A Search for Values

I get the impression that my family worries a bit about me not making a proper living at the moment. Worries about me not investing more effort into getting my freelance business off the ground.

Their observation about work and business not being at the top of my priority list, at the moment, is sound. And the subsequent concerns are understandable. After all, here in Germany, work and a steady income are widely considered the most important things in life. In fact, lots of people actually define themselves through their job.

I too did that, a long time ago. Gained my self-esteem from my position as a successful software engineer. Was so keen on it all that I even took work home. But those times - fortunately - are long gone.

My relation to work has shifted back-and-forth over the years. For a long time

I thought I had an issue with my job. Only recently did I discover that my issue is not with software development as a profession, but with what could broadly be described as “corporate” or “regular employment”.

A country’s messed up work-culture

For many years I have had the feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the way we work and live. In 2009 I had a co-worker who always pulled overtime, was constantly stressed out and basically lived to work. One day he didn’t show up for work and it took a week to track him down in a psychiatric clinic, where he had submitted himself with a total breakdown.

At that time I wasn’t exactly happy with my work-life either, and his case triggered me to do some research into the mental health of the German work-force.

One of the most interesting facts for me is that 15% of the German workforce has already submitted their “Innere Kündigung” (source), has mentally quit their jobs but not handed in a notice. That’s more than six million people hating their jobs!

The vast majority (70% or 30 million) don’t give a shit about their jobs and only a minority has a positive attitude towards their employer.

That’s pretty messed up. We spend the bulk of our waking time, the light of day, the prime of our lives, at work. Now if we spend all that time on something that is meaningless, or worse, that we despise - isn’t that a terrible waste of our lives’ time?

When doing my research, my assumption was that such a disturbed relation to work-life would cause ripples in other parts of life as well. One possibility was that people would try to escape, and one easy way to escape are always drugs.

When Germans talk about drugs, they usually only refer to the illegal substances (which, in case of Cannabis, are actually often good and helpful stuff). But hardly anyone realises that legal drugs are drugs too. And truly devastating ones.

Looking at the causes of death in Germany, we can see that 100,000 to 120,000 people fall victim to smoking each year. Another 40,000 to 70,000 are taken away by Germany’s most favourite: alcohol (Drogen- und Suchtbericht 2016).

Let’s put these numbers into perspective. The total annual death count in the country 2015 was 925,000, which means that around 18% of all deaths in Germany are caused by drugs. Hello junkie-nation…

On a side note: 10,000 suicides each year aren’t exactly an expression of a mentally healthy society. 10,000, that’s three times as many as traffic accidents reap. Do we really need safer cars? Or is there something else we could focus on?

Learning all that over the years led me to believe that I’m not all alone in my struggle with the insanity that is modern work-life. And it strengthened me in my intent not to go back into it. Which is why, at the moment, my work-situation is somewhat unorganised.

Exploitation

What I learned about Germany’s internal situation is not all that I picked up over the years though. Spending time overseas, I caught a glimpse at how people in countries thousands of kilometres away lead their lives. And it’s not all peachy, to say the least.

There is talk about poverty in Germany. But we have rather high standards of poverty. If you can’t pay your rent, you’re considered poor.

Quite frankly, if you want to see really poor people, you’ve got to go to a developing country.

[caption id=“attachment_4888” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] … and that’s not nearly as bad as it gets[/caption]

Now it’s a fact that some countries are financially wealthy and others are not. But what’s the standard? Are some unusually rich? Or other unusually poor?

In the western world the common myth, which we all readily and happily believe in, is, that we earned it. By the sweat on our foreheads, by the countless hours we put in.

Which is bullshit. The west is off as well as it is today, because for centuries we ruthlessly and mercilessly exploited the rest of the world by means of colonisation and robbery. And still are. We wouldn’t live nearly half as neatly if there wasn’t whole continents suffering in sweat-shops to manufacture the goods we purchase at bargain prices.

This is something that really shits me about the post-WW2 German generation. Lamenting endlessly about the abomination the concentration camps were (not questioning that), going on-and-on about how that shall never be repeated - but then on the other hand having no issue at all with sending little negro slaves into the mines to dig out minerals for a new mobile phone. It’s textbook hypocrisy.

German language has the (highly controversial) term “Tätervolk”, which describes the population of Nazi Germany as collective perpetrators. Of course no population as a whole can ever be put into one bucket.

But I’m wondering whether we are not the true “Tätervolk”. Exploiting millions (billions?) of people in unimaginably brutal ways, destroying their habitats, their cultures. For decades, for centuries even.

But we are the winners. And the winners always write the history books. And say what’s right and wrong.

All of this is not a popular or even common topic of conversation anywhere. It is just way too convenient to close ones eyes, not question anything too hard. But once you do question, once you do think… man, the whole belief system just goes down the drain.

Sophie Scholl used to inspire me. Her and her fellow campaigners leaned up against a totalitarian government, swam against the stream of a whole population, fighting non-violently for their beliefs.

I say “used to”, because at some point I realised that her and the White Rose didn’t change a thing. What they did - the course of Nazi Germany it did not influence the least.

Sure, they are praised for their courage nowadays. Praised by a German government that sells weapons to apartheid states, which then use those weapons to execute civilians in the streets of Palestine. Idle talk.

So there I am at the crossroads. I’ve seen too much, can’t make it unseen. Now what do I do? Do I just remain silent as everybody else. Continue to happily exploit my little negro slaves in Africa, my sweat-shop minions in China? And if not, how do I deal with my surroundings? With living in a culture who’s behaviours I find… questionable, at best?

Orientation and Company

Commonly, when feeling lost, the easy way out is to turn to one of the major world religions. But I’d need a lobotomy to believe the mumbo-jumbo they preach.

Individually figuring out what to do, finding values and a lifestyle is incredibly difficult. It requires a lot of questioning of what is. It requires some deep digging. And as is always the case when you dig, you have to ask how deep you want to dig.

Or, when searching for the cause of something: how far to go back? What was the last time that mankind had a functioning set of values, a lifestyle that was sustainable for both people and planet?

Do we possibly err in assuming that we as human race are the pinnacle of evolution, and that the planet is ours to conquer and rule?

Are we westerners indeed as rich as we always think? Or are we actually very poor. Poor, because we don’t have a functioning set of values, lack working communities.

Funny enough, tribal cultures, those that we deem poor and undeveloped, actually have all that.

Thinking very critically about the culture we live in isn’t the most popular thing to do. I think I’ve pissed off a fair share of people over the years. Pointing out that we can only buy clothes cheaply because somebody else already paid for it with blood… doesn’t go well with everybody.

I truly don’t mean to offend anybody, it’s just that keeping everything to myself is not an option at all. For telling others about my thoughts and asking for their opinion is one of the best ways of learning known to me.

Finding people to run my ideas by isn’t easy at all though. Even working in IT, spending my time surrounded by highly intelligent people, I can only witness them happily squander their intellect on wondering which new phone to buy.

Bringing up a mildly controversial topic, like electronics manufacturing in Chinese sweat shops, tends to dampen the mood in that crowd.

It was on the road that I encountered most of the people who thought out of the usual way. Many of them would be considered “hippies”, for they led an alternative lifestyle and bore a certain contempt for capitalism. Yet all too often their thinking didn’t go far enough for me. Or it appeared to me as though they were ignoring the realities of the world we live in. Messed up as it is - it is the status quo.

So yeah, to sum it all up: Making a living is a constant issue on my mind. But it’s by far not the only thing on there.