Aging & Wisdom Quote by Gunther Grass

Grass skewers "absolute busyness" as the stealth ideology of modern life: not a virtue, not even a necessity, but a utopian principle dressed up as common sense. The line turns a familiar promise inside out. Utopia is supposed to mean release from toil and a richer interior life; here, the dream-world is one where both work and leisure are pressed into the same mold of productivity. Even rest gets conscripted: leisure becomes "recharge", hobbies become "side hustles", attention becomes an asset to be optimized.

The subtext is political as much as psychological. A society that is "perpetually busy" is conveniently governable. Conflict requires time to notice what hurts, to argue, to organize, to imagine alternatives. Busyness, by contrast, atomizes people into schedules and metrics. It produces the calm of saturation: not peace, but exhaustion. Grass's most acid move is the pairing of "utopia and melancholy" - a future that meets every material demand while starving the self.

"And without consciousness" lands as both diagnosis and warning. Consciousness here isn't mere wakefulness; it's the ability to reflect, to remember, to feel contradiction. Grass, writing from a Germany haunted by total mobilization and postwar economic discipline, understands how easily collective purpose becomes coercion. The rhetoric is chillingly smooth: an "age without conflict" sounds like salvation until you realize the price is a population too busy to be fully human.