I am seven, maybe eight years old, walking through my village with a little basket. It contains eggs and apples. My grandma has sent me to take the things we have in abundance to our neighbor. Later, I will walk home carrying potatoes from the neighbor’s garden. It is an exchange that needs no words. It is guided by the collective gut feeling of a community with rules of its own.
Back then, in the late 1970s, there was a communal bakery, a communal cold store, and a communal milk house, all collectively managed. Almost everyone in the village had a substantial garden or a small farm. Surpluses were given away and only rarely sold. When there were too many apples, people would sometimes take them to the local juice factory. But I think most of what was produced simply circulated within the village through informal exchange.
It may sound romantic today, but sharing was simply necessary back then. I was born into the last remnants of a rural model of community that had already begun to dissolve during my childhood. The nearby car industry was desperately looking for workers, while the growth of the region was making the farmers’ land increasingly valuable.
By the time I finished school, this small town in the Southern German Remstal had changed fundamentally. The older generation of small farmers had died, the land had been sold. The places where community had once taken place had disappeared. In their place stood a supermarket and a gas station for the many people commuting to work in the city.
Wasn't it wonderful to have grown up like that? Yes and no.
We children were free to do whatever we wanted. We roamed around until evening, until someone eventually came looking for us and sent us home. Once, we were in the middle of a race with our imaginary animals, and I was determined to get my horse across the finish line. That freedom is one of my strongest memories of that time.
But it was not so nice if you didn’t belong. And in my case, that was the case. I had trouble fitting in and living up to other people’s expectations. The village was not exactly gentle with those who fell outside the accepted order.
One night, I didn’t get home until dawn, and I saw the curtain move at the neighbor’s house. I will never forget that look. After finishing school, I left — and never went back.
And yet, what I learned and experienced as a young person in that village has become a kind of low hum running through my life.
Make Something of Yourself!
My school years coincided with a historical period that I would describe as hyper-individualism. Everything increasingly revolved around “making something of yourself” and “finding your own path.”Neoliberalism gained influence from the 1970s onward and became particularly prominent under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The first political measure I remember consciously was Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010, which made the idea of greater individual responsibility a guiding principle of German social and labor-market policy.
During this period, a policy agenda increasingly took hold that emphasized privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization, and fiscal discipline. “Let’s dare more market,” Deutsche Bank wrote under Alfred Herrhausen in its 1987 annual report. And its closing appeal was: “Let us dare more individual responsibility.”
This was also the period of German reunification and the collapse of the socialist system in Eastern Europe. Gradually, the former Eastern Bloc countries became integrated into a new political and economic order in which market economics and democracy emerged as shared guiding principles. Europe grew closer together and moved toward a single currency. It was a remarkable period of stability. Everything seemed possible.
That was the great promise of the time: You can become anything. And it was also the expectation an entire generation had for its children: You can have a better life than we did. It was not just an assignment, but almost a debt, a responsibility to make something of the opportunities that had been opened up for us. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, author David Graeber described how deeply rooted the idea is that we owe something to those who gave us life — and to the society that sustains us.
So go ahead. Make something of yourself!
American Psycho
And yes, it was true. We could all become something. Even I, coming from a modest background, had the opportunity to go to university and “fulfill myself,” as people often put it at the time. I still remember starting my first degree, overwhelmed by the possibilities, but also by the feeling that I absolutely had to make something of them.
The deeper I ventured into the world of professional opportunities, the more I experienced the rat race: the pressure to fit in, the competition and the stress. The freedom I had hoped to find after school, I found only outside the university.
The world of my childhood was changing, too. From the 1990s onward, public institutions increasingly came under financial pressure. The libraries that had been a gateway to the world for me as a child became smaller or closed altogether. It happened so slowly that we barely noticed. After all, a great future lay ahead of us. And we were all stumbling toward it.
In his 1991 novel American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis grotesquely embodied this promise of being able to achieve anything in the character of Patrick Bateman: successful, consumer-driven, perfectly adapted – but utterly empty inside.
9/11
In the open-plan office of a Berlin digital agency, a Tuesday, just after three. Suddenly, a colleague broke the silence: “Guys… look, something crazy is happening.” I will never forget the jerky video on Spiegel Online, the images of the planes and the burning towers. Shortly afterward, the server crashed and we all ran to the television.
September 11, 2001 was a turning point. The War on Terror was followed by new forms of state surveillance and increasing militarization of international politics. Data became a resource of national security, and new laws such as the US Patriot Act enabled the surveillance of digital communications. Including here in Germany.
The digital revolution had just promised us a world without borders. Now the same technology was helping to create new ones.
The Banking Collapse
Then came the financial crisis of 2008. For me, another turning point. What began as a crisis in the American financial system shook the global economy and many people’s trust in financial markets and public institutions. For me, it was the moment I left my well-paid corporate job behind. In 2010, I co-founded SUPERMARKT in Berlin and began to rethink my professional path.
Something new was emerging politically and digitally, too. The Occupy Wall Street movement brought a new form of global protest culture. In 2009 came Bitcoin: money from a digital network, not a bank. Airbnb and Uber promised a new form of sharing, the Sharing Economy. Business from person to person.
It seemed as though the internet was finally delivering on its old promise: community without borders. But then the platform came between us. It mediated apartments, rides, music, news, and attention — and turned that connection into a business model.
Individualism did not disappear in the digital age. It simply got a new user interface.
The Pandemic
Then, in the spring of 2020, came Covid-19. By then I was the mother of a primary-school child who now had to be homeschooled for weeks at a time. Suddenly, almost everything that made up our lives had been moved onto screens: school, work, culture, shopping, friendships.
We organized “teledinners” with our friends: eating and drinking wine together, connected by video call. After two hours, we were tired and signed off. Precisely when an evening together in real life would just be getting fun.
I remember how we tried everything to reclaim some sense of closeness. We went cycling, had picnics on blankets spread far apart, paddled on lakes and talked from boat to boat. One New Year’s Eve, we even celebrated outside, surrounded by fire pits. We did everything that was possible at the time to be together.
Today we know more about how fundamental human closeness is. A 2025 OECD study found that in many countries, face-to-face meetings with friends and family had already been declining for years, while remote forms of contact were increasing.
And Today? Where Does Individualism Go From Here?
I am no longer sure that individualism will have the last word. Perhaps we are once again at a turning point. Not because individualism has disappeared, but because its limits can now be seen and named more clearly.
New technologies were supposed to help us become free, yet we became increasingly dependent: on markets, global supply chains, and eventually platforms that mediate more and more areas of our lives. Hyper-capitalism has turned many things that were once simply organized together into commodities or services. Even community increasingly became something you could book, or at least manage digitally.
During the pandemic, many people realized that not everything can be digitized. For me, the most important lesson of that time was that technological connectivity is not the same as physical connectedness. A text message cannot replace the warmth and attention of a face-to-face conversation.
Perhaps that also explains why we are now seeing new forms of community emerge in so many places. People are creating neighborhood gardens and housing projects. They are taking over village shops, organizing community-supported agriculture, or creating new spaces for work and culture.
This is not a return to the village of my childhood. It would be wrong to romanticize the past. Yet apparently we are rediscovering something we had long considered obsolete: some things simply work better when we organize them together.
I therefore don’t think the future can be built on an either-or between individualism and collectivism. We need a new model in which both can coexist.
The Global Village
When I think about the village of my childhood today, I realize how much that informal economy was driven by people’s needs. One person needed help repairing a roof; another had a broken tractor. So they figured out how to help each other. They needed one another. Simple as that.
What I experienced back then had a name I would only learn much later: reciprocity. Admittedly, it is a rather difficult word for something that was completely natural in everyday life: You have something I need. I have something you need. So we help each other.
Perhaps the digital global village offers a new way of organizing such forms of reciprocity. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan described the world as a “global village” as early as the 1960s: electronic media, he argued, would connect people across vast distances. What was once a vision is now a technological reality.
Reciprocity Now!
But connection alone is not enough. We can communicate with one another like never before and still not automatically be able to organize around our shared needs. Platforms can connect us, but they turn that connection into a business model. And the state, too, cannot solve all the complex problems of our time on its own.
The task, then, is to reconnect the strength of the individual with the ability to cooperate. I don’t think the collective needs to be the new standard. Rather, it is the new forms of cooperation emerging in many places. They are not emerging because people want to live collectively again, but because they are realizing that some problems can simply be solved better together. Through adaptive resilience and new social technologies for shaping our common lives.
Ciao, Hyper-Individualism!
You can step aside now. No one will applaud you for celebrating your achievements in front of landscapes drying up.
The major innovations of our time now lie in the question of how we can connect the freedom and abilities of the individual with collective action.
Not less individuality, then, but more cooperation and better coordination. And yes, more empathy for human needs.
What a fascinatingly wide field we still have ahead of us!