At home it is most beautiful.
Photo: DPA/DANIEL REINHARDT
It is September, perhaps the most caustic September in a long time, and the world feels like an apocalyptic television series with ever new ominous front characters-of which I had never heard until about two weeks ago. I never had the right-conservative dropout Charlie Kirk on my screen, and the surveys of the US FBI boss Kash Patel as part of the “Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight Hearing” are my new evening entertainment in mid-September. You are helpless in the audience yourself – and there has been no emergency exit in 2020. It meets well to listen to how Patel is put on the pot, for example by squeezing it up with Mel Gibson on a UFC fight in Las Vegas, for example on the topic of “excursion (possibly at state costs). Splendid!
But this is not my only September faith: I also captivate how young people in droves in particular join for social media that calls themselves “September Lock-in”. This means a kind of voluntary inclusion for the month of September to optimize your own routines. A mixture of asceticism, movement, internet use reduction and healthy nutrition is preached. A bit of nonsense is allowed: for example, stare at senseless scrolling on the Internet or series. But, maybe more limited! The counter -program to collective escalation, so to speak, in view of the miserable times, and also the perfect mix of self -prevention, asceticism and “Brain Rotting”, disguised as a productive fresh start.
So exactly my thing. Because I know this temptation: entrench yourself in your own four walls, shoot lemon water in the morning, produce to-do lists and protein dishes in the hope that the private microcosm can be saved with everyday discipline while the macro system collapses outside. Maybe you snuggle up a laboratory. And I understand what is so promising: Understand your own biography as a handicraft project that can still be optimized, regardless of how bleak the structural conditions look, appears as an escape route. And so endless scrolling through morning routine videos on YouTube and sports and learning tutorials can feel like a resistant action on a lonely rescue manager. True to the motto: If the world gives me no future, I will at least build a good notebook system and a few abdominal muscles.
Shehreh
Felix Hüffelmann
Nadia Shehadeh is a sociologist and author, lives in Bielefeld and lives for live music, pop absurdities and decorative ram. She was a long columnist of the “Missy Magazine” and has also been a co -operator of the blog girl team for many years. Most recently, Shehadeh at Ullstein has the book »Anti-Girlboss. Combat capitalism from the sofa «. For »ND« she writes the monthly column »Pop Colon Festival«.
The “September Lock-in” is not a brand new invention of young people, but the contemporary variation of an ancient retreat ritual. In the past you went to the monastery, today into the children’s room. In the past, one spoke of “contemplation”, today of “brain red with purpose”, in the past people prayed to God, today it is meditated. While monks used to be able to save humanity in the past, the “September Lock-in” is a desperate-ironic self-experiment that only fails after two weeks due to the combination of algorithms, Uber-Eats vouchers and the simple fact that you cannot get 10,000 steps in a circle in your own apartment throughout September.
On the one hand, retreat to private as a reaction to a world that can no longer be checked. On the other hand, adhering to neoliberal optimization imperative, which come to us that we are only another habit tracker away from good and safe life. And in this sum there is a generation portrait: young people between doomscrolling and journaling. A metaphor for a society that currently seems completely blocked to create really real structural improvements.
