Warning: Please read this article with care – you might end up getting depressed!
Now I am already quite far away from our small but ever so nice country. I can see it from the outside. Thinking about all the things that happen there, I have a lot to tell you.
About the way we in Germany live and how we think. And all the things I cannot understand, although I am well aware of having been there when we caused it. Well, let me just write down a few absurdities, as a motivation to start thinking on a Sunday.
Let us start with “no alternatives” (but, as I said before: please be careful when you read this!):
We need grain in order to live – our cars need road salt and crushed stones so they can go as fast in winter as in summer.
1 kilogram of grain costs less than 1 kilogram of road salt or crushed stones.
Our cars need fuel or diesel. We need milk.
One litre of milk bought in the tetra-pack (!) costs a fraction of what a litre of fuel costs at the petrol station.
At the petrol station, you can get E10. It contains biological petrol from Africa or Brasilia. The car-owners do not like it, because they are afraid it might harm their cars.
On the motorway, we have “free driving for free citizens” – there and on other roads, people die because we drive too fast. In Africa and some other countries, people starve.
If we drove more slowly, less or more sensible cars, we would not need biological petrol.
Our climate is destroyed.
One of the reasons is deforestation of the rainforests. Not just for biological petrol or for Soya-beans. There are some areas where grain is produced exclusively for feeding all those chicken held in chicken farms. In these farms, the chicks are bred and hatched in huge quantities from eggs, fattened up to become chickens and then killed in unimaginable numbers.
We in Germany want to live healthy. That is why we eat especially much poultry.
We also have plenty of lifestyle deceases. Because we eat so much and exercise too little. And since we have such a stressful life taking care of the car, the food and everything in general, we often suffer from migraine and headaches.
Consequently, the international pharmaceutical concerns produce painkillers for us. In order to maximize their profits, they have to use almost half of their turnover for sales and marketing of their products.
Then we have too few kidneys for replacing the organs damaged by all those painkillers and must buy “human replacements” from India.
The tobacco concerns also live quite well. Theirs are the highest turnover profits of all sectors (up to 45 %).
They have to spend a lot of money in order to make smoking look chic, especially for young people. But most of the smokers in our society are the underdogs of society, who have low incomes.
It would be easy for me to continue in the same way … But I guess it is better to stop, because…
In past centuries, hysteria is said to have been the number one psychological mass decease. Small wonder, if you remember all the fear and frustration caused by the authority of the church.
These days, we have exchanged hysteria for depressions. In the Western Countries, they are really on the forefront. Church restraint was replaced by consumer stress.
Hysteria made room for depression.
Some way or other, I can understand it all very well. Most of us can no longer defend against the ever-increasing, not species-appropriate livestock breeding of humans (that is: us).
In former times, we talked about achievement. Today it has to be over-achievement. It starts with small children when they enter pre-school, or, if you are lucky, when they start school. We will soon have the full-day school. In the evening, the children will have to learn for their tests. In work-life, the eight-hour-day is a thing of long ago. We want employees to be present around the clock. The mobile phone will find you at all times and places. And unless you answer your emails ASAP, you are not fit to live in our modern “information and communication culture”.
Flexibility and mobility are the credo of our economy. Spending your leisure time also gets more and more demanding. And if you fail to play along – you are a failure. The alarm clock is obligatory, because after a short night and TV in “prime time”, you have to be back at work on time. If you are a manager, you need medication in order to sleep at the required time and be fit at the required time. There is more and more heteronomy, agreements about goals that do not make any sense have to be met. If your body revolts, it will simply be filled up.
Consequently, the psychological pressure increases. The physical counter-balancing, for instance through regular and demanding exercise in fresh air, is neglected. There is no room for this in the life of the “over-achieving” car-driver and TV watcher or internet user.
And trying to find all the counter-balance during the ever shorter weekend again turns into a stressful experience. Don’t you think that, over the decades, this entire life-style will have some negative effect?
If, on top of all this, you start thinking about what I wrote above, you will easily be in danger of getting depressed.
🙂 But now you have already read it. Too late! And I relieved myself by writing it down, so you could say I handed my black mood on to you. Now I can continue thinking only of the nice things in life, here in the South Sea.
🙂 That is how nice writing a blog article can be!
Many thanks to all of you for volunteering as recipients of my dark mood!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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