When someone rises so high above ordinary life that they can no longer see it clearly — success that severs connection with everyday reality.
Abgehoben is what Germans reach for when someone has lost touch with ordinary reality — when success, wealth, or status has pulled them so far from everyday life that they can no longer see it clearly. The word comes from the verb for an airplane lifting off the ground, and that aviation image does all the work: someone who has risen into the air and lost connection with the earth below.
The metaphor emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when post-war prosperity created visible gaps between the wealthy and everyone else. Germans needed language to name what they were seeing — celebrities who forgot where they came from, politicians who couldn't understand ordinary struggles, newly rich neighbors who suddenly acted superior. The airplane image gave them that language.
What makes this phrase revealing is its opposite: bodenständig, meaning grounded or rooted to the earth. German has a conceptual pair — lifted off versus grounded — that shows how the culture thinks about humility and connection. You can achieve success, but the moment you forget the ground beneath you, the moment you stop seeing the people who remain there, you've become abgehoben. It's a social critique delivered through physics: gravity keeps you honest, and losing it means losing something essential about your humanity.