Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak here.
When I was a teenager, I found a book at the local library with a dystopian city on its bright pink and orange cover, and a girl in the middle. Its first sentence read like this: “Our grandparents still remember where they were during the moon landing. Our parents still remember where they were when they heard of 9/11. We still remember where we were when the teleporting machines stopped on 4 October 2025.”
Besides the fact that dystopian books almost always have a weirdly unrealistic timeline for the introduction of life-changing technology (I mean – where are my teleporting machines?), this book did install one idea in my mind: every generation has that one life-changing event for which they still remember where they were when they first heard of it.
And yet, I think our generation has already had multiple of these events. I was sitting on my father’s sofa, watching the evening news, when I first heard about a “new virus emerging in China”. I woke up in my room during my gap year in Warsaw, confused as to why my flatmate was crying. Russia had invaded Ukraine. I had a birthday picnic in Vondelpark when it dawned on me that the 7 October attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza were maybe one of those generation-defining moments. When Trump was elected again, I followed the vote count live in Korea while on exchange, and I sat in a politics seminar in our first year when Baris suddenly told us, “Psst, I am not supposed to tell you this… But there is this new artificial intelligence… It can write you any topic you like… The people at the politics department are freaking out over this right now!” (I am sorry, Baris, for snitching on you.) We spent the rest of the seminar asking ChatGPT to write us funny stories. Later, we used it to help us with uni and life, although maybe some more than others, and maybe we did not realise that this might become the biggest life-changing event of them all.
Born into that as a child, you do not even realise how crazy it all is, because for you, the internet has always existed. And then you grow up a little, and you learn that because of climate change, you may never have snow again. I cried when I first learned that. Many years later, I wrote my PPE Bachelor’s thesis about climate politics, and I cried again, shocked at the absurdity that more than half of all historical emissions are from after 1990, when we already knew for sure that climate change existed.
And now, after PPE, I am doing an internship in climate policy, and there are days when I wake up and believe I am in a bad dream, and then I have to accept that no, this is my life, this is our life, this is our future. It feels a bit like we are in one of those cylinders that you have at the zoo where you put in a coin and first it slowly, slowly rolls around the outer edges until it speeds up and becomes ever faster before it drops into the abyss.
This realisation can be paralysing, and make you angry, and upset, and ultimately just confused – why is our world like this? Why can’t everything just be nice?
Why can’t everything just be nice? I think this question ultimately motivated me to study PPE. A short reminder: PPE stands for “Philosophy, Politics and Economics” (or, if you listen to our fellow student Hidde, Poverty, Poverty, Employment). This simple lack of understanding of why we, as humanity, after having “defeated” nature and being completely able to decide how we want to live together – we decided on this??? Why can’t we spend our summers at the lakes and in tree houses, with our only worry being what to have for dinner that night? Why can’t we spend our nights gazing at the stars? Why can’t we spend our winters building snowmen? Why on earth do we have to go out in the rain to go to a demonstration? Why have we not translated the fact that only a few per cent of people need to produce food into more free time for all of us, but have instead decided that women now need to work 40 hours a week as well while managing the household and raising children, effectively doubling the burden on families? Why do we have hustle culture increasing expectations for what it takes to get a job for all of us? Why do we have useless, high-paid “bullshit jobs” when there are enough necessary jobs that are understaffed and underpaid? Why do I have to listen to politicians all over Europe use populist, racist statements to rally voters only to ultimately reduce taxes for the ultra-rich? Why do I have to watch fascism unfold in real time, something that I, as a German, thought would be impossible?
So you come into PPE with all these grand ideas of justice and wealth and progress, and then you end up in a seminar room in the grey Amsterdam autumn, talking about exactly that. I love PPE for that! No topic was ever too big for us to discuss, from the question “What do we owe the poor?” (or, as our macroeconomics professor Wouter Zant once said, “What do the poor owe us?”), over “What is right and what is wrong?”, “How did states form?”, “Is GDP a good measure of progress?”, “Does science tell you the truth?”, “Is economics even a science?” and “How can we solve the climate crisis?” In PPE, you are not only allowed to ask the big questions, you are encouraged to ask them.
You are in this very limited space – physically, I mean: the fourth floor, its five seminar rooms, one lecture hall, the study area, the board room, and the coffee area with the sofas. I think it was very interesting to observe what the introduction of those sofas late in our first year did to the PPE community. A few of my favourite PPE memories are from when it was a Friday afternoon, seminars were over, but people were just hanging out on those sofas, not leaving yet, because the fourth floor was a place we liked to spend time. Sofas make spaces, spaces make communities, and communities make democracy. Ultimately, community means regularly talking to people who are not your close friends, something that I think happens in PPE and makes it special.
At this point, I want to thank all PPE staff for what they have put into the study programme. I want to thank our seminar teachers – Marina, Emi, Cian, Baris, Chris, Dori, Julia, Steve, Sarah, and Alexandra – for all their time and work in making mandatory seminars a fun experience. Because of you, we learned that cancer is good at game theory, apples can be very oppressive, and Baris may be funding ISIS. We also got such nice tips as “When you quote it, everything is right”, “Read the book if you love words”, and “Try doing the exercises and get the right answers or die”.
I also want to thank the PPE lecturers, Özlem, Menusch, and Phil – and all the others who always answered our questions, even if they were repetitive or arrogant, even when we thought we knew it better than the entire history of a discipline. I want to thank our deans – Lieven at the start, and Roland – for putting so much heart into PPE. I want to thank our study adviser, Alex, for guiding us through the jungle of administrative requirements, and our programme officer, Rozemarijn, for presenting PPE to the outside world. I want to thank all the thesis supervisors who put so much time and energy into our theses. I want to thank the programme committee, including our year representative Elisa, for making sure that John Stuart Mill would be mentioned in every single course, but more importantly for seriously considering our feedback and actually making visible changes in PPE because of it. You have not only made PPE better, but also given us a sense of self-efficacy. And lastly, I want to thank our study association’s board – Board 7 of KallioPPE – Joseph, Lea, Olivia, Enora, and Julius – for actively working on our community. Because a community is work (sometimes more for your liver than for your brain), but it is worth it, and you made PPE the cosy place that it is today.
An academic degree is the intense occupation over several years with one topic – or three, in our case, as we will probably have to explain for the rest of our lives. You go in with this question – “Why can’t everything just be nice?” – and then you start to collect answers over several years from people who spent way more time than you thinking about the same question. Or, in Dori’s words: “There are some weird people who made some weird rules and that’s what we’re studying.” You learn about money and the market and exchange rates and capitalism, and politicians and wars and nation states, and slowly unravel how the world came to be as it is.
And then philosophy comes in – because philosophy teaches us that just because the world is this way, this does not mean it is good like this. Philosophy teaches us that asking “but why?” and “is this just?” are valid and important questions. “Why can’t everything just be nice?” is neither a childish nor a naïve question, but a very valid reaction to this world. The idealism that we have at the end of high school and that hopefully grows in university might fade into the background as daily life takes over. Suddenly, we are confronted with having to make a career. Poverty, Poverty, Employment – and the worry about the world becomes lower on the priority list.
“Agency is the ability to move past structures.” That was said by our lecturer Meave Powlick in one of our Political Institutions lectures. What does that mean?
It means to move past what is seen as normal and possible. It means not to capitulate in view of all these problems and accept that the world is just bad, people are evil and selfish, life is shitty. I mean – if you think like that, it will for sure stay so. But it can change. It must change. I want it to change. I want people to continue asking the big questions. Because only by thinking about these big questions can we change how we actually live together.
Better decisions for a better world. That is our PPE motto. I want to live in a better world. I want to have a good and solid future and I want to dream about crazy utopias and I want those utopias to become true. Instead, we live in a world where the opposite seems to be happening – instead of moving towards utopia, we are quickly descending towards fascism again. Not cool. But I believe that we can counter this – democracy is more stable than we think, but it takes all of us to keep our heads up and not start giving in before we even try to fight. Lately, I sometimes hear this sentence: “Watch out what you say or post online, because if the fascists come into power in 10 years, you might be in trouble.” This is exactly the same attitude that allowed the Nazis to take power. So it takes all of us to stand tall and put in the work for democracy.
So I ask all of you – as you go into your next steps, do your master’s or internships or just try to figure it out – keep that one thing in mind: it is absolutely incomprehensible and unacceptable that not everything is nice.
See you in the future!