing more than the loss of habits.
The little battered word: habit, that sounds like silent married couples at restaurant tables, like front gardens and Christmas.
This little word contains what makes many lives.
The routine, the tradition, everyday life.
Doing things the way you've always done.
The Sunday breakfast with the family, the quiet conversations with your partner under the covers.
The day is made up of millions of little habits, they form the mosaic that makes up being, and woe if they are taken away from you.
The world, which is changing at breakneck speed, the storms, the pandemics, the visibility of the exploitation in which most employees find themselves, all of this threatens the common law that many believe they have.
A life as a superior Western European to anyone.
Like dissolving in the hostility of life
Many Western Europeans have become so used to the absence of war that they consider it to be their own merit.
Just as they got used to prosperity, or the fear that is part of the threat mechanism to capitalism.
Make an effort, sell your life, otherwise you will lose your job, your apartment, your right to exist.
This invention of competition, which is wonderful for a few, flies out of which does not perform.
And only those who can afford can afford any kind of stuff that stands around.
And the fear of losing it again fuels.
No matter, the fear is familiar, the work is not questioned, that's the way it is.
Nothing should change from the outside.
Probably the biggest nightmare for most people is losing habits.
As if one were falling apart, no longer having a floor, no handrail, no security, and dissolving in the hostility of life.
Speaking of dissolving, summer is over, that short, strange summer in a year that has just dissolved for most all that habit means.
And nothing seems better.
Nazis are marching outside again.
The climate catastrophe continues to lead to a great collapse, 150 species of animals die out every day, and almost everyone suspects that the time of "We have always done it this way" is over.
Hardly anyone knows what to do next.
A few complete posts in the economy continue to produce dull and climate-destroying, babbling from the omnipotence of the markets, and most of the wage workers, the self-exploiting freelancers, simply want to go back to a time that has long ceased to exist, except in lovely old movies.
Without traffic jams, dirt, noise, rising sea levels, rising rents and melting glaciers.
In short, we're all screwed
Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine that almost everyone feels the same way as one, with all the nervousness, the longing for calm and stability, the great desire for an ideal world and the huge, indefinite feeling of loss.
It affects us all.
The youth loses a halfway intact nature, the older ones the carelessness that not being informed.
In short, we're all screwed.
And if you say that to yourself a few times, you can almost get in a good mood again.
And with it a good-humored, wonderful evening in the round.
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