Drinking for your time savings
A few years ago, I met the writer Ferdinand von Schirach. We had arranged to meet at the "Manzini" in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, and I still remember that the sun was shining when he arrived, dressed all in black, on an old-fashioned men's bicycle, also black. He dismounted, leaned it against a tree, and moved towards me so provocatively slowly, almost as if in slow motion, that I asked him if he was feeling under the weather. "No," he said, "I'm walking so slowly on purpose." If you feel like you're not making any progress while walking, you're doing it right. Of course, I thought, the professional flâneur is protesting against the busyness of our times—you just have to be able to afford it.
This little scene came to mind when I saw a commercial that I admittedly didn't understand right away. It featured a young man playing with a colorful toy loop-the-loops and a very contemporary-looking cream-colored water bottle with the words J*st Food on it. "Drank the food, wasted the time," said a voice-over, and then something else I don't remember because I was already thinking about what this was actually about. Are you laughing? Okay, I'm a bit old-fashioned and often have a hard time keeping up with new trends, but in my defense, we humans are extremely talented at making the abnormal seem normal, which is why I'm always a bit skeptical before accepting or adopting new fashions. But eventually, I understood the ad: It advertised a drink with a choice of banana, berry, chocolate, or cookie flavors that replaced a full meal, like roast pork or udon noodles with tofu crumbs. The advantage: Because it only takes ten seconds to eat, you have more time for the important things in life, and I remember thinking, "Whatever those might be," because food ranks high on my personal list.
What I'm trying to say is: I understand the idea, but I can't fully comprehend it. I see not only no benefit, but enormous harm in simply omitting something as grand as food. Okay, it might be that a CEO might find a bottle like that useful between several video calls with Singapore, but fundamentally, I would always approach the matter from the other side: If you don't have time to eat, you're living wrong. And the solution can't be to drink your meal, but to change your life. If I'm honest, just by observing the people around me, I find myself increasingly asking whether our inventions are actually still helping us live the lives we want, or whether they've long since dictated the life we have to lead without us really realizing it? I mean, first we skipped the starched napkins, then the nice cutlery, then we ordered the takeaway food, and now we're just skipping it altogether. Why all the stress? This hysterical obsession with speed and efficiency? What do we cut out next? Sleep? Sex? Lazing around? And what do we actually do instead?
For as long as I can remember, I've made fun of people who throw nice-sounding but out-of-context quotes into serious debates, often from Friedrich Nietzsche or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. But if it fits, it fits: "And when they lost sight of the goal, they redoubled their efforts." It's supposed to be by Mark Twain.
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