WELTAUFGANG has begun.
Every two weeks i fold the pieces into one letter. This is the first.
Pride has two sides. One faces the sender, the other the receiver. The receiver’s side is a beautiful cocktail: gratitude, love, happiness, relief that something long carried is finally out in the open. Today i feel that second kind of pride for the crew at delodi. After thirteen years of building software for sustainability, they have raised the bar. The new thesis is documented in a book, and it is now coming out on Substack as well. Twice a week, free, in English and in German. We have carried this text for years. Now it walks.
Every two weeks I will fold the freshly published pieces into one letter here, for those of you who read in letters rather than chapters. This is the first.
Eight people around a table in Upper Swabia. Two generations, one pot, fresh bread. No plan. No shared goal written on a whiteboard. And yet everyone knows: we eat together, we talk, we are with one another. The woman who brought the pot knows who likes tomatoes and who does not. The boy cutting bread does not cut the last piece for himself. This flows without needing to be named.
Now ask these eight people what Germany wants. What Europe wants. What humanity wants. Listen to the language shift. Suddenly you hear growth, security, competitiveness: values no one would speak at a Sunday table.
The serial opens with this gap. On the near levels we know what we want: the children healthy, the bread enough, someone there when we are ill. On the distant levels we cannot measure any of that, so we reach for proxies. GDP for well-being. Voter turnout for trust. The map for the land.
A proxy is not a lie. But whoever drives by the map alone eventually hits a tree.
Marshall Sahlins called the hunter-gatherer bands he studied the original affluent society and meant it. Affluence, he said, has two roads. You can expand the means, or you can contract the wants. Those communities worked three or four hours a day and missed nothing. We took the other road and forgot there had ever been a fork.
So the book lands on a question we answer without thinking at every family table and have sidestepped for generations at civilisational scale: what is our shared goal as humanity?
Aristotle had a word: eudaimonia. Not the sofa-happiness our economy peddles. The quality of a whole life. And it is relational. My good life hangs on yours, on the state of the city, on the Earth beneath all of us.
Then the world turned.
Money, we all vaguely feel, is broken. The serial shows precisely where. Most of it is not printed. It is lent into existence. Commercial banks create deposits by making loans. The Bank of England said so in plain words in 2014. Every loan is a debt. Every debt carries interest. And the money to pay that interest does not yet exist. It has to be borrowed into being. A spiral with one direction: onward, more, larger.
That is the first design flaw. The second is that accumulation has no ceiling. Piketty demonstrated that returns on capital consistently outrun economic growth, so wealth concentrates. And a market with an actor rich enough to buy the market is no longer a market. The error correction breaks.
None of this is conspiracy. It is architecture. We built a machine that must grow on a planet that cannot, and then we wonder why every year feels tighter than the last.
But the grandmother with her garden and three hens is not poor, and no one at that table would dare call her poor. She knows something the ministries have forgotten. The whole book is an attempt to carry what she knows into the structures of the distant. Not by dismantling the procedures, but by binding them back to their purpose, and making them leaner where relationship can carry the load.
to read the full series in English go to
um die ganze Serie auf Deutsch zu lesen:
