Now this is a tough one. The introduction will be in english, but the actual discourse needs to be in german. Why? You´ll soon find out.
There is something fundamentally wrong with german culture and at the center of it is the little word Glück. For those of you not familiar with the utterly complicated german language, depending on the context, Glück means either luck, fortune, bliss or happiness. Can you imagine how difficult it is for a German to be happy? Most of us tend to confuse it with being lucky. If asked what happiness is most Germans probably will answer: "not being unlucky."
To quote Douglas Adams: "The best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it". Can you be happy if you don`t have a distinctive word for it?
So there is a great need for philosophical discourse about the meaning of Glück. And some people like me are quite happy to join and enjoy it.
The background for the discourse which will unfold on these pages over the next couple of weeks is set at the beautiful Castle Tutzing, situated south of Munich at the shores of Lake Starnberg, the home of the Evangelische Akademie which hosted a symposium on Glück about a year ago.
It was the most intense meeting I´ve ever been to. The first day felt like 5 days of WWDC, I took so many deep impressions with me. It was topped of with a beautiful evening with a barbeque in the park at full moon. It is a rare sight to see the Alps (about 40 km south of Tutzing) in the middle of the night, but the air was cristal clear and the moon so bright. It was clearly an uplifting experience if I ever had one. In part this caused me to take the course of action which lead me to creating this site. My girlfriend of 6 years had just left me and my happiness was severely reduced because I was feeling very unlucky. So I signed up for this symposium and relearned (as I had only forgotten) that luck and happiness are not the same.
I took a lot of notes which I wanted to turn into an essay ever since. The first step is taken. I hope for a lot of feedback.