Wasting Time
This short text is about the end, at least for the time being, of the vanities of a consumer society that has clearly lost its way. The ecological crisis is forcing us to our knees, so to speak, forcing us to put everything else we would like to deal with to one side, at least for the time being. But we don’t like to be told what to do, not even by a crisis that seems rather authoritarian. We want to decide for ourselves what is important and what is secondary or even tertiary. The crisis, however, demands our unrestricted attention with the habitus of an eco-dictatorship and does not tolerate any contradiction, no matter how clever. The ecological crisis is a diva. It says that we must subordinate everything else to our thoughts and actions, otherwise we will be grilled.
We are in a situation in which we can no longer afford to sweeten our time with vain pursuits; we no longer have time to make clever speeches. Many of our intellectual debates on whatever topics we consider existential are also passé; the ecological crisis demands all our strength. If we continue to pretend that we can pursue all our other interests instead of working on the existential issues of the crisis, we are simply failing to recognize the seriousness of the situation.
Wasting our time with electronic toys such as Playstation or X-Box is no longer as smart as it was 10 years ago; on the contrary, such behavior is now dangerous for mental health and poison for the development of future skills. If they continue to spend their time in front of the monitor, they and their loved ones will lack the essential skills for a challenging future that is waiting in the wings and will be left behind in the coming decades by the relentless zeitgeist of post-consumerist transformation. In every activity today, we must ask ourselves whether our actions are really still relevant to the issues of our time. What is important today, in the age of the socio-ecological crisis, and what has become obsolete? Let’s think about this more often.
