It’s time to rethink everyday life

A manifesto

Fortepan / Domokos József

A couple of weeks ago, on a rainy night, President Zelensky of Ukraine made a surprise appearance in my personal life. I was returning from my weekly commute when the express train stopped short of its final destination. For some reason, the car needed to keep a 300-meter distance from the previous one. After a significant delay, I eventually arrived at Berlin Central Station. Now, things got more complicated. The overcrowded S-Bahn didn’t depart. I took a taxi, only to learn that the police had cordoned off the streets we needed to cross near Zoo station. The driver bypassed the area, and when the taxi finally arrived in the residential neighborhood where I live, a motorcade unexpectedly passed by. For a brief moment, flashing blue lights reflected on the wet asphalt, then everything went back to normal.

„Zelensky,“ the taxi driver said, referring to the Ukrainian president’s state visit, which was responsible for security being on high alert. Of course, it’s not unusual for a capital resident’s daily routine to get interrupted by a prominent person’s visit. Nonetheless, this moment made me think. It was special. Not in the sense that world politics caused a minor disturbance on my way home but because it appeared to me that the highly endangered man who briefly touched my peaceful, predictable life somehow guaranteed it. After all, without the Ukrainian people resisting the brutal Russian invasion, who knows how far west Putin would go? Zelensky, I thought that night, represents just how threatened and fragile the life most of us take for granted actually is. A life where you don’t have to permanently fear death, where things by and large work, and people basically can do as they please. An „ordinary“ life.

The world in your own life

That night, I realized anew that „everyday life“ depends on prerequisites we only pay attention to once they are disrupted; we only truly appreciate once they are in danger. As someone from the Western world who was lucky enough to be young in the light-hearted 1990s, I am part of a generation that enjoyed the historically and geographically rare privilege of a youth characterized by stability and optimism. Unlike my parents, who experienced war in their early childhood, unlike my friends from Eastern Germany, who spent their youth in a dictatorship, I was used to a different sense of life, essentially unburdened by the weight of the world.

Don’t get me wrong. That’s not to say that political issues weren’t on my mind. Quite the contrary, my peers and I had enough time to worry about any number of things. However, these issues never seriously trickled into our day-to-day lives (with the 1986 Chernobyl accident being a notable exception). They rarely threatened our endeavors in any existential way.

Today, the dominating sentiment has changed profoundly. The ordinary has become a window to the world in ways increasingly more challenging to avoid. Restricted fundamental rights and interrupted supply chains indicated a global pandemic. War in Europe caused skyrocketing energy prices and inflation. Terror is a threat that happens precisely when you run some errands. People experience extreme weather as an indicator of global warming. A computer bug during the holiday season brings mobility to a standstill. Leisure? A comparison game on social media. Sleep? Impaired by the very apps that promise to better it.

A cascade of crises directly plays out in many people’s daily lives. The formerly trivial becomes a node where the world’s affairs shine through and become tangible. To be clear, this has never been different for most people on this planet. But now, not just people experiencing war, poverty, or discrimination but also the (still immensely) privileged — me writing this post, you reading this article — learn what it means when the ordinary is deeply informed by world events and issues beyond their control affect people’s day-to-day experience.

Your own life as a part of the world

The good news is that everyday life is more than just a place where people passively experience problems larger than themselves. It’s also an arena where they have the opportunity to deal with those challenges. Without a shared religion, no political utopia in sight, institutions less and less trusted, and countercultural impulses quickly turned into new markets, the everyday seems to be a last resort where values live, and people can influence things.

It’s no surprise then that many thinkers praise local communities as a remedy for political polarization. Think neighborhood initiatives serving a common cause, diversity experienced in a sports club, or open-minded discussion learned early in school. The recent debate about liberalism as a way of life, initiated by political theorist Alexandre Lefebvre, points in this direction. Political procedures and the law call for a practice of cultivation to truly anchor in the delicate fabric of modern society. Ideals like „freedom, fairness, tolerance, reciprocity, self-reflection, and irony“ must be embedded into everyday life to hold up when things go awry.

The grey day-in-day-out has lost its 9-to-5-y flavor — but also the relieving reliability of the repetitive. Everyday life turned into a task, an assignment even. We relearn it as we go along, poorly prepared, by imitation and chance, more than once in vain.

It’s certainly harder, yet healthier, to try making some small-scale difference than to yell at others on social media about matters that few people are knowledgeable about and even fewer have any agency to change. However, two serious downsides complicate the politics of the everyday:

• First, structural constraints remain structural constraints, no matter how committed an individual may be. Overexpectations burdening everyday life can counteract the sense of autonomy gained by concrete action, resulting in pressure, stress, and frustration.

• Second, micropolitics tends to govern every facet of life, no matter how minuscule the impact and how bland the issue. Yet invading every part of people’s lives eventually backfires.

There’s a tricky tension between lazy whataboutism—which delegates every responsibility to other people, social circumstances, the state, greedy companies, or capitalism in general—and a certain brand of micro authoritarianism, which inspects every consumer choice in a petty way, polices every pronoun, and prefers the proper signal over sound analysis.

Everyday life mirrors and, to a certain extent, makes what we call the world. Taking this ambivalence seriously demands an attitude that tries to act with integrity while being aware that limitations persevere. It requires seriousness just as much as a sense of humor, decisiveness as well as generosity, care, but also friendly indifference. Sometimes incorrect extravagance is necessary to not get mad about the world. Imposing meaning on everyday matters only goes this far; some things simply suck and always will. (I promised a manifesto, didn’t I?)

Why Unregistered?

This article is the inaugural post of my Substack Unregistered. The title expresses that:

• Many things worth knowing are hidden in plain sight.

• It’s time to rethink everyday life because our day-to-day experiences are a junction that simultaneously reflects and shapes the world.

• A cultural perspective is about uncovering blind spots, taking different angles, and adding nuance.

• An essayistic format is best suited for zooming out for clarity while staying at eye level with the world's complexity.

• There’s extraordinary beauty hidden in the ordinary.

In a piece called Against Stories, Sam Kahn persuasively pointed out that „the minutiae of daily life“ resist narrative templates with their neatly resolving beginning-middle-and-end-structures:

„Choose the non-story sensibility, and life becomes almost immediately richer and more complicated — anything can be interesting, anything can be rewarding, the only limits on expression and on wonder become your own anxiety, your own lack of imagination.“

This journal succeeds when it makes you perceive the familiar in an unfamiliar way, recalibrate the common, and capture something previously unregistered.