Generation Z: Fear of the menu – travel

It is well known that the poet Thomas Bernhard suffered from people and even from the world. This was the only reason why he was able to write his great plays, whose rhythmic insults are among the funniest and most tragic things written in the German language.

Only those who have seen or read his drama “Claus Peymann buys himself a pair of trousers and goes to dinner with me” know that Bernhard also suffered from the fear of the “trial cell beat”. Tasting cell is Bernhard’s word for changing room in a clothing store. And the protagonist of the piece, who is the same as the writer and who goes shopping for trousers with his favorite director Peymann, complains a lot about the stress he feels in the changing room when trying them on and which threatens to end in a trial cell stroke: It is hot, the salesman is waiting outside and of course wants to sell, while you yourself perhaps just wanted to look but were tempted to try it on. Some people know the feeling – especially now, in the shopping frenzy of the Christmas season.

At the same time, Bernhard was also a passionate tavern-goer who almost always only ate in restaurants throughout his life, and enjoyed hearty foods, from chip soup to vinegar sausage to goulash. And this is where another strange mental illness comes into play, which, as far as we know, Bernhard didn’t know anything about, but which he would have liked. It’s menu anxiety.

“Menu anxiety,” that’s what it recently said in the New York Post, is particularly widespread among Generation Z, i.e. among 18 to 24 year olds. Accordingly, it is primarily about the ever-increasing costs of food and drinks as well as the fear of not finding the right dish and ultimately regretting the choice. A third of the 2,000 people surveyed by an American restaurant chain were so afraid that they had to ask other people at the table to speak to the waitress.

So it’s probably also a fear of the waiter, which is quite understandable in the USA, as it is now assumed that tips should be somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the price of the meal. A development that is galloping quickly across the ocean to Europe.

Well, what can be done about such phobias, which obviously affect young people more than older people? We know from behavioral therapy: You should expose yourself and confront the object of fear, in this case: courageously take the menu in your hand, give yourself exactly three minutes, decide and go through with the decision. Maybe you could also yell at the waiter.

And this is where Thomas Bernhard comes into play again, who must have suffered greatly from the Viennese coffee house waiters, who were known to be arrogant. He wrote: “I always hated the Viennese coffee house and I always went to the Viennese coffee house that I hated, I visited it every day because, although I always hated the Viennese coffee house, I was always at the Coffee shop sickness suffered.”