The ramp SSST is Fair Enough

I'm not from here. Like most Berliners, I'm a newcomer. 35 years ago, my homeland, the Soviet Union, ceased to exist and I couldn't and didn't want to go back. "Due to unforeseeable events, the connection was no longer mobile", as Deutsche Bahn would put it. Nevertheless, I am regularly asked whether I miss my homeland and what relationship I have with my country. In the past, I would often stammer when asked such questions and say that the disappearance of my homeland was unexpected, but perfectly acceptable - fair enough.

It was all right that she disappeared so suddenly. It could have gone differently, but it was accepted by most citizens. My communist homeland had a great concern for the world and failed magnificently. As a souvenir of my homeland, I have retained an aversion to ballet and world exploration. While children in Germany usually want to study medicine or law, the Soviet mainstream was different: girls were supposed to become ballerinas, boys cosmonauts.

As a child, I was sent to my grandmother's house in the country every summer and was amazed at how irritated my grandparents were when they saw the cosmonauts on TV. They were pensioners who were critical of the regime and the Soviet space travellers looked like a red rag to them. At that time, the Soviet Union was endeavouring to conquer space in a competition with the USA. Every evening, cosmonauts wrapped in a hundred tubes waved at us from the television screen. A proud voice off-screen reported on the longest and furthest flight into space. We were told about distant planets and distant galaxies to which we would soon be travelling at an incredible speed. Why should we go there? What were we doing in this dusty, cold space? There were no answers to these questions; it was taken for granted that mankind would always strive for the impossible. The unstoppable progress was supposed to take mankind to the top. My grandparents immediately changed their minds as soon as they saw cosmonauts; they even thought space was a communist invention. According to my grandfather's theory, the communists had invented outer space as a substitute for the Christian heaven in order to make the citizens obedient. According to the party programme, each of us should strive for outer space as a higher goal, but practice asceticism in earthly life, preferably all year round. We should do without the pleasures of earthly life, all the state's money was shoved down the throat of the universe. Even today, people still fall for such tricks.

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People are gullible and playful, they see the planet as an "opportunity-rich deposit for risk-taking investors", they put their foot on the accelerator all their lives in the belief that they are conquering something extraordinarily important. Sociologists believe that the feeling of permanent dissatisfaction is the motor of the human species. People are fundamentally dissatisfied with themselves and the world.

For most people, dissatisfaction begins during puberty. One day a person wakes up, looks in the mirror, feels unhappy, looks around and finds the world imperfect, unbearably hot in summer and poorly heated in winter. So he believes that the world is to blame for his personal unhappiness and begins to tinker with the world as much as he can. After a while, however, he realises that not much has changed, the world has remained as it was, unbearably hot in summer and badly heated in winter. Then our unhappy person turns his gaze inwards, believing that perhaps the cause of his unhappiness lies within himself. On 1 January, right after New Year's Eve, he starts a whole new life, focuses on self-optimisation, does yoga, strives for a career and becomes rich. He learns the language of the financial markets and sees himself as a valuable high achiever who invests his life energy in projects. And he no longer eats animals, and if he does, then only happily deceased ones.

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Time passes, he wants to list the achievements of his successful self-optimisation and finds himself where he has always been, despite his discipline and hard-earned money, he has remained the same. So man, if he acts wisely, makes a compromise. I probably won't change the world, says the person, and I can't reinvent myself either, even if I bend back and forth on the yoga mat for another twenty years. So, here's a suggestion: I accept the world as it is, and the world accepts me as I am. It's totally unfair, but it's okay - fair enough.

→ You can read the entire text by Wladimir Kaminer in ramp #70 - Fair Enough!