The Last Post Before the Silence: Why I Am Stopping the Hamster Wheel for 5 Days

About a payment reminder that supposedly could not wait, about a generation that forgot how to live while it kept functioning, and about 5 days in which the whole loud world is allowed to stay stolen from me

I am lying in bed, and my back forced me to my knees over the weekend, every movement fires a bolt through the lumbar spine, and above me the ceiling fan turns in that lazy, indifferent way I like about it. Bandit lies on the floor next to the bed and is feeling every single bone right now, because he was out three times yesterday, and when a Malinois lies like that, it is the rest of an animal that has honestly earned its day. Outside it is cool, and into exactly this moment the phone vibrates.

A message, and a woman is furious about a payment reminder, over an invoice, 100 euros, and she wants it settled immediately, not this evening, not tomorrow, but right now, as if the fate of the Western world hung on these 100 euros, as if the world stood still until I dragged myself out of bed and hunted for a mistake that may not even exist.

I laughed for a second, not unkindly, more puzzled, because while I lay there and the fan turned, a question crossed my mind that is really the whole reason for this piece. What person actually has the right to decide over me? Who gets to dictate that something has to happen now, this minute, because a stranger wants to make her own panic mine?

The answer is simple, no one, and there is no such thing as immediately, because there is a wall, and no one gets through that wall anymore.

I am writing this book, the Hamster Wheel. It is essentially finished, and yet I still reflect, day after day, on how to show people the way out of that wheel. This piece here is not a scientific article, it brings my voice back. It is for those born in the fifties, in the sixties, in the seventies, who feel lost in a time that changes faster than a brain could ever adapt, a brain built over hundreds of thousands of years for a slower world. I am one of you, and I spent the weekend thinking hard.

The immediately is the lie that keeps you in the wheel

Imagine you live in a matrix. All around you everything is happening, nonstop, loud, urgent. Someone dies, someone weeps, somewhere a shot is fired, somewhere something collapses, some country passes some law, some corporation in America loses data that concerns nobody here. All of it is a side matter, and it is not your life.

My life is my house. My life is the handful of people who belong to my circle, and for them I give everything, down to the last, even my own, and Bandit belongs to it too, while everyone else, with respect, can go hang. That sounds hard, and it is hard, but it is the only stance with which a person keeps his head in this world. If I let every stranger’s disaster, every stranger’s drama, every stranger’s reminder throw me off balance, then at the end of the day I am empty, wrung out, and sick, and I have gained nothing but the illusion that I did something important.

I spent decades in court. There I stood under constant fire. A question came, I had to answer at once, precise, without hesitation, and one wrong word could tip a trial. That was the job, that was fine. But at some point I stood in a Munich courtroom and said a sentence that has stayed with me to this day, because it was so simple and so freeing. “Then let’s drop the whole bloody thing,” I said, and for that I was removed from the room, but I was free, and how I savored that feeling. It is my life, and as long as I commit no crime, as long as I keep to the law, I can do as I please, and no one has anything to dictate to me.

I keep a list in my head, a to-do list ordered by priority. When an authority pushes, when the tax office grows impatient because I missed a filing on the tenth, because I could barely move for the pain, then it goes on the list. And I work through that list when I can and when I judge it right, not when someone else decides it has to be now. That one woman who wanted her reminder settled at once is only the symptom. The hamster wheel itself is made of a thousand such immediatelys, and every one of them is negotiable the moment you grasp that the urgency is borrowed, not your own.

The body that no longer wants to play the character

Let me get to what has been driving me for years. The normal person gets up on Monday, makes breakfast, takes the children to school or drives to work, if there still is work, earns the money or does the work at home, and so it goes day after day, a whole life long. And in all of it we forget the one thing that matters, we forget to live.

Often the body fights back, and it does so in a way we call depression. I do not believe depression is first and foremost broken chemistry in the head. I believe it is something far more honest. It is the moment a person reaches a certain point and the body says, I no longer want to play this character. I no longer want this life that makes no sense, in which I function and function and never arrive. The body says, hey, what you are doing is not logical, change it. And in the instant you truly change it, the depression might well be gone.

Now look closely, because this is where it gets interesting. For decades we were told that depression is the result of a chemical imbalance, too little serotonin, a shortage you top up with a pill like a half-empty tank. That story broke big in the nineties, together with the modern antidepressants, and it lodged itself like almost no other. Surveys show that 80 percent of people and more believe it is proven that depression is caused by this chemical imbalance. A large systematic umbrella review by Joanna Moncrieff and her team, published in Molecular Psychiatry in 2022, combed through the entire body of evidence and reached a sobering conclusion, that there is no consistent evidence of a link between serotonin and depression.

I am honest here, the way I always am. The work is scientifically contested, and that belongs to the story. 36 experts pushed back in the same journal and accused the team of methodological errors, arguing the serotonin theory was never meant as a simple one-chemical model in the first place. That is a quarrel among scientists, and I will not settle it here. But the point that remains is enormous either way. The simple tale, you have too little of a substance, take a pill, is anything but the settled fact it was sold as.

And the industry is powerful. It developed agents, which I deliberately do not name here by their acronyms, that people then take for the rest of their lives, while the brain has long since throttled its own production. You notice it when you try to stop, because then many people feel truly awful, and that is not proof they needed the drug, but a sign that the body needs time to take over again. The research on this withdrawal is clear on this one point. Anyone stopping such agents never does it abruptly and never alone, but slowly, in tiny steps, with medical guidance, because otherwise the withdrawal turns brutal. That is exactly why I write no instructions here. I only write what the family doctor or the poorly trained neurologist then likes to say. Now you see it, you need the medication to function. No, you may not need it to function, because you were plastered over so your body would stop fighting the wheel.

I know this is an uncomfortable view, and I know there are people for whom these agents lift real suffering, and they should keep them. They are not who I mean. I mean the far larger group who were talked into a metabolic disorder where in truth a life no longer fit.

What I miss, and I say it without softening it

I was born in 1970, and I grew up poor, in social housing in Munich, a latchkey child, a few marks lay on the table in the morning and I bought myself something to eat with them. And still, or perhaps precisely because of it, I miss that time with a force that sometimes surprises me.

The eighties were the finest time I know. We had a television, in color eventually, what an event. Later came a video recorder, and we copied films onto VHS, illegally of course, everyone did it back then, you passed them around, you swapped them. I remember Alien, and I would have sworn the film came out in 1985, that is how vividly I still carry the feeling of those days, but it came out in 1979, with Ridley Scott and Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, a woman I loved with my whole soul, because she beat the monster not with muscle but with mind. What a film, for the technology Hollywood had at the time.

In the eighties we did not have to be reachable around the clock. We had no phone, no mobile. Bad news arrived by post, and my God, did anyone run to the mailbox every day, I certainly did not, and when there was bad news from the world, it stood in the newspaper, in those idiotic boxes where you dropped 50 pfennig for a bad mood. Politics was not something you racked your brain over, it was far away, and at some point you learned, ah, now it is this way or that, and life went on.

The supermarket had 2 beer brands, 3 mineral waters, cola, a cola-lemonade mix, one flavored soda and one lemon soda, and that was it. Nobody stood half an hour in front of a meter-long wall of drinks wrestling with the existential question of which of 40 waters was the right one. For me it was tap water anyway, soda was out of reach, it cost money, and now and then a cola-mix, that was luxury. I grew up on meatloaf in a bread roll, a couple of Vienna sausages, because you had to live, and because there was no self-appointed guru explaining to you by the second what that was doing to your body now.

Let me set 2 images side by side, then you will see what I am getting at. Back then, a Sunday: the phone hung on the wall, with a cord, and when no one called, there was simply quiet. You sat there, looked out the window, grew bored, and out of that boredom came the ideas. Today, the same Sunday: in your hand a device that lights up every 7 minutes, a photo of a stranger’s breakfast, an outrage, an ad, a war, a cat video, and by evening you wonder where the day went.

One more image, because back then you bought a record, put it on and listened to the whole thing, side A, flip it, side B, because the flipping was part of it. Today you skip a song after 20 seconds, because the next one might be better, and in the end you have heard 100 beginnings and not a single piece to the end. That is how we live now, all beginnings and nothing carried through.

And do you know what I miss most? To this day I listen to music from the eighties and nineties, because from what plays now I simply cannot draw anything out, no warmth, no memory, rather a quiet aversion. I do not think I am alone in this. I think many of us are waging an inner battle we will not even admit to, because we are so deep in the wheel that we mistake the wheel for the world. So let someone point a finger at me and say, there goes George exaggerating again. No, I stay realistic, and I tell you honestly what I miss: the time without hurry, the time without this device in the pocket that cuts every silence apart, the time without email, without Netflix, without the constant direct debits, without the feeling of having to run each month just to earn the roof over my head. What I miss is life itself.

The guru madness and the doctors who play God on Instagram

And here we are at something that truly gets on my nerves, this whole guru circus. And yes, I mean the doctors too, the ones who want to pull their last private patients into the practice and for that explain on Instagram how to live healthily, why you get cancer and why you do not, what you must supplement and what will kill you. Honestly, they do not know themselves. A doctor studied a few years of outdated knowledge and earned a title, and suddenly people take him for a god, which he is not, and good doctors know it. Good doctors question themselves constantly, keep learning, and do not trust what the pharma rep whispers to them. The others dump their mental drivel into the net and call it enlightenment.

Back then it was not like this, we were healthy. Now and then someone went off the rails, as they said back then, but this present flood of depression, anxiety disorders and diagnoses of every kind did not exist. Children were children, and when a boy in puberty fooled around with another boy, that was normal, and when girls kissed, you let them find their sexuality. Today a child gets a label pressed on early, ADHD, autism, because it is different from the norm.

On autism I have written at length elsewhere, in the piece about the Homo Genius in the adaptation phase, and I stand by it. Autism, in my view, is not primarily a defect, but a way in which evolution is preparing the brain for the enormous demands this new world places on it. But instead of looking more closely, people stick on a label and are satisfied. The self-satisfied, closed-off mind that believes it knows everything because an algorithm served it the same half-truth for the hundredth time, that is the real disease of our age. Call him Otto Sapiens, the man who thinks he has understood the world because he listened to an audiobook about it.

And since we are on the beauty mania, because that is all this guru circus is at its core, a contest over who hangs the most flawless facade into the net. Out there young people still believe they must build the great modeling career, must contort and starve themselves for a single photo. I photographed all my life, people, landscapes, nudes, I know how the craft works and what an image costs before the shutter even clicks. 250 euros for the makeup artist, then the clothing, then the light, then hours at the computer, until almost nothing is left of the person in the picture that has anything to do with the person before it. And today models run out of my computer, artificially generated, too flawless to be real, and suddenly too pretty does work. So whoever uploads their software-smoothed photos and gets high on every like should pause a moment. It is not your face being celebrated, it is a computation that decided to push you out to enough people.

Bread and circuses, only the medium has changed

Does Homo sapiens need this madness? Is your brain built to torment itself nonstop with what happens on the other side of the planet? If you sit in New York, is it really vital what gets decided in Germany, and the other way round, must I get worked up here over every American outrage? I have readers all over the world, and the Americans among you will feel it just as the Germans do. We are not built to carry this load.

In ancient Rome it was the games. They threw the people a piece of bread now and then and kept it amused with games, so it would stay in the wheel and not get dangerous ideas, and that is what they called bread and circuses. Today it is the World Cup, the jungle camp, the endless stream of triviality that lets you go quietly dumb. Nothing has changed, only the medium.

Social media did not hold humanity together. In the beginning, when you found old classmates again, it was lovely, I grant that. But now we live globally and let ourselves be ground down by things that do not concern us. And the engine underneath is dopamine, the small kick when you scroll, the chime of the notification, the counting of the likes. It is built that way, on purpose, and money is made from it, from your data and from your health.

Sure, I have an Instagram account too, with a six-figure following. I have Facebook, I have X. But I log in, dump my own mental drivel, and log out again. I read no news there. I do not scroll for hours through strangers’ outrage. The algorithm does not have me by the throat, and that is precisely the trick I show in the book. A like, by the way, is not a verdict on quality, which ought to sink in by now. It only says a machine decided to push your post out to enough people, nothing more.

Record revenues, and still it is not enough

Now it turns political, and I say it cold. Let us look at Germany. In 2025 the state took in 989.8 billion euros in taxes, more than ever before, almost a trillion, and the money is not enough for it. The government plans, demands, changes this law and that one, and it turns my stomach to see what has become of this country, an administration of scarcity with full coffers.

And then there is that machine in Brussels, which is forever thinking of something. This must be changed, that must be changed, and the next regulation is already in the queue. Every change breeds new forms, every form a new post to administer it, and in the end the citizen sits before a stack of paper no one can survey anymore. I am a free spirit, and still I demand of a state that it make life simpler and not more complicated year after year. The opposite happens, and it makes me sick, I put it that plainly.

I separate cleanly here, because I always do: the number is evidence, what comes now is my reckoning, my opinion. I believe it is not enough because over the years costly fundamental decisions were made whose costs no one names openly, for instance when the borders were thrown wide open years ago. At the end of 2025 around 1.17 million Ukrainian nationals lived in Germany, and that is only one group among several. I do not claim these people are lazy, that would be an insinuation I cannot prove and therefore do not present as fact. I only say, as a sober reckoning, that large humanitarian decisions cost large sums, and that a state which spends such sums and rakes in record taxes at the same time should not stand up and claim there is no money. Whoever made the wrong decisions corrects them, and does not keep demanding more from the people who filled the coffers long ago.

And since we are on priorities, a glance at what this government is deciding right now. In early July the coalition under Chancellor Merz set in motion a duty to produce a sick note from the first day of illness. The conservatives originally wanted a waiting day, a day of illness with no pay at all. Merz himself is already backpedaling and says one need not go to the practice on the first day, the implementation is still open. So they decide something whose meaning the chancellor himself cannot state precisely. And with a smile I write beside it what will happen. The practices will be flooded, and whoever is already sitting at the doctor over a sniffle will not take one day off sick but the whole week at once, because the doctor is annoyed anyway, and were I the doctor I would write two full weeks for this nonsense, with warm regards to Berlin.

On the pension only this much. Who dreamed up this construction in the first place? I work as long as I can work. When I can no longer, the state is there to secure me a roof, my care, and enough to eat, full stop. It cannot be that one man retires at 62 into a lush pension and lives to 98, while another grinds himself into the ground, and where is the logic in that. But let us leave it, we stay human.

And here is the point where my gall rises. When I have no money left at the end of the month because I budgeted badly, then I eat potatoes, potatoes with quark, potatoes with cottage cheese, and what I drink is water anyway. I allow myself nothing then, and the world does not end over it. That is exactly what I expect of a state that takes in almost a trillion. Herr Merz, I mean you. Herr Klingbeil, I mean you as well. Learn above all to make do with what is there, the way every citizen must, and give the people back what they earned, instead of forever demanding more.

The word says it already, livelihood, so I have to earn my own keep, for myself, for the bare right to be alive, and how sick is that really. A bit of work would be fine, if you could still afford a life from it, but that is exactly what fewer and fewer can.

It will get tight for me too, and I admit it reluctantly

Let me go back briefly to the early nineties. I had to learn an enormous amount, studies and work at once, and I was so broke you can hardly imagine it. I lived in Munich in a one-room hole, 16 square meters, a tiny shower, a bed, a hallway with a micro kitchenette. 820 marks rent for that hole. On the side I worked as a fitness trainer, for 16 marks an hour, and I was good, at a trial session nearly everyone signed a contract, because I trained obsessively myself and it showed. I had gotten the license for it in the army, where I served for 4 years.

I say it openly, because I gloss over nothing. Back then I also took anabolic steroids and tried other unhealthy things, not out of stupidity but out of curiosity, because I wanted to know how the body reacts, and I did it under guidance and stopped again. I tell this not as advice, quite the opposite. I tell it because I am no guru preaching down from a pedestal, but someone who tried the things himself and knows what he is talking about.

But what I am getting at is something else. Back then, with 20 marks, I drove to the discounter in an ancient 5 Series BMW, 200,000 kilometers on the clock, the seats worn through, a hole in the exhaust that woke half the block when I started it in the morning. The radio brought in only one station halfway cleanly, and in summer the whole car smelled of warm vinyl and old gasoline. It drank like a hole, but the fuel was cheap, and when the engine ran and the windows were down, the road was mine alone. Rich I was not, but free, and for those 20 marks I had a cart brimming full. Not long ago a friend in New York sent me a photo of his full cart, and he had laid down 490 dollars for it. I know 2 Americans alone who now live in their car, because they can no longer afford the rent. George, one wrote to me, I studied and learned my whole life, and now I live in my vehicle.

That runs through every stratum, and it can hit anyone not born with a silver spoon. The time coming toward us will be tight for most of us. And I admit it reluctantly, but I am honest, the way I always am, it will get tight for me too.

What I expect when I pull the plug

And now comes the part I look forward to like a child looking forward to the summer holidays, those 6 weeks that felt as if time itself had stopped. That is how I look forward to these 5 days.

I want to be honest, with myself too. I expect the first days to be hard. The hand reaches into the empty pocket where the phone usually sits. The phantom vibration, that imagined buzz on the leg that everyone who carries a smartphone knows. The boredom creeping up, the nagging sense that somewhere something important is escaping me. This is not weakness and not chance. It is withdrawal, and the research names it exactly that, with boredom, with a hunger for stimulation, with that pull the studies call craving, the same word used for nicotine.

And because I am selling no guru nonsense here, I tell you where the science actually stands, that it is split. Some controlled studies found less anxiety and better mood after a week without social media. A large review from 2025 pooled 10 studies with nearly 4,700 people and, on balance, found no measurable effect on well-being, not better and not worse, no miracle cure anywhere. Whoever promises you otherwise is selling you something.

I also dislike the buzzword drifting through every second timeline, this so-called dopamine detox. You do not reset dopamine like an odometer, that is kitchen neurology for people who once watched a video about it. What really happens is plainer and more honest, the constant loop gets interrupted. Stimulus, swipe, small kick, next stimulus, a thousand times a day, that is how the thing is built, with full intent. For 5 days I unplug from that loop, and I want to feel with my own head what happens then.

Because that is the whole point. I am not running this experiment because a study promises me a better life. I am running it because I want to know for myself, and because I suspect that the boredom everyone flees from is in truth the doorway. Behind it, that is my expectation, it goes quiet. The attention that has been torn into a thousand shreds for years gets a piece back whole. I will read a book and not reach for the phone after 4 minutes. I will think a thought to the end without a ringing tearing it apart. Maybe I am wrong, maybe on the third day I will be jittery and irritable and write a whole page about how much I miss the thing, and that too would go into the book, honest, as always.

And yes, I look forward to it. I look forward to the emptiness that is no emptiness. I look forward to the moment when the humming in my head grows quieter and I hear again what I drowned out in myself for years.

Tomorrow I am gone

The fan is still turning. Bandit breathes calmly beside the bed, and this morning’s reminder still lies unread on the phone, because it can wait, because everything can wait that does not belong to my circle. This is not defiance, but the only freedom we have left, and it costs nothing but the willingness not to make a stranger’s immediately my own.

Before me lies an experiment. From tomorrow, from Tuesday, I am gone. 5 days no phone, no email, no texts, no social media, no news. For 5 days I open no mailbox and no post. For 5 days I do not care what stands in the account, what fails on some computer somewhere, what got decided again in Berlin or in Washington, what the fuel costs and why the food in the shop has grown so expensive. For 5 days I let the soul dangle, and I go through with it hard.

And for 5 days I do not even care whether I will one day die. The fear of death, that faint hiss at the back of the head that social media turns up a little louder every day. The modern person racks his brain over things Homo sapiens never had to, and the fear of one’s own end is the greatest of them, carefully fed by an endless stream of catastrophes that do not concern him. For 5 days I set it down.

In these days I speak with no one who tells me something bad. I want my head to come to rest, I simply want to know nothing more. 5 days, perhaps it becomes 7, that I decide along the way and no one else. It is an experiment on myself, with an open ending, and I go into it as into a room whose door I pull shut behind me.

Today I still write to the few people who truly matter to me, and that is not many, because friends in the real sense I hardly have, that was always so and belongs to me, and after that there is quiet. How I felt after these 5 days, what it did to my head, you will not read here on the blog but in the book. Because my knowledge costs, and when it comes to the hamster wheel I am hard as nails. Whoever truly wants out has to pay. But this one thing I promise you, this book is the key.

This is the last post for a long time. The fan turns, the dog sleeps, and my hand already rests on the switch.

References

• Groot, P. C., & van Os, J. (2020). Outcome of antidepressant drug discontinuation with tapering strips after 1-5 years. Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology, 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2045125320954609
• Lemahieu, L., Vander Zwalmen, Y., Mennes, M., Koster, E. H. W., Vanden Abeele, M. M. P., & Poels, K. (2025). The effects of social media abstinence on affective well-being and life satisfaction: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 15, 7581. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-90984-3
• Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R. E., Stockmann, T., Amendola, S., Hengartner, M. P., & Horowitz, M. A. (2022). The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry, 28(8), 3243-3256. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0
• Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis). (2026). Tax revenue: Germany, year 2025. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Staat/Steuern/Steuereinnahmen/_inhalt.html
• Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis). (2026). Ukrainian population in Germany as of 31 December 2025. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/ukraine.html