Life in Berlin is just...easier

Rent control = peace of mind

Welcome back to Ordinary Delusions, a newsletter searching for answers in the shit show of late capitalism. I rebranded a few weeks back and am exploring new directions in my work. Read more about that here.

I am opening this new chapter with three stories about how technology and the economy shaped my 20s and 30s. The first one was about how Big Tech killed my dream job. Then I wrote about the economic forces that shaped my work in sustainable fashion. This week, it’s the decision I made to leave the UK for Germany. If you find my writing meaningful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Britain sold its water and now its rivers are flowing with shit, wet wipes and sanitary towels. Most of the country’s water industry is owned by foreign investment funds like the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Just one company, Southern Water, poured billions of liters of raw sewage into the sea to cut costs. Instead of investing in Britain’s water supply, the companies running it all have paid shareholders billions in dividends.

It’s a gross example of what neoliberalism has done to the UK.

In the UK, generations of neoliberal politicians have told us that the best way to push society forward is to cut as much money and regulation out of public life as possible, and to turn services like water into profit-making businesses. The idea was that all these businesses competing against each other will naturally lead to the best outcome for everyone. What really happened was that public services got worse and life got more expensive, but the people at the top of it all made tons of money.

Neoliberalism really got going in the 80s under Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. Most of the english-speaking world followed, and many poor countries in the global south got it forced down their throats. It has had a terrible impact on quality of life in every country it’s touched. The American healthcare scam is the best example of how neoliberal politics ruins lives.

In the UK, you’re lucky if you don’t spend half your salary on rent. Independent businesses struggle as corporations take over entire industries. Students are drowning in debt by the time they leave university. Tower blocks are covered in material so dangerous that construction industry analysts describe it as solid gasoline. And as life got more expensive across the country, working class people have been systematically shut out of creative industries.

Neoliberalism’s gradual degradation of British life has been going on my whole life, and it’s only getting worse. My mum paid £60 a year to go to university, and bought a flat in London when she inherited some money from her uncle in the 80s. Its value has gone up 1,000% since then. You’ll find neoliberal fingerprints all over the climate emergency, too. It’s all connected.

It was against this backdrop that I moved to Berlin in 2014. I was interning at Carhartt at the time and living at my mum’s in London, but it was already clear that a career in fashion was going to be really tough in the UK. Plus, it was hard making new friends and it took hours to get anywhere.

Life in Berlin is just…easier. Rent control creates stability. It’s not like people are chatting non-stop about how much they love housing regulations, but it has an undeniable impact on your peace of mind when you know your rent isn’t going to get doubled next year for no reason. It’s harder for companies to fire people, and anyone with a full-time job has their healthcare paid for them. Life is slower here. Making friends is easy because people have the time for it. Your social life does not need to be non-stop networking. Everywhere feels like a neighborhood because there are way less chains (there’s 246 Starbucks in London, in Berlin it’s 18). And it’s easy to imagine settling down when there’s free kindergarten, universal healthcare and university costs a few hundred euros a semester. It’s a place to be human.

Regulation and welfare spending are not the kind of things you dream of growing up, but they shape our lives in so many ways. They can either open you up to new opportunities — because you have the safety net, the financial cushion, the headspace to take risks. Or they can close them off, as ordinary people can’t afford to do anything but chase money and climb the corporate ladder. If your dream job requires you to intern for years with no pay, then the only way you’ll make it is by being on the right side of the intergenerational wealth gap.

I still go back to London a few times a year. The change in mentality is stark. DM someone or bump into them on the street and it’s all let’s catch up but when it comes to actually making plans, nobody has the time for anything. People are doing work calls on the bus while everyone else stares into their phones. Life is a hustle. It feels like part of the atmosphere, but really it's down to the decisions made by generations of politicians who decided that corporate profit and economic growth are more important than human wellbeing.

A big part of my career path has been shaped by the fact that I do not want to live my life like this. When I quit my old job at Highsnobiety, there was basically nowhere else in the city I wanted to work. I could have gone somewhere else — like London or New York — but I didn’t want to walk away from the peace of mind I have here. So that meant going freelance, which led me to writing my book. And writing my book led me to writing this newsletter. But fashion is still a very IRL industry, and when you’re far away from it all, people kinda just forget you exist. So I’ve pivoted my work into other topics. It all comes back to the rent control, the healthcare, the rivers that aren’t flowing with shit.

I’ve been here almost eleven years, and I’m a dual national now, with a German passport and everything. IDK how I feel about living here forever, there are many drawbacks to life in Berlin and aspects of the country that are toxic in their own ways. Expat life has its own downsides that regular Germans never experience. I really miss my old life sometimes. I don’t really feel like I “finished” the fashion chapter of my life. I didn’t give it up, Silicon Valley killed it. Sometimes we have to leave unfulfilled parts of ourselves in the past.

Over in the US, Trump is tearing neoliberalism apart and trying to replace it with something even worse. Most of the democrats, the quote-unquote good guys, are still on neoliberal autopilot, convinced that all the health insurance scams and millions of homeless people are the best life can be and that anyone who doesn’t shill for corporate lobbyists is living in a dream world.

One of the great ironies of the 21st century is that many of the countries standing at the top of the capitalist food chain are tearing themselves apart. Generations of politicians told us that economic growth would make everything better, that slowly but surely we’d fix all the world’s problems, one quarterly report at a time. Instead of the promised land, the neoliberals led us into fascism, climate meltdown and student debt. Maybe we need to stop listening to them.