When the Future Grows Old

Why We Need to Rethink the Relationship Between the Generations

Lecture at the symposium Fewer – Older – More Diverse. Opportunities and Challenges for Our Society of the Karlsruher Forum für Kultur, Recht und Technik e. V. (Karlsruhe Forum for Culture, Law and Technology)

Karlsruhe, 14.10.2026

“You should have it better one day”

I remember this sentence of my grandparents well. They said it to us often, to my two brothers and me.

My grandparents were not philosophers; they were simple people. But this sentence had a philosophical depth. It could be declined on three levels:

• Never again war. For: “Peace is not everything, but without peace everything is nothing.” – I do not know whether my grandmother was consciously quoting Willy Brandt, but it is from her that I often heard this sentence. My grandparents did not say much about the war. And even less about the crimes against which they and their parents had put up far too little resistance. They were 13 when Hitler took power. – But when they did talk, you could see the shock in their faces. And it was clear: anything is better than war.
• Education and openness to the world. They kept our parents’ backs free and looked after us children, so that my mother could work and we could sit our Abitur. And they showed us their world, took us to Paris and to London. They themselves even travelled to Moscow. In the middle of the Cold War.
• Passing on modest prosperity. It was not about their prosperity, it was about building up ours. They put aside part of their pension, which was not large, for us children: for the driving licence and for university. – “You can’t take anything with you in the end,” my grandmother would say to me now and then, whenever she slipped me another twenty-mark note for the weekend with friends.

“You should have it better one day!” – The future was the promise made to us, and the stake they put up for us children.

The sentence “Things used to be better” never crossed their lips. For the brother had fallen in the war, one brother-in-law had been severely wounded, and the other brother-in-law had been driven from his homeland after the war.

The past was no competition for the future. The past was the old, the future the new that dawned with the young generation.

Things used to be better

“Things used to be better” – this sentence is probably as old as humankind. It is a sentence of the older, for the younger do not know this past of which people speak and which is supposed to have been better than the present. “Even the future is no longer what it used to be.” In Germany this sentence is attributed to Karl Valentin, in France to Paul Valéry. Probably it is older still.

Things used to be better – that is an attitude shared, according to a survey by Infratest dimap from February 2026, by 52 per cent of Germans. The reference point was the 1980s. Among supporters of the AfD it is 68 per cent, of the Union parties (CDU/CSU) 55, of the SPD 47, of the Left Party and the Greens about a third. – At first that is no surprise: conservatives have a more positive image of the past.

A comparison of the age groups shows a clear generational difference: among respondents aged 50 and over, more than 60 per cent rate the Federal Republic of the 1980s as better. Among those under 50, who for the most part did not experience that time actively themselves, agreement is lower, but still astonishingly high: in the age group from 35 to 49 it is 44 per cent, among 18- to 34-year-olds still 33 per cent. One in three, then, who did not live through that time at all.

But that leaves out a great deal: it was not better!

It was not better in the past: not geopolitically. Not economically. And socially least of all.

Geopolitically: Let us begin with the fact that almost 17 million Germans had to live in a dictatorship with a shoot-to-kill order at the border. The Cold War, the rearmament, Pershing missiles on German soil, hundreds of thousands in Bonn’s Hofgarten because they feared a nuclear war in Europe. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, the war between Iran and Iraq raged. The First Intifada broke out. The IRA was murdering in Northern Ireland and ETA in Spain.

Economically, in the wake of the oil crisis we had inflation rates averaging 5 per cent between 1970 and 1980. Domestic demand was saturated, new technologies (robotics, microelectronics and so on) moved into factories and offices – the economy grew only slowly, unemployment rose, as did public debt. The Social-Liberal coalition broke apart over the question of economic policy.

Socially, there were violent confrontations between the state and its citizens. Not only did the enforcement of the Startbahn West runway at Frankfurt Airport claim lives; the scenes at the construction sites of the nuclear industry, too, were compared by the press to conditions of civil war. Violence in marriage and against children was tolerated. Rape within marriage was not a criminal offence until 1997. As late as the end of 1978, the Bavarian Supreme State Court confirmed a “right of corporal punishment under customary law” for teachers in the classroom.

Migration, too, the supposed “mother of all problems”, has always existed: over 10 million refugees from the former German eastern territories after the war – in Baden the population demonstrated against the settlement of the expellees; millions of labour migrants from southern Europe and Turkey in the years of the economic miracle; millions of ethnic German resettlers and refugees in the wake of the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. When right-wing extremists openly hunted foreigners in Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Mölln and Solingen in the 1990s, the state was helpless.

If one asks Germans why they nevertheless regard the 1980s as a better time, they name the quality of roads and bridges, the state of Deutsche Bahn, and upward mobility through education.

The last two points stem from a distorted perception. The Bundesbahn was chronically in deficit. The burden on the state budget from the railways in West Germany already stood at DM 8.8 billion in 1980. The carriages of regional services were chronically outdated; and staff was lacking everywhere.

And as for education: of those born in the mid-1960s, eight out of ten still earned more than their parents. Of those born in the mid-1980s, it is six out of ten. In 1983, BAföG (the federal student aid) was converted to full loans, and the number of recipients fell. – Our problems with education began back then.

And quite honestly: better roads and bridges – that is the remake of the old story: “But he also built the motorways.”

It was not better.

The transformation of society

Now, this feeling that things used to be better does not come out of nowhere. It has its causes in a structural change of society:

• Old people live more in the past; and old people are becoming more numerous
• A different economic structure and slower growth
• The division of social realities

There are more old people

Whoever is old seeks stability and security. That is not true of every individual, but it is true in sum. And when the majority grows older, a society’s readiness for change declines, not because the individual changes, but because the weights shift.

In 1980 there were 12 million people aged 65 and over for 21 million children and young people. Around 2006 the two groups were equal in size. In 2045 there will be about 22 million older people and 13 million young. The ratio between old and young will have been reversed.

Of ten people who need someone to look after them, that is, children under 18 and people over 80, one was old in 1980. Today it is three; in 2050 it will be four. Where society used to care mainly for its young, it now cares more and more for its old. It no longer cares for its future, but for its past.

A different economic structure and slower growth

Age shifts the activity of the economic sectors: the workforce in the health and social sector in Germany as a whole rose from 3.1 million people in 1991 to almost 6.6 million today. – 14 per cent of those in employment look after health and social care in one form or another. One in seven. We often lament the shortage of doctors, yet in 1990 there was one doctor for every 335 inhabitants. Today it is one for every 187. – That is almost twice as many doctors.

A society that expands creates opportunities for new growth: new industrial areas, new roads, new ports. – Today we repair this infrastructure. This money creates no new growth, it secures what exists.

Together with the ageing of the population, this slows the growth potential of the economy as a whole. Care is less productive than industry. In addition, older people invest less than young families.

A division of social realities

Ageing does not proceed uniformly across Germany: for every ten Hamburgers aged 20 to 64 there are just under 3 people aged 65 or older. In Saxony-Anhalt it is over 5. Baden-Württemberg, at just under 4, lies in between.

Urban centres and regions with good educational provision remain attractive and draw in young people. In the long run this leads to a structural collapse of provision in rural areas, with doctors and pharmacists probably the last to leave. For there is work for them. The first to close are the schools, since too few children are left to make up classes. In many rural regions it is also hard to put together a football team. That is why families and young people move away. Businesses find no successors and close. Supermarkets, electricians, plumbers, car repair shops are missing. Flats and houses stand empty. Infrastructure costs are spread over fewer households. Life becomes more expensive.

In the face of these challenges and these individual experiences, social consciousness changes, and not only among individuals but across the board. A society that looked forward to the future becomes a society that grows weary of the future and takes refuge in the past. The future grows old.

“Being determines consciousness”

The sentence is from Marx. – With it, Marx turned against the philosophy of German Idealism, which believed it could describe reality through the analysis of consciousness.

“Social consciousness”, if there is such a thing, reacts to this structural transformation with three mechanisms of repression, if you like:

• The transfiguring glance back and the nostalgic flight into the past
• Withdrawal into the private sphere
• And: the assertion of claims in the name of a justice for those who, really or supposedly, come off short

The transfiguring glance back

No matter how often I say that it is not true. No matter how many statistics, facts and analyses we trot out. The feeling that things used to be better does not go away. It does not go away because, individually, it of course was better. We were all younger, the world lay open to us. We had plans. We were young, fit and beautiful. – I liked being young. And I remember a gleam in my grandmother’s eyes when she talked about her youth. When she was 20, the Second World War was raging, her brother was at the front. And yet her eyes shone when she told of that time.

In addition, the progress of the 1970s and 1980s in particular was publicly visible progress. New roads were built, new schools, sports halls, swimming pools, libraries. New housing estates were developed. Young families moved into new houses. The railway developed the ICE, cars became safer, technical environmental protection made enormous strides. In the 1960s the Rhine still changed colour regularly. There were hardly any sewage treatment plants. In Frankfurt and Munich the refuse dumps burned regularly.

From the 2000s on, progress became increasingly invisible. The iPhone has existed since 2007. The first Tesla came onto the market in 2008. After that, it feels, not much more came. – For medical progress, progress in production methods, resource efficiency, the optimisation of processors, all of that one does not see. There are no ribbons to cut. – And the little visible progress there is (wind turbines, heat pumps, electric cars) is dragged into a culture war.

Finally there is the culture industry, which lives quite well on nostalgia: television has lost the young generation and now broadcasts the TV of the 1980s and 1990s: “Verstehen Sie Spaß?” and “Wer wird Millionär?” (the German version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”). – The programmes of the radio stations live on the music of that time. And even documentaries and museums are discovering the recent past as a focus. – Why? Because it sells. Even my son listens to my music, and he is not alone in that.

Withdrawal into the private sphere

While nostalgia is above all a phenomenon of the older generations, withdrawal into the private sphere is a consequence for all generations, albeit from different motives. Among the older we are dealing with a mixture of a mistaken notion of “making room” (now it is the young people’s turn, I don’t want to stand in the way), a certain egoism that is even cheerfully professed on car stickers (“Travel before you’re dead – or your heirs will go instead”), and a social discourse that strips the old of their autonomy. They become objects of welfare-state provision and are offered housing advice, nutritional advice, sporting activation and so on, whether they want it or not.

The active generation withdraws because it is overburdened. Two earners in a household, which still does not suffice to build a house of one’s own, because land and ancillary costs have become so expensive and because society’s expectations of holidays and household equipment have grown. In the generation of those over 60 today, the woman kept family life going. That left room for her own voluntary engagement and for her husband’s. – With two jobs and no grandparents in the vicinity, that is no longer possible.

And finally, the young have the feeling that engagement does not pay off. They experience always being in the minority. And they experience meeting with scarcity everywhere: too few teachers, too few coaches, too little of everything. It is no longer normal to be able to play football or learn an instrument.

Insisting on justice and on one’s own claims

Where the cake no longer grows, the securing of one’s own claims begins. Public debate no longer approaches the big questions of society from a vision of the future, but from the claims and particular interests of individual groups. That makes common solutions all but impossible, because although claims are formulated, it remains unclear how they are to be paid for, or whose claims are not to be met.

And there are many claims:

• The claim of the 64.5-year-old to a pension without deductions
• The claim of the hard-working, of whom no more can be asked
• The claim of the young to an affordable flat and a free nursery place

Whoever lodges a claim is always also saying: someone else must pay or go without. The left side of the political spectrum likes to look to the wealthy at this point. They should contribute more, so that social insurance, the renovation backlog of the infrastructure, better education and equipment for the armed forces can be paid for. – The Left Party’s wealth-tax proposal is supposed to raise about 150 billion euros. The conservatives like to call for cuts in social spending, but even the complete abolition of the Bürgergeld (the basic income support for jobseekers) would bring in only just under 50 billion. The state, however, has total expenditure of 2.3 trillion euros. The lion’s share of that still has to be paid by all of us. – The claims cannot be shifted onto supposed marginal groups such as the “super-rich” or the “total shirkers”.

The previous “relationship” between the generations – the definition of claims and needs

The previous relationship between the generations is often defined as a relationship of entitlements. On the one hand there are the social security systems; but there is also the question of what an age-appropriate life can look like and what the state or society can or should provide for it.

I shall spare myself the many discussions about the social security systems, and only want to point out that looking at the pension system is not enough. There are model calculations showing that the rise in contribution rates in health insurance is to a predominant extent attributable to the ageing of the population. In long-term care that is undisputed.

More worth pondering, it seems to me, is the growing importance of a once incidental and subordinate paragraph of the SGB XII (Book XII of the Social Code).

In 1961, with the Federal Social Assistance Act, it was recognised that old age, too, can create a need for assistance of its own. Assistance for the elderly was a small part of social assistance; since 2005 it has stood as § 71 in the SGB XII. That is to say, where it concerns people who cannot help themselves by their own means. Whoever looks at old age in this way creates structures that make old people, per se, people in need.

“Assistance for the elderly is to help prevent, overcome or alleviate difficulties arising from old age, and to preserve for old people the opportunity to take part in community life in a self-determined way and to strengthen their capacity for self-help.”

And indeed more and more organisations and offers of help relating to growing old are springing up, invoking this paragraph. They create their own demand. From the federal level to the municipality, from associations to consultancies, everyone is now concerned with the question of how to grow old well.

The German Association for Public and Private Welfare (Deutscher Verein für öffentliche und private Fürsorge), the professional association of municipalities, states and welfare organisations, has, with funding from the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, commissioned a situation report comparing the services of the municipalities and federal states under this paragraph. It is the starting point for the fact that more will now be demanded throughout the land.

This report, produced by a management consultancy, lists 13 advisory services under the five themes the law itself names: civic engagement, finding and keeping a home, everything to do with care, using age-appropriate services, and finally sociability, entertainment, education and culture. A great deal of money flows into lunch clubs, neighbourhood processes and project posts. It is hardly possible any longer to keep track.

By now an Elderly Assistance Act of its own is even being demanded; the state of Berlin passed one at state level this summer. A small part of social assistance is to become the counterpart to the Child and Youth Services Act.

What, then, has changed in the situation of the old, compared with the glorious 1980s, that they now need a law of their own? Is the individual old person suddenly more in need of help than before? Hardly. The economic and nursing needs are covered elsewhere.

The whole thing is philosophically questionable for three reasons:

• These structures are financed by the active, who do not have comparable help; and the old of today, when they were active, did not finance such structures for the old of their day either. So we are redistributing from young to old, from the future to the past.
• Many old people need no state support. Nevertheless, advice and support under § 71 are to be provided “regardless of existing income or assets”. That violates the principle of subsidiarity.
• And perhaps the most telling argument: we strip people of their autonomy from their mid-60s on when we declare them en bloc to be the addressees of assistance for the elderly. Youth services are meant to lead to independence; they make themselves superfluous. Assistance for the elderly is meant, to be sure, to preserve independence, but it tends to grow as people grow older.

But what is just, then?

This is the question of philosophy since its beginnings. What is just? – Many claims argue from commutative justice: “We paid in.” “We worked for a long time.” I have achieved something and now want compensation for it. Even Aristotle found it hard to find the right measure for this, valid for all time.

I would therefore like to put the question differently. For in this form the question of justice arises only if I regard society as a society of exchange. That, to be sure, corresponds to the ideology of our time, but before the exchange comes the willingness of one party to go first, to give in advance; the willingness to give something at the risk of getting nothing back. The core question that holds society together is not the question of justice, but the question: Who is prepared to give? Who is prepared to take on responsibility?

Between the generations the idea of exchange does not work anyway: do the young owe the old something? Nobody was asked whether he wanted to be born. Gratitude may arise from this, but not a debt that can be enforced. The generational contract is not a contract that anyone has signed; its terms must constantly be renegotiated. And it is not a contract of exchange. What could the old generation have to offer the young in exchange?

And the other way round? Whoever brings a child into the world is responsible for it, for a lifetime. That is the real generational contract: what we received from our parents we can never pay back. We can only pass it on. That, too, is not an exchange. It is a gift that is given forward. It is a gift that founds the future.

The social, the idea that the other is a socius, a companion, and not an enemy, opponent or competitor, this idea does not start from a community of exchange among equals with equal rights, but from the willingness to give without getting anything back. In this lies the responsibility of the strong for the weak, of those who have for those who have nothing.

And here it now gets interesting. For many old people are strong. They are wealthier than the young: in every percentile, people between 65 and 74 have markedly more wealth than people between 35 and 45 – from poor to rich; on average more than twice as much; every year 400 billion euros are inherited in Germany, and the typical heir is in his mid-50s or older. Wealth is being shifted from the very old to the not-quite-so-old.

Older people in Germany largely no longer have to work. Someone who could formerly live off his wealth was called a rentier. He was considered rich. Also because he could dispose freely of his time. Added to that are knowledge, competence and experience. There is a great deal of strength there.

Moreover, our generation has not exactly had a positive influence on many things that make the lives of our children harder: climate change first of all, the broken infrastructure and an education system that leaves too many behind and by now also produces poor results across the board.

From this derives a special responsibility, one that the old generation always knew about and which found expression in the sentence “You should have it better one day” – The old of former times knew that one is never rid of one’s responsibility for one’s children.

For this, however, it would be necessary for the old to break with this new retro consciousness of society: they know from their own experience that things were not better in the past. They would have the time to get involved. And they would have the freedom to formulate a claim, not on others, but on themselves – for the young: “You should have it better one day…”

Perhaps one can make this sentence a kind of touchstone for the individual and political decisions that are now pending: does the retention of the pension without deductions after 45 years of contributions stand up to this standard? Does inaction in education policy stand up to it? Does the abolition of the heating law and of the ban on combustion engines stand up to it?

The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once said that responsibility consists in acting for a “time without me” and in renouncing being a contemporary of the triumph of one’s work.

In the mid-1980s my grandfather had the heating in my grandparents’ small owner-occupied flat replaced once more. He was 65 then and, statistically, had a little more than 12 years left to live. He did not do it for himself.