# [[Stoic Unsettling]] *October 22, 2025* ##### How to deal with a crumbling industry? Recently in the subway, a man took a seat in front of me. He decisively opened his *BILD Zeitung*, drawing a perimeter of paper around himself. On the very first page he got stuck on a headline: “Metal construction company cuts 150 jobs! 300 YEARS of company history are ending!” The man remained on the page for some while until he closed the newspaper and kept staring nowhere. This short moment captured a mood in today’s Germany, noticeable in the evening news, in the smalltalk of strangers at the barbershop, in the coffee break of management workshops. It’s a bleakness towards the future of the German economy in general, the German industrial manufacturing in particular, driven by the realization that things don’t work anymore as they used to. Although I don’t like newspaper headlines, I can relate to this sentiment. My industry (the filmmaking technology industry) always is a tiny shiny special case, yet the current problems and anxieties are remarkably similar to larger sectors like automotive. Everyone struggles to accept that the exact same things that made them champions not long ago are now to be considered a part of the problem. A colleague of mine put it nicely: “We were used to making magic happen against the odds. But somehow we lost the magic while the odds shifted against us.” The current vibe does not feel magic, more like an exhausting (and actually boring) stalemate. Existential dread that makes things heavy: if our solid industry is not stable anymore, if my solid industry job is not stable anymore, what is stable at all? Many individual identities here are deeply intertwined with manufacturing sophisticated, expensive stuff, which is increasingly hard to build and to sell. Unsettling is the name of the game. Right now, I notice two extreme ways of dealing with this situation: 1) Many seem to be ignoring all signals demanding for a substantial pivot and instead double down on the old ways. Obsessing over detail optimizations, trying to run quicker and quicker, while following outdated rulebooks for a game that has changed a lot. 2) Then, of course, there are frantic talks about pivots to shiny new things. Folks are „learning AI“, stumbling into crypto, suddenly favoring attack drones and obsess over obscure power storage technologies, ignoring that the very same challenges of today’s post-globalized late capitalism will wait everywhere Quite often, such moves are all talk, not action. This may be just another type of agency trap: pretending existential disruptions can be fixed quickly and completely by doing more of the good old or more of a shiny new thing. A deeper problem I see with both approaches (blindly doubling down and hectically pivoting) is that you lose the ability to observe what’s happening around you. Especially in unstable times, you want to observe and understand the signals of change around you to be able to adjust to them properly.[^1] That’s hard when we are not listening because we are too busy doing. On a Sunday, I was cycling through rainy streets between factories turned penthouses, hunting for overpriced croissants at the only open bakery. Two guys in Patagonia vests chatted in front of the shop. As I passed by them, one asked the other: „What about your business? How is it going?“ The other responds: „I just shut it down.“ Then they moved into a shared silence, gazing at the apartment block on the other side of the road like a distant mountain range. This moment reminded me of a comedy clip we shared at school.[^2] It’s two working-class Eastern German guys sitting on a bench having a beer. One of them, a good friend obviously, keeps asking the other one about his professional situation. The other one goes on explaining his increasingly weird career of pivoting from one exotic craftsmanship to the other, just to come to the point that there are no contracts for anything. Nobody needs the skills he can offer, but somehow he does not care, moving on from "PVC Blacksmith" to "Plastics Mason". You might read this behavior as a form of desperation, but somehow I appreciated the meditative vibe. It shows a rare combination of pragmatism, proactiveness, but also of healthy detachment. I think this hybrid stubbornness seems much more sensible than blindly doubling down or pivoting hectically. The Stoics may be over quoted and often misread, but they figured this one out well: "There is nothing bad in undergoing change or good emerging from it."[^3] Instead of ignoring change or trying to make spectacular moves, maybe we should train to accept that change is just *happening*. If we would be able to detach our sense of self worth, purpose and day-to-day happiness from work stuff that is completely beyond our control[^4] (like Tarif decisions, the price of lithium, Netflix Production Budgets, your school friends LinkedIn success story), we MIGHT be able to learn something we did not see before. Staying with the discomfort of "still figuring it out", as Jan Chipchase but it nicely[^5] would allow finding the right foundations for whatever the next steps will have to be. Some years ago, I had a wise colleague who taught me a lot. Once we talked about career worries and frustrations, when he shared a thing I still remember, though back then, I did not understand it. He told me, he preferred to focus on **reducing** the things that stressed him out and pulled him down, instead of increasing the things he liked. He preferred to let the desirable things emerge, while deliberately letting go of the things that did not work for him anymore. Actually, he was wise enough to let go of his job (which caused him frequent burnouts) long before the current turmoil. Letting go of fragile things, instead of holding on to them forever or grabbing shiny new things in panic, seems a reasonable approach to me in the current situation. A society could consider letting go of its 1980s manufacturing industry myths. Professionals working in this very industry could free themselves from the dated promise of a decade-long stable career in the corporate world. For me personally, it’s time to let go of the expectation that a job always and permanently has to provide exhaustive meaning to my life. A good job can also be a job that pays well for me doing the things I am good at. Maybe that’s enough for now. [^1]: *"[V]olatility is information. In fact, [fragile] systems tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface."* Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) [^2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhffJbDG5Qk&pp=ygUKUGxhc3RlbWV0eg%3D%3D [^3]: *"There is nothing bad in undergoing change—or good in emerging from it."* Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) [^4]: Another stoic evergreen, from Epitectus: *There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs. Now the things within our power are by nature free, unrestricted, unhindered; but those beyond our power are weak, dependent, restricted, alien. Remember, then, that if you attribute freedom to things by nature dependent and take what belongs to others for your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will find fault both with gods and men.* [The Enchiridion (Epitectus)](https://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html) [^5]: *"For people whose sense of self worth is wrapped up in their professional identity the “I’m still figuring it out”response is often considered an admission of failure, rather than a positive recognition of potential evolution. (…) [A]cknowledging a transition reveals that change was required or that we were at the mercy of forces outside our control. A transitional period provides the mental space to evaluate what aspects of prior identities we wish to retain, what and whom to jettison or let drift away, and to ensure the next iteration of our evolution is built on firm foundations."* [Career time horizons and the evolution of identity (Jan Chipchase)](https://studiodradiodurans.com/blogs/radar/time-horizons)