Friends can be chosen, family not …

Family is simply assigned to you. You don’t have to like everyone and you don’t have to maintain equally good contact with everyone. Everyone has to decide for themselves. However, they should then act consistently. Therefore it surprises me all the more why distant relatives suddenly remember me when they can use me for something, even though they were barely aware of my existence beforehand. And unfortunately that has happened to me a number of times. Just recently again, which made me think a lot. No, wrong, it really annoyed me.

The story goes like this: A male relative, whom I have rarely seen in my life or in his life, also I never talked to him on the phone, sends me a WhatsApp. Out of the blue. I have no idea how he got my cell phone number at all. I don’t have his either. But it doesn’t matter. In any case, he wrote to me that he and his wife were on their way to South Tyrol from Hamburg and that their overnight stay in Munich had been canceled. Whether they could stay with us the following night.

Zo explain it, it should be said that this is not a penniless student, but a lawyer who certainly does not earn badly. In addition, we were the only ones from our family who weren’t invited to the wedding of the two of them a few years ago. But as a free lodging place – with food, of course – on the way to vacation, we would have come into consideration. Actually outrageous. Or did I misunderstand the whole thing and the two tried to make better contact? Certainly not. That became clear to me when there was no more answer from them to my “regretful” refusal that we were on the way to Italy ourselves, which was also true.

I like to invite friends

But even if I hadn’t been making travel arrangements myself, I wouldn’t have accepted the two of them for an overnight stay. After all, I’m not a hotel. To make it clear. I love to have guests and to make them comfortable with me. Stinginess is far away from my character. If I already invite guests to my home, I would like to look forward to meeting them and having nice conversations with them. Then a funny, long evening and also breakfast together on the next morning is an enrichment. Visitors who just want to take advantage of me – no thanks.

The example described is just one of many that I know from my own experience. There are grown sons who boast of an annual income of € 200,000, they make their retired father or elder family members pay whenever the opportunity arises. There are young people who mostly live abroad, but register on a stay in Germany as unemployed in order to collect income from the state. It does not occur to them that the state are we, their fellow human beings, who have to pay for it. Perhaps all this is just a thoughtlessness without calculation? I don’t know how to decide.

What is clearly shown in many things. Most of our descendants belong to a Me generation. Me, me, me first, and then nothing for a long time. How can I get the most out of parents, family, employers and the state, seems to be their life motto. Nobody seems to have taught them that social interaction can only consist of give and take. And these nobodies are unfortunately we who have brought up these young people. Fortunately, there are also those who think differently from their peers, and I am always particularly happy about them.