The Best Way to Waste Your Life

Berlin is the best place in the world to waste your life. I read that in some guide once—maybe Vice—and it stuck. The city’s one long drunk parade of immigrants and lazy bastards and dogs that never stop shitting. Everyone here is either pretending to study or actually just giving up, and there’s no real distinction. The only people wearing suits are homeless men, and even they’re doing it ironically.

It’s the one German city where being lazy isn’t a failure—it’s what people do. Germans come here specifically to not work, to sit in bars at three in the afternoon and pretend that’s a personality. The whole place runs on the principle that you don’t have to have your life figured out. You can be 32 and living like you’re 23. No job, no plan, it somehow works.

I’m not sure if that’s sustainable or good, but it’s honest. You walk around and see people who decided to stop trying and just exist. Not in some enlightened way—actually exist. Drink coffee, walk dogs, sit, show up late. The absence of ambition becomes its own kind of presence.

The thing that got me was the guide framing it as actual advice. Don’t wear a suit. Be broke. Have a dog. As if that’s what the city sells. Maybe it does.