From one of the first evenings in our new home. It was still a construction site, where the heat and lamplight did not work. But the atmosphere was top notch.
Report 2024
During the new year I will be eighty years old. I feel it as a much more significant aging marker than the preceding so-called sharp corners with round age numbers. But when I (re-)read the text of the last few years for the Report column here on the website, it is as if I have already started to take stock of the situation and prepare the landing several years ago. The altitude has been reduced, I have gradually slowed down, fastened the seat belt and lowered the landing gear.
2024 was no exception. Mai (my wife) and I moved a few months ago to a house that is much smaller than the one we left after 38 years. More telling is that I have begun to relativize the time horizon for various serious problems and threats. We take the potential catastrophes that do not seem to materialize within the next twenty years too lightly and can only mobilize our concerns by thinking about the world we are leaving for our 10 grandchildren.
It is also striking to see how the content of these annual Report pages has been reprioritized in recent years. Previously, the post began with a long list of the past year's many different tasks. Probably to convince myself and show others how extrovertedly busy I was. Everyday life and family were briefly mentioned at the end. I still find it hard to get the timing right. But that must be because I have become more thorough - or just slower.
This applies, for example, to my work with a contribution to an English handbook on public service media. After a far too long approach, in which I have been looking for what architects call the "main grip" on my contributing, I have discovered and am slowly beginning to understand an interesting interplay between, on the one hand, citizens' media consumption and the degree of freedom in their choices, and on the other the media's methods of curating to influence – or even control – what is read, listened to and watched. It's strange that it took me so long to see and grasp it. But now I am in the process of writing and will submit the "first draft" to the editor here at the beginning of the new year.