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Can you miss partying?
Photo: Deagreez / Getty Images / iStockphoto
So many miss celebrating so badly, said a young woman recently in a street survey by the ZDF Today Journal.
"I haven't been partying since March and before that I was somewhere three times a week and that's really sad, because I actually need it, I have to rely on it.
I feel for her.
Me too.
An excerpt from the post spread in no time on Twitter.
It has now been deleted.
The reactions to her lament were remarkable, if not to say irritating.
At first the interviewee was severely criticized for this;
shared the video with malice and anger.
The "blatant missing" of something as hedonistic as partying was trivialized as a first world problem in the face of a global and life-threatening pandemic; there was outrage over millennial wealth egocentricity, in which the biggest problem is said to be the lack of a party when the number of infections increases.
Then she was defended - because many know that heavy-blooded feeling that she describes, the more and more tenaciously pulling on the chest the longer the pandemic lasts: the missing.
This thin-skinned discussion about the young woman's supposedly too little resilience says a lot about our own meanwhile low resilience: By shouting over to someone "Pull yourself together, we all don't have an easy time of it", we say above all, "Pull yourself together, I do it too, what do you think of to take out more sensitivity than I would or can allow myself? "
The fact that we so quickly evaluate every hint of emotional overload as selfish letting go basically makes us the mercilessly scornful: We are sorry if we accuse someone of being sorry because we don't want to endure the sorry feeling.
It would be more sovereign to be less relentless, but this way we can hold on to the self-lie through projection that we are comparatively strong and steadfast towards Corona.
No resilience parades, please
Samira El Ouassil Right Arrow
Photo: Stefan Klüter
Born in Munich in 1984, is an actress and author.
In 2016 her book "The 100 most important things" (with Timon Kaleyta and Martin Schlesinger) was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
In 2009 she was candidate for chancellor of the PARTY, which at that time was not admitted to the federal election.
She was recently awarded the Bert Donnepp Prize for media journalism for her media critical column "Wochenschau" (uebermedien.de).
However, the longer the pandemic lasts, the more different we deal with it - because we have different reserves of patience, resilience and resilience, which can be used up at different rates depending on the circumstances.
Maybe faster with a single mother, a carer or performing artist.
Digital hermits in secure economic circumstances will probably find it easier.
We should therefore not fall into resilience parades and compare how well or badly someone comes to terms with a new and stressful situation.
In addition to the different manifestations of our stamina, there are different speeds of crisis processing.
Our threads of patience are sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, sometimes thinner, sometimes thicker.
Resilience, i.e. how resilient someone proves to be in the face of a challenging situation, is considered a particularly admirable quality.
It is best to defy resistance without a single tear, preferably with calm composure as exhibited mental strength.
Why are we so ungracious with the uncertainty presented?
Either because you make yourself the measure of restraint and find it unfair to have to be stronger while others pretend not to be.
Or because one assumes that the longing for an earlier current situation calls into question the usefulness of the measures relating to the current situation.
One can very well miss an old reality without rejecting a new provisional one.
On the contrary: you accept it in the hope that everything will be fine again at some point.
What's the use of whining?
A moment of supposed weakness may also be a reminder of your own powerlessness.
Sure, complaints about the current situation increase the feeling of hopelessness, which is why some respond with angry repression.
What's the point of whining if you can't change anything?
So what is this silly missing?
Isn't it mostly flaunted emotional self-centeredness?
Now you shouldn't confuse sadness with self-indulgence (which is not that bad either).
Because the irony is: articulating one's missing makes the missing person more resilient.
more on the subject
Corona hotspot Berlin-Neukölln: a certain carelessness Andreas Wassermann, Sebastian Spallek and Celine Wegert report from Berlin
Corona pandemic: Robert Koch Institute reports a high of 11,287 new infections
Author and psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi established the idea of psychic entropy as opposed to a state in which everything flows, there is a so-called flow: psychic entropy describes the reduced psychological state we enter when fear or frustration goes against our goals seem to work.
If we do not know where to direct our expectations and hopes, what goal we are working towards by pulling together, we fall into entropy and are less resilient.
So in order to persevere, we need something to look forward to - and above all to look forward to.
There is no right to party, but there is a right to miss, to longing, sadness and nostalgia.
Because this dialectic, this experience of ambivalence is already wisely anchored in the mechanics of missing: One misses BECAUSE one has accepted that what one would like to have is not there, cannot be there.
Sadness arises from the realization of the incompatibility of reason, longing and acceptance that something loved must be absent.
Those who are sad have really understood and internalized that this will be a contactless winter.
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