Sometimes, when I once again have one of my acute world-weariness phases, I wonder what we (as humans) are actually doing here and where we want to go, as individuals and as a society. Why do we seem to care so little about the world around us? Why do we all live in our own little microcosmos, shielded by pocket-sized displays of our choice, headphones and our own tunnel vision? Where has our commitment to us and the world gone - and can it come back?
It's thoughts like these that I push back and forth in my brain on rainy evenings, at pedestrian lights or at the supermarket checkout. They sneak into my head as I watch the people around me - coming and going, flowing and seeing through, moving forward together, loud bodies in a single beat.
Is there room for deep thoughts?
They rush, they run - sometimes hectic, sometimes less hectic - each of them has a certain goal, now and always. Each one of them is the center of his own little world and sees the others as extras. What has also and especially driven the existentialists* inside, doesn't really want to penetrate my grey cells and I try to look at the tape at the cash desk with the view of the student who is obviously already drinking beer at noon. Or with the eyes of the old woman who is stacking salad and fruit on the black conveyor with a slightly trembling, age-spotted hand.
How have they lived so far - and what's to come? Which lovers did they have to let go of - and which moments of joy did they especially remember? How do they live - and how do they love?
When I raise my gaze - no matter whether it's at the checkout in the supermarket or in another public space - I wonder whether you others are asking yourselves these questions as well. What looks are resting on me - and what are the stories you make up about me? Are there stories for others in your heads at all?
Sometimes, when such situations arise, I seriously wonder if I belong to a minority of people who are concerned about such things - and if not, why not, why not stop talking about them or not practice thought-making more intensively.
I know the answer before the sentence is completed in my head. When I work all day or have sat on hard lecture and seminar chairs and my belly rules my body by sending almost painful signals through my innermost, I know that I have no place left for such luxuries. When I register the hustle and bustle on the streets, these transit spaces of human bodies and their means of transport, I quickly realize that many others have to do the same.
We need emphatic thoughts and intense feeling
Such moments of empathy (or at least trial and error) are first steps towards a more comprehensive and emphatic perspective on what surrounds us.
I am trying at this moment to look at the world from the perspective of another, giving up my point of view, which otherwise seems so immovable, and accepting not only that there are many realities, but also that they exist side by side on an equal footing.
I don't have such experiences often due to a busy calendar, but I try to make them more frequent.
Because after such head excursions I feel much more emotions going through the day.
For people who already have too much of it anyway, this can be very exhausting and tunnel vision can be a kind of gentle, stimulus-filtering day processing (keyword: high sensitivity), because even more feelings - especially if they are foreign or fictitious-foreign (visual word: missing delimitation) - are simply too much of a good thing.
But this palette of compassion, empathy, worry and a strange form of closeness to your fellow human beings, who ultimately have exactly the same wishes around you as I do - love, intactness, covering basic needs and so on - can be very enriching and is not least one that we experience very rarely in this intensity.
Because we are often distracted and unfocused? Intense feelings have no place between smartphone, meeting and PC work until late into the night. Or Netflix and talk shows.
These highly-technical things naturally have their right to exist. They are both service providers and symbols of modern societies that can afford the luxury of continuous entertainment.
Perhaps the busy appointment calendars also have their legitimacy if we don't have to deal with ourselves and others at the cost of stress - ergo, systematically avoid the intensive emotions addressed (consciously or unconsciously).
Because we have not learned how to deal with them? Because we simply can't stand (any longer) this blatant proximity that overcomes personal barriers?
And if I allow people to get close to me, even though they have done nothing else but exist with me by chance and most probably don't know about this temporary closeness - then I briefly feel like I can stop times and like a 3D programmer I can look at, turn and turn the model in the microcosm of one of the countless lives on this planet.
Whether I fantasize something together is both a main and a minor matter: The main thing is that without it this unstable, short-term closeness, eating from interest in the other person before he or she or you continue to rush, cannot be produced. A minor matter, because it is not important what I assemble in my head as a potential life.
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Society: I am interested in you
And apart from the egoistic interest in the sense of a social contract, in which I should have the best starting position for me, is it not also a cornerstone of what we call modern democracy: the interest in the counterpart?
We can train on a small scale which leads to national laws in the greater sense. There are plenty of opportunities.
And further thought: Can't the individually and nationally practiced - if it is raised to an international level - ensure that the world (pathetically speaking) becomes a better place?
What is (or should be) the motivation for aid organizations and numerous charity projects also serves as motivation for sustainable ambitions, since these are usually closely linked to the fates of other people.
Maybe we have to get out of our little echo chamber, where we can only hear ourselves talking, raise our eyes and make ourselves (again) aware that life is not an isolated one, but one that is interspersed with networks of all kinds, whether we notice them, approve of their existence or not.
And that in the end, it can only be in our sense to feel more. Above all: to finally take the time for it.