First world problems – NRC

‘I have a ticket left for The Worst Person in The World”, a friend asks. Oh yeah, that movie about a millennial who can’t make choices. Before the war I read the reviews. Isn’t that movie outdated now?

I’m going anyway, and indeed the peaceful Oslo in which protagonist Julie lives her existential crisis feels far removed in every way from Kiev, from which half the population is said to have left because of the ongoing bombings. Julie wants to be a surgeon first, then a psychologist, then a photographer, or a writer? Which man does she want to share her life with? Does she want children, and if so when, and with whom?

First world problems, my stern self thinks. Luxury problems. Embarrassing, when you consider that other millennials have to take shelter in metro stations, and that our own safety suddenly seems less obvious.

The next day I do the Voting Guide for the municipal elections. I am asked for my opinion about paid parking, coffee shops and the temporary extension of terraces. Themes for people in peacetime, just like Julie’s career and partner doubts and so many other things we worry about. „Many people make at this time traumatic things, and we have the luxury of dealing with things like intergenerational trauma”, says a friend who recently did a family constellation with her coach. I also see embarrassment in her.

Stress of choice, high parking fees, the traumas of your ancestors: a war puts these kinds of problems in their shirt. They are suddenly futile. There, in Ukraine, that’s what it’s about, says someone with whom I discuss the news. “The war shows us what values ​​like courage and freedom really mean,” says another.

Does war really show how futile our worries are? Reminds me of an old acquaintance who moved to Albania because he wanted more urgency felt. He was like the ‘last man’ from Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), the book about liberal democracy as the provisional terminal of history. In the final chapters, Fukuyama, following Nietzsche, warned of a downside to liberal democracy: when people have nothing left to fight for, they risk becoming bored and lethargic. These ‘last people’ need a struggle to experience their humanity to its fullest potential.

Fukuyama, like my stern self and the people I talk to about the war, pits ‘real struggle’ against the sluggish life of liberal democracy, where nothing essential is at stake. But that line of thinking is simplistic. He misunderstands the human tendency to experience new struggles in peace and prosperity. Partly because well-being is relative: our standards for the fine and just move with reality. And partly because the problem of problems, the meaninglessness of existence, has not been solved in a safe, prosperous environment. On the contrary: that issue then has every chance to impose itself on us.

Our ability to invent problems is endless, but the space for experiencing those problems is finite. Hunger and violence can completely fill that space, and only in their absence do less life-threatening issues such as existential doubt, social injustice and social discomfort seize their opportunity. Even small dilemmas (do you want a hard or a soft mattress, or: who do you invite to your wedding) can feel urgent. The fact that someone in an air raid shelter will shrug it off does not change that.

The war reminds us how lucky we are: almost nowhere in history and in the world did people have and have it as good as we are now in the Netherlands. This forces us to put our usual concerns into perspective. But putting things into perspective is different from denying or ridiculing. If you do, you alienate yourself. Worrying about what’s going on around you is the only way to feel connected to your life; the same goes for the ‘luxury issues’ we will vote on on Wednesday. As futile as they may feel now, they matter.

Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC