Faces Like in the Soviet Union: A Walk Through a Swiss Supermarket
I walked through Coop today. One of the newest, cleanest shops in the region. You could eat off the floor. The lighting is soft, the products are perfect, the layout is spacious. It’s Switzerland at its most polished.
And yet, the people inside looked like they were in a queue in the Soviet Union. Long faces. Hollow eyes. The kind of expression that says, "I don't want to be here, but I have nowhere better to go." Even children looked bored.
It wasn’t the poor. This wasn’t a discount store where the burden of every cent weighs down a shopper’s posture. Coop is middle-class, upper-middle even. These are people with stable jobs, well-stocked fridges, electric bikes at home. Yet they looked defeated.
The Comfort Curse: When Safety Kills Spirit
This phenomenon has roots in the thought of Arnold Gehlen, the German sociologist and anthropologist who argued that human beings are "Mängelwesen" — deficient beings. Unlike animals, humans are not fully equipped to survive in nature on instinct alone. So we build institutions, tools, and culture to compensate for our biological fragility.
But Gehlen also warned: once our environment becomes too secure, our institutions too efficient, and life too predictable, humans lose the very friction that gives shape to the self. We become, in essence, over-domesticated. Our vitality begins to atrophy.
We are built to struggle. Not endlessly, but necessarily.
What I saw in Coop was the spiritual cost of this hyper-stabilized existence. No danger. No real stakes. Just aisles and choices and muted dissatisfaction. People who no longer know what to do with their inner tension because life has removed every outer challenge.
There is no war, no hunger, no catastrophe. But there is also no fire. No necessity. And without necessity, purpose decays.
The nervous system, designed for alertness and reaction, now paces inside a gilded cage. It has nothing to respond to except promotions and digital noise.
So people drift. They don’t live. They manage. They select. They survive inside abundance. And the face says it: "This is not it." Even if they can’t name what it should be.
We built a paradise of logistics and forgot that the soul doesn’t run on efficiency. It runs on meaning. On hardship transformed. On the sharp taste of the real.
And so, even in Coop, the Swiss ghosts walk. Not because they have nothing. But because they have nothing left to fight for.