Because of the compulsion of work and production, we are losing the capacity to play. We only rarely make playful use of language; we only put it to work. It is obliged to communicate information or produce meaning. As a result, we have no access to forms of language that shine all by themselves. Language as a medium of information has no splendour

Part of what makes modern work so challenging is that nothing ever seems to finish. It’s exhausting,

Germans talk about the phenomenon of das Verschwinden der Zukunft, the disappearance of the future, and a widening gulf between what people hope for and what they think is likely to happen.

What we are dealing with now, however, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility.