When Gerhard Schulze published his theory of the experience society thirty years ago, he described the Federal Republic of the 1980s as a rather conflict-free society, characterized by growing social equality, in which people not only strived for a beautiful life, but also seemed convinced of its realization .
Today, Schulze's idyllic social theory seems outdated.
The relevant keywords of the decades that followed were precariousness, new poverty, the disappearance of the middle class - and depict a society in permanent crisis, the central theme of which is the intensification of the distribution struggles and the deepening of social inequality.
Is the experience society irretrievably over?
Surprisingly, the Magdeburg sociologists Jan Delhey and Christian Schneickert disagree with this finding.
The experience orientation is still widespread in the German population and has not weakened in the past twenty years.
They justify this bold thesis with data from the “European Social Survey”.
This enabled them to determine for the German population whether the respondents were more status-oriented or experience-oriented.
Their findings show that both orientations have proven to be quite stable, but the proportion of experience-oriented people was always significantly higher than that of status-oriented people.
Even after a peak ten years ago, the proportion of experience-oriented people was still 66 percent in 2018.
And if you don't make a strict distinction between the two types, but assume mixed orientations, the purely experience-oriented and the mixed came to around 65 percent.
The label "competitive adventure society" would be appropriate for the current society.
Status and experiences together
The adventure society has by no means disappeared, according to the authors, many consider the pursuit of status and the pursuit of experiences to be compatible.
The crisis phenomena find their subjective expression in a great dissatisfaction with the political and social conditions.
Personal livelihood opportunities and individually experienced appreciation, on the other hand, would continue to be assessed positively.
But, and this is an important correction to Schulze, the experience orientation no longer applies to society as a whole.
More than a third is not experience-oriented, and the fact that they cannot examine this third more closely in terms of social structure is a shortcoming of the study by Delhey and Schneickert.
The central result of their study in no way devalues the new crisis diagnoses.
But it betrays the persistence of internally oriented modernization, as Schulze suspected.
Fears of social decline were at an all-time low in 2017, and worries about material existence and fears of status are at a consistently low level in Germany, according to recent studies.
Doesn't the crisis even exist?
The limitation logic as a model
Thirty years ago, Gerhard Schulze did not want to give the impression that the adventure society he was describing was purely a “fun society”.
Her hedonism had its price, which Schulze never concealed, because the experience also wants more.
One can increase wealth, status and success, but can this "logic of increase" also be applied to inner experience?
For Schulze, that was the crucial question, and he considered the strategy of accumulating experiences to be a mistake in view of the "immovable limit of the inner increase in wealth".
Schulze did not consider this "accumulation strategy" to be future-proof.
Experiences wear off, the fulfillment of the inner need for improvement becomes more and more difficult.
The social hamster wheel is no longer primarily about success, but about beautiful experiences, but it remains a hamster wheel.
How could it come to a standstill?
Delhey and Schneickert assume that it is not so much the status or experience orientation itself that has come into crisis, but rather their realization.
In the future, the model for this must be that of a logic of limitations: For the internal orientation, this would be characterized by the insight into the limitations of human performance and experience, externally by the limitations of natural resources.
That would be revaluation processes that will not be socially neutral, but rather conflictual.
It is to be expected that there will be struggles to maintain the standard of experience and the level of prosperity that has been achieved.
It will be easier for those who have better chances in the logic of the old status orientation.
If you also enjoy the good life,
Jan Delhey, Christian Schneickert: Rise, Fall or Change in Experience Orientation? A position determination after 30 years of "experience society", in: ZfS, 2022 51(2), 114-130.