We have stopped living

Why we confuse functioning with living

This text is not an attack on individuals, but a fundamental questioning of what we accept as “normal”. It describes a growing sense of alienation – from ourselves, from each other and from nature.

To hell with a life that you can supposedly live freely, even though from an early age you are told how to think, feel, work and live.

Manuele Hanke, TAPOJA

To hell with Mother’s Day, Easter, Christmas, Whitsun and all the other holidays that are meant to keep us busy year after year – as if there were nothing more important. While people consume, celebrate and are distracted for a brief moment, something much bigger has long been burning all around.

To hell with a life that you can supposedly live freely, even though from an early age you are told how to think, feel, work and live.

And yet I know – just as instinctively as a seed knows what it wants to become – exactly what I long for: a life close to nature, creating something meaningful, leaving something lasting behind. But how can anything grow and thrive if neither we humans nor nature even get the right conditions for it any more?

The system – and our role in it

Many people constantly rail against “the system”. But what actually is this system? Isn’t it ultimately ourselves? Rules, laws, moral ideas, definitions of right and wrong, legal and illegal – all of this was created by people at some point. By people who decided how society should function. And yes — there are many people for whom exactly this system fits perfectly. People who identify with the existing rules, find security in them and want to live just like that. For them, this world works.

Then there are those who have long felt that this life is not actually good for them. People who are inwardly exhausted, alienated or unhappy, but carry on anyway as if there were no other possibility. They defend rules and structures under which they themselves suffer — perhaps out of fear of change, perhaps out of habit, or because they have forgotten how to even imagine a different life.

And then there are the people who really want to change something. People who feel, question and try to build something more meaningful. But it is precisely these people who are often smiled at, ignored or even branded a “sect”. Not because their ideas are wrong, but because real change rarely fits into a world built on conformity, security and functioning.

How often have people already tried to shake this society awake? How often have they warned, questioned and tried to make others think? Again and again they hit the same wall — rejection, mockery, incomprehension or constant pressure to conform again. Perhaps this is the real problem of our society: not only in the system itself, but in the fact that every real change immediately has to fight against the fear, comfort and habit of the majority.

The difficult thing is: systems maintain themselves. Changes happen gradually — slowly enough for the majority to get used to them without even noticing how much is being lost. Systems keep people busy around the clock — with pressure, fear, distraction, consumption and the constant feeling of having to keep up.

Everything is judged only by usefulness, risk and exploitability. Even a living, decades-old tree becomes something you remove without a second thought as soon as it no longer fits perfectly into the system.

Manuele Hanke, TAPOJA

When even nature becomes a nuisance

We currently live on a community farm. A place that should actually make visions possible: living together, mutual support, connectedness and independence. But even there it shows how difficult real togetherness has become.

The owner of the community farm is not interested in creating values together, sharing responsibility for future generations or building something for the long term. Instead of real community, often there is just living side by side.

Different values, a lack of common goals and the general inability of many people to really live with one another instead of just next to one another make it almost impossible to build something lasting.

That is exactly why we are once again looking for the right place. A place where real life is still possible at all. A place where nature is not just a backdrop, but the foundation.

Yesterday we found a plot of land that suddenly made all these dreams seem within reach. But even the conversation with the estate agent showed once again how our society thinks today.

At the edge of the building plot stood a breathtaking spruce – at least a hundred years old. The municipality said it had to be felled because it was a “threat”. The estate agent just said: “Never mind, there are plenty of others there.”

And that describes exactly the state of this world.

I am fed up with a world that preaches growth but at the same time constantly takes away space from everything that really wants to grow and be alive.

I have understood — even if I still cannot accept it — that many people will probably not really wake up any more. Habit, fear, distraction and conformity run too deep.

And even if many people read this post, in the end one question above all remains:

If you recognise where we are heading and what we risk losing in the process — why don’t we do something about it together?

Conclusion Independence & freedom

Independence does not begin on the outside, but in radical honesty with oneself. Freedom arises where people develop the courage not only to criticise existing structures, but to consciously take other paths. As long as conformity remains more comfortable than change, little will shift.

But every real decision for a conscious, nature-connected and self-determined life is a step out of mere functioning – and back into actual living.