Comment by 0x000xca0xfe
4 hours ago
I don't know if it's sheer stubbornness or they're just wired differently.
As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore. They just want to keep the system running until retirement.
There is no long-term strategic thinking anymore, only feel-good policies and short-term cash burning for their respective clientele.
As a young person it infuriates me but there is nothing we can do.
That's my impression as well. The future is being sold for the present.
>The future is being sold for the present.
That's where the famous high European pensions come from. In France now the average pension is higher than the average salary.
>who only saw rising prosperity their entire life.
Their prosperity has been artificially inflated and not earned for the last years as the government adjusted their pensions according to inflation, not according to actual economic growth/fall.
But this is a similar issue with Boomers versus Gen-X in the US.
>As a German I believe it's more about demographics nowadays. The country and all large companies are run by older people who only saw rising prosperity their entire life. They all have settled in a comfortable place and do not seriously care about the future anymore
However bad Germany is in this regard, I suspect the US is far worse. There is no cohort in the US who remembers living in "East US" to temper the excesses of the people who've only known ease and comfort (though of course those people will tell you they worked hard to <insert career/prosperity path that no longer exists).
You are right about the issue, but wrong about the action. There are things you can do. Vote for candidates and parties that genuinely want a different future. Become politically active yourself. Run for office. Work with your local community. Every bit of action helps.
There is no party in German political landscape interested, capable of solving or even understanding the problems that needed to be solved. We have lost political center to groups of special interests and medieval guides. The state sponsored tool for informing about political programs (Wahl-O-Mat) is biased towards political issues of the mainstream. E.g. nobody is talking about the suffocating monopoly of notaries or increasing the property ownership by any significant margin. Running for office is an interesting idea, but in party-dominated politics to achieve anything is a decades-long adventure.
It seems to even get the compass needle pointing in the right direction would require immense personal sacrifice. This brings to mind a line I heard recently: “I burn my life to make a sunrise I will never see.”