A writer’s perspective on a (quickly) changing world

“Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, makes fun of the ‚busy man‘ for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the night and realize that you’re lonely in your marriage, or that you need to think about your carbon footprint, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there’s no end to little things, you never have to stop and confront the bigger questions. Reading literature isn’t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean, but it is one good way. And then consider how laughably unbusy Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen was, compared to our own age: we spend our days reading, on social media, stuff we’d never bother reading in a printed book, and bitch about how busy we are.”

Special event with awarding of the Frank Schirrmacher Prize 2017.