Turning Point

Social background

Personal ruptures do not happen in a vacuum. We live in an era in which technical, social and political changes accelerate one another – and in which many familiar points of orientation are becoming fragile at the same time.

A turning point in everyday life

AI, social media and real-time communication do not only change individual tools. They change how we work, conduct relationships, experience the public sphere, make decisions and perceive ourselves. While the industrial revolution mainly reorganised production, labour and cities, digital transformation reaches directly into attention, identity and interpersonal relationships – every day, right into private spaces.

What is new is not only the change itself, but its simultaneity and speed. People are expected to adapt continuously to new systems, expectations and crises, while there is hardly any time to make sense of experience. Functioning becomes the quiet basic requirement.

When private crises have collective causes

Covid was not the beginning of this change, but a magnifying glass. The pandemic made visible how vulnerable social relationships, supply systems, trust and public debate have become. Wars, inflation, ecological crises and economic insecurity did not arrive one after the other, they overlapped. What is experienced individually as exhaustion, loss of control, a crisis of meaning or withdrawal can therefore also be the expression of a social rupture.

That releases no one from personal responsibility. But it changes the question: not only “What is wrong with me?”, but also “Under what conditions am I currently trying to stay capable of acting?”

Progress is more than acceleration

In my geography bachelor's thesis I examined Western thinking about development and progress from the perspective of indigenous philosophy. One central idea in it is the critique of a purely linear notion of time: always further, always faster, always more – with the better life in a future for which the present is permanently sacrificed.

Material and technical progress can enable a great deal. But it does not automatically answer the question of a good life. When success is measured almost only in quantitative terms – growth, reach, performance, speed and key figures – qualitative values drop out of sight: friendship, connectedness, solidarity, time, trust and the ability to really be present.

Identity under permanent comparison

Social media amplify a mechanism I already described in my thesis: identity often emerges through comparison and demarcation. Platforms turn fluid lives into static images, profiles and positions. Visibility becomes measurable, belonging is marked, and disagreement is quickly experienced as an attack on one's own person.

That encourages fragmentation. Political and social questions are negotiated less along concrete experience and more according to which camp a statement supposedly belongs to. Connection becomes harder, even though we are technically more networked than ever.

The geographical perspective: people live in relationships

Geography asks not only about places, but about relationships between people, spaces, resources, technology and power. From that view a personal rupture is never exclusively “inside”. It is connected with family, work, milieu, digital spaces, economic conditions and social narratives.

The idea of relationality from indigenous philosophy is therefore important to me: nothing exists entirely on its own. Sovereignty does not mean isolation or total independence. It means perceiving relationships and dependencies, being able to place them, and acting consciously again within these entanglements.

The question is not only how we adapt to the new era. The question is also which relationships, values and spaces we have to preserve or create anew so that a good life remains possible.

What follows from this for the consulting

I regard personal crises neither as mere individual failure, nor do I explain everything with “society”. Both would be too simple. What matters is keeping the levels apart and connecting them again: what is my story? What acts from the outside? Where do I take on other people's expectations? Which relationships carry me – and which keep me in mere functioning?

This kind of sorting can relieve pressure without giving away responsibility. It opens a space in which personal sovereignty is not understood as a lonely retreat, but as the ability to perceive, judge and act more clearly in a confusing time.

Background: The thoughts on linear time, relationality, identity, social fragmentation and qualitative values draw on perspectives from my bachelor's thesis in political geography: “Proposals for a socio-ecological transformation based on the critique of Western development paradigms by indigenous Buen Vivir communities” (University of Graz, 2022).