Onbeschikbaarheid – Unverfügbarkeit – Unavailability

Hartmut Rosa sharply describes tendencies in society that are typical for our time. We know him from his book Beschleunigung about the increasing pace of life in society. In this book Unverfügbarkeit, he explores how contemporary citizens deal with availability and unavailability of things and experiences. He explains how the new categorical imperative sounds like everyone should maximise his reach in the world. He should maximise his possession; he should maximise his impact; he should maximise his fame and maximise his ‘experiences’ in this world. Many things can be explained from other typical features of our time such as the fear of status loss (status anxiety) and the fear of being dumped into the losers’ pit of oblivion due to the power of the Matthew effect.

The author sharply observes the behaviour of city citizens. Like spoilt children they behave ‘blasé’ and cool. They do their utmost to give the impression they can never get impressed by anything. This leads to a kind of numbness and a kind of despair. If everyone performs the impossible to get recognition and nobody is prepared to give anyone else recognition, this leads to a society full of desperate losers. Moreover people tend to seek their happiness in material meaningless differences yet at the same time they can never be happy and remain restless after any material achievement, which happens to be temporary by nature.

Looking for unique experiences, we will always fail if we don't allow the resonant spaces in between the races we run daily. Always looking for news on our smartphone, we succeed in killing every authentic experience. Believing everything should be reachable and feasible, we fail in being grateful for anything achieved. If something goes wrong and proves to be unfeasible, we blame other people, we always find someone guilty and someone to be liable for today’s imperfections of society.

A book worth reading for all people interested in understanding the signs of our times.

I refer to my blogs Disaster and Sin and The Thin Grey Line between the Feasible and the Unfeasible.