“To get out of a dead-end, you should just start walking – that strikes me as a good recipe in many circumstances in life.”
A country in crisis mode, the world in a fragile state – how is it possible to live a good life despite all this? The philosopher and journalist Jürgen Wiebicke has made his way across our country, in search of people who care about more than their private wellbeing – and are happy for precisely that reason.
More and more people are growing increasingly uneasy about the fact that there is something fundamentally rotten about our current individualistic lifestyle. Yet it remains very unclear what we can do to change it. Hiking has always been fantastic therapy for this paralysis of thought and action. So, last summer, Jürgen Wiebicke simply started walking in order to discover something about the state of our society, about the crisis mode we’re stuck in – and to meet people who are trying out, very concretely, new forms of political involvement. He meets artists, millionaires and athletes, speaks with the heads of youth welfare centers and refugee shelters, and visits a shooting competition, yoga sessions in a convent garden and a slaughterhouse, among other things.
In the process, he discovers that people’s willingness to take care of more than just their own front yards and to work towards a successful community is growing – and not just in the face of the refugee crisis.
