21st Society Feminists Should Reconceive Parenting as a Societal and Professional Asset

Bringing up bébé by Pamela Druckerman is all the rage.  It’s about how “one American mother discovers the wisdom of French parenting”, the secret behind how “the French manage to raise astonishingly well-behaved children,” all while having a life, too.  

I can see the attraction – it always seems exciting when we’re on the verge of learning a foolproof success recipe for something as bewildering and experimental as raising children.

Frankly, Druckerman’s gross generalizations don’t really fit with my personal experience, American with 2 young children being raised in France.  Nor do they match my personal analysis:   as different cultures clearly have their assets on either side of the Atlantic… the strengths of being brought up in one or the other are tightly linked to the cultural realities of each country (historical, geographical, social, religious, etc) with all the positive… and negative…. aspects  and consequences of those realities when it comes to parenting.

But that’s not the debate I want to have here.

What comes to my mind as I read about Druckerman’s “Bébé” has more to do with the premise of superiority.  It’s a major ailment within our competitive performance society.  Instead of more pragmatically and constructively seeing how an individual with his and her personal priorities decides to compose with all this input, our obsession is for the Perfection of it, for our own Perfection in doing it Perfectly. .. and we link it to making the Perfect woman.

But parenting is far more relative.  And so is being a woman. 

Unfortunately, many analyses these days aren’t helping the matter and tend to divide us up and peg us down into superlatives:

·         the stay-at-home moms who have given up their bright career to raise their children, finding themselves living vicariously through the children and managing powerplay between moms via creative playgroups and perfected birthday parties, so well described by Judith Warner in her work, “Perfect Madness”

·         the in-between women who work shorter hours / part time to have a hand in raising their children and who are dismissed for their inability to do either well enough, as profiled by Elizabeth Badinter in her work, “Conflict: mother, woman”

·         the career women who escaped the patriarchal claws of “choice feminism” and who never have children or who have 1 child raised by someone else in order to access power and status, as prescribed by Linda Hirshman in her work, “Get to Work”.

These caricatured divisions anger me.  It’s not that I don’t smell some smoke; the intelligent women who did this research each have valid points in their diagnostics.  And it’s clear:  we still haven’t figured out how to comfortably “Have it All”.   But the sidelining is damaging in a number of ways:

• It risks confirming executives can’t be good pro’s if they have children, giving fodder to the discrimination against women on the job (note that in France, known for all the State-led initiatives to help women work more easily and have good care for their children, Bamboo Conseil, consulting firm in management and personal development, has calculated that a child’s arrival generates an 11% gap in women’s careers, a lag that is difficult to make up).
• It comforts the idea that family has no place in our “public” sphere, including the professional sphere.
• It reiterates that family, “care”, home economics merit no value and should be considered only as a burden.

For me, we need to tackle these issues differently.

1.  We should tap into the underestimated value of children / family in professionals’ lives.

Having children as a professional is generally represented for its negative stereotypes:  exhaustion, too much juggling, sick-leave, a less dedicated professional, etc.

That’s not the reality of the story at all.  And it’s time we (including feminists like the authors cited above) start having the real story be heard.

Raising children renews our learning curves, stimulates us to questioning our presumptions, pushes us to find new and/or alternative solutions… all important skills that are also leveraged on the job.  Having and caring for children kindles empathy and the art of putting oneself in another’s shoes to be able, again, to find more pertinent solutions and improve work efficiency (especially in marketing, communications, sales, and management).  Building a family and balancing career/family ensures flexible/agile organizational skills which, again, can improve professional performance. 
And, even more importantly, children represent a pull of gravity toward other things.  It helps tired professionals resource themselves either thanks to imposed “breaks” from work, offer fresh insight into topics (se changer les idées) and/or refresh the professional’s outlook (avoir plusieurs terrains de jeu and/or bring a little relativity if ever things aren’t going so well at work).  This added-value of child raising can help improve quality of work and can buffer from burn-out.   For so long, we have pinpointed the problem and the unfairness of the “second shift”… let’s get some benefits out of this additional “work” experience!

I’m not trying to say every single woman / family should have children.  That is choice.  I’m saying that those of us who decide to have children bring new added-value that is usually used against us.

2.  We should tap into the underestimated value of child-rearing in society.

Beyond the arguments above, I would also like to impress upon us the importance of child-rearing (I make a difference between child-rearing and simply bearing children whose education is entirely outsourced)… including among our top decision-makers in both the public and private sectors… has on society as a whole. 

Short-term vs. long-term relativity, comprehension of others, desire to build / be constructive, renewed attention to discovery, recycled and renewable love often inherent in child bearing and raising… without mentioning the mirth… are all qualitative aspects of raising children which are often ignored but which can actually help gain time and efficiency in our professional work and build a society in which we build with cooperation instead of destroying with competition, we innovate with love instead of stagnating with rivalry.

3.  We should bolster the value of transmission to collective progress

When we transmit our knowledge in culture, two things happen:  the person being initiated learns… but also questions in new ways/ differently from the presumptions formerly internalized by the initiated / initiator.  In turn, the initiated learns from these questions / new perspective and can even join with the newly initiated to weed out what to maintain and what to improve, and move beyond the clashes of culture we’re witnessing a little all over the world right now between past and present (just consider the Republic primaries in the US and some candidates’ pitch to return to 1950s values, turning their backs on progress, future potential, and human flourishing) and the pseudo conflict within companies worried about the clash of generations.

4.  We should renew the demand that family NOT weigh only on mothers’/women’s shoulders and work away from the nuclear family (key to performance society) towards the concept of “it takes a village”.

Just as women should be able to take advantage of the added-value in child-raising, so should men (and they increasingly are).  We should all be responsible in raising future generations and benefiting from what our interaction can gain for us individually, societally, and even competitively (when it comes to the professional sphere, as noted in point 1). 

In France, for example, free public schools with fine, trained teachers welcome children starting at the age of 3.  “School” is of course a big word for the children have nap time and play time in addition to arts, crafts, singing, story time, etc.  I used to think of this as a convenient, free “day care” for children whose parents worked… but I now espouse the idea as of utmost societal value.  It seems to me absolutely critical that children receive love and education from their parents… but also that they diversify their sources of interaction and learning.  They’re also given the space to resolve some of their own quarrels (vs. parachute parents) and build their resilience, crucial to surviving in today’s world. 

Further, we must facilitate men’s implication in this education.  In the book Jocast’s Children, Christiane Olivier’s analysis postulates that girls can better build confidence and be less beholden to “hyper-sexualisation” if they’ve had a chance to interact more with their father, including at puberty.  Today, many families don’t have a “father”.  But this building oneself vs. the “other” (l’alterité) can be supported by fostering more male teachers – including in elementary and pre schools – so that children have more male and female role models outside the home. 

The point here is that family should be carried by society rather than being uniquely nuclear-based.  This would free up women to work without fearing they are “bad mothers” or their children “abandoned”.  Further, it would free children from our own personal neuroses and/or the crushing pressure we may be putting on their shoulders for vicarious fulfillment and/or anxieties. 

These are some of my thoughts that are, of course, to be improved.  But I am convinced that a key to enabling women’s… and men’s… and future generations’ fulfillment is to stop making family quite so personal and allow it to be a rich societal asset.

Let me know what you think!  Then, talk to you next week, for another bite from the apple.

When will we accept we are like quarks? Part 5: Love need not be crystallized

Once we’ve accepted that identity need not be definitive and individuals need not be singular, it follows that love need not be crystallized. 

This may seem obvious… and yet looking around, it seems that it isn’t quite so easy to apply to our current mores. 

Reading articles and talking around me, women today still are expecting to meet Mr. Right, Mr. Perfect, and/or her very own Prince Charming.  When (if) she does, he’s just right and great… often until the first complication (be it a difference, a misunderstanding, or frustration).  Her reflex?  Jump into the sea of interrogation:  is this really love?  Is he really the one for me?  Is he the man of my dreams?  Where is this relationship heading and do I like where it’s going?  Am I making too many concessions?  Am I losing myself?

These are healthy questions and illustrate that women of today feel entitled to their own demands, to keep control over their lives, and that they’ve at last come into their own:  they are no longer the ones by default to bow with docility to the man’s prerogative.    Women today are primed to avoid making a mistake that will lead to divorce but, just in case, they are also making all the preparations to be financially autonomous to always keep their options open. 

Let me be clear:  this moral, mental, and financial autonomy is crucial progress in the fight for equality and is to be maintained and supported.

However, the comments I hear don’t always breathe empowerment; at times they mask disappointment, resignation, or vulnerability.  Every individual and each of their cases are different, of course, but I see these types of start-and-go romances as serial “shooting star relationships” in which both individuals of the would-be couple begin by correlating their projected identities (who they wish to be and how they want to be perceived) then face disappointment when one or the other discovers that the person doesn’t necessarily or currently incarnate that promise in the day to day.  The most obvious example is the slew of on-line dating services and the promises they make for finding “your other half” or “someone just like you”.  But I have seen this in traditional 100% real-life relationships just as much as relationships beginning virtually on the web.   It isn’t a question of technology; it’s a question of expectations.

What is the expectation?  To meet “my soul-mate” with whom everything is easy, effortless, and pleasant.  An individual who can fulfill “my” every desire:  passion, adventure, friendship, partnership, a good parent for my children, perhaps a good “wife”, be close but give me some distance at just the right time without me needing to say it, with the right mix of challenge, support, empathy, coaching, respect, and playfulness.  The other is also someone presentable, who can carry good status, perhaps good financial prospects, and oftentimes capable of reflecting positively on ourselves and become new proof of our own success in life.  Above all, we expect love to be effortless… and that effortlessness is the ultimate proof of love.  Anything that requires work or effort means we’re forcing the hand of love and that it isn’t the “real” thing… and we throw in the towel.

I am convinced that much of today’s trouble in love comes down to these expectations.

For a long time, neither love nor, for that matter, family or success, was really determined by the individual.  Today, our expectation is to be “happy in love”, a love that matches a romance novel.  …While we’re also looking for the man or woman who will be our “wife” and a good “partner”.  These three roles can certainly be conjugated… but the expectation of perfect three is often a reservoir of frustration and disappointment because it comes down to fragmented perfection and performance in each role, which is never sustainable for a single person.  Worse, not only are our expectations severe, but when we don’t succeed, we suffer the disappointment… or even guilt… of failure.  For me, in addition to the ills of our performance society, the trouble begins with a certain amount of confusion about love. 

First, confusion about the role we expect love to play in our lives:  we seem to believe that the other will somehow authenticate or confirm the identity we are building for ourselves.  I call this the “confirmation maze”. 

Let me explain:  since the post-modernist breakdown of the institutions that used to edify Western societies (patriarchy, marriage, top-down hierarchy, authoritarian government, authoritarian God, etc.), women’s emancipation has opened the floodgates of choice.  Suddenly, we’re wonderfully facing the vertigo of boundless individual responsibility for what we make of ourselves and who we become.  We have the “liberty” of making ourselves who we want to be… but also the “dread” of losing ourselves.  As a result, in looking around, I have the impression that many romances fall into this “confirmation maze” in which the “catch” somehow confirms to us (as well as to others) the attractiveness of the projected identity we have constructed. 

This may seem to make sense in terms of societal status in which people attempt to marry up into a higher station in life, etc., but it doesn’t sit well with our other expectations of passion or romance… and it can actually prevent us from living love for its real merit:  an opportunity to build ourselves as individuals, and build a more humane world, as I express here below.

Second, we can also note some confusion over the Spacing of Love. 

Women seem to expect Mr. Right to fit into our space without taking too much of it (for fear of losing ourselves, our autonomy, or of making too many concessions).  This type of demand is currently applauded as proof of remaining “whole” in France and representative of a woman respectfully in charge of her life through-out much of the Western world. 

But it’s also a guardedness that inhibits much of the exchange a relationship requires to not be sterile or short-lived.   

A real relationship is built by exchanges that infuse it with life, a chemical reaction that leaves neither member of the couple unchanged.  It also creates and fosters a third entity (1+1=3) that represents the 2 beings together.  In this sense, both individuals can continue to grow, their individual growths nourishing, in turn, their common relationship and project. 

However, this synergetic growth system cannot happen as long as either part of the couple holds back.  And, here, I believe, is a real key to the problem:  we all have learned to share, to give… and believe we’re contributing our fair share… when, in fact, the lack is in the receiving.  Not material gifts, but in receiving immaterial exchanges in the realm of ideas, points of view, ways of living, habits, etc.  Kind of like the type of “sharing” we see on social networks where we each spend all our time showing and telling, feeling very creative and magnanimous… without ever realizing that we’re in a soliloquy, spinning in a solipsism and comfort zone in which we are barricading out our vulnerabilities, reinforcing our projected identities… trying desperately to preserve ourselves within the world… and making us incapable and/or unwilling to receive.

Yet with no receptivity, the contact, the interaction, the relationship… the love… can’t really be or become.   

In our 21^st century, we need a return for receptivity with which we stop seeing others as an infringement on our freedom / growth and begin realizing that it’s our interaction with them and their “alterité” that will enable us to grow.  Our individuality will be fortified by exchanging and building with them.  It stands to reason that instead of seeking someone just like us (our “other half” our “soul mate”, our “mirror image”), we could revel in our differences and all that the loved one can bring to us, learn from us, help us learn about ourselves, and all we could build together. 

This, I must warn, has to be symmetrical, from BOTH parts of the couple.  We have all seen couples where clearly one has been eaten up by the other.  That’s not the point here.  The man must clearly be emancipated to open up to his vulnerabilities and be socially liberated so as to be receptive.   For the same reasons, we should also avoid a role reversal in which the woman simply becomes the dominant partner.  Forget about trying to make someone the “wife”, someone the “bitch”, and let’s work towards a respectful balance capable of love and growth. 

We can improve the Spacing of Love if we resolve our confusion over the Timing of Love. 

We expect Mr. Right to come along and somehow presume he will stay forever “right”.  But if we learn to accept that life is dynamic and by definition motion, movement, change, it seems irrelevant to expect someone met at time T to always be an inert “perfect”.  We can’t expect (nor should we desire) the other to stand still, like a still-life, and not evolve.  We, ourselves, constantly (hopefully) growing will grow out of synch with the still-life who made that former “perfect” match…  Furthermore, we won’t remain “right” for the other either …  At least not unless we each embrace the positive power of the Dynamics of 3 (1+1=3 mentioned earlier : 2 evolving individuals plus a growing relationship). 

This dynamic is promising because it means that within a couple, each can meet and re-meet the other, evolving person repeatedly.  Evolution of each individual implies constant renewal.  Let’s discover what it’s like to live by the side of someone who has now changed careers, now been promoted, now become a parent, now started a new hobby… plus this discovery takes on greater relief through our own evolving perspectives that are also constantly changing according to our own ups and downs and growth spurts.  

Our Performance Society pretends like long monogamous relationships are proof of lacking dynamism, good only for the unambitious (I’m not referring to those with serial extramarital affairs).  They’re represented as a synonym of boredom, concessions, a sign of having “settled”.  That may be true of all those who are locked in by their still-life identities that miss out on the actual Dynamics of 3 (or more, if there are children) living, evolving beings who are prepared to discover and rediscover each other.  Songs talk of love like a cocaine rush, authentic only until all the mystery is gone – “I know him so well”.  But that seems a little old-fashioned today in the 21^st century in which we, at every level of society, have access to so many ideas, social networks, possibilities, radical career changes, more than one “life” to live.  The expected timing of love should therefore shift from being a question of “right” right now to a quarkish spherical timing of “in phase” to be regularly re-actualized and reactivated, reinvented. 

These 3 degrees of confusion lead to a major unintended consequence:  The general misuse/misconception/poor practice of love, underestimation of the need for love in our world, leading to a world lacking love, walled behind its vulnerabilities and defense mechanisms, losing touch with its humanity.

And when we lose touch with our humanity… we also lose out on our gains in collective intelligence as a species… and progress for future generations.

Rendez-vous next week for a new bite from the apple.  In the meantime, share your comments based on your own knowledge and consciousness! 

Experiencing life creation thanks to a dress?!

Hello and Happy New Year!  To start off this new year, I would like to jump in with a piece about new life... as in the experience of creating new life.  As of next week, I will resume my piece about integrating quantum mechanics into our 21st century lives and mentality.

Experiencing life creation thanks to a dress?!

I recently read about a dress developped for men to be able to pretend they’re pregnant in La recherche, sept 2011,n° 455.

At first glance, you might think, “we have made great progress for men to actually be interested in knowing what it’s like (used to be dismissed as woman’s work),to be prepared to take the time to follow the slow progression of a pregnancy (used to be the boring part or hassle), to be prepared to be invested in the child already, before it even arrives (used to be woman’s private sphere ordeal with the man doing little more than kissing the clean, quiet, and still child before bed), and to be prepared to get more in touch with his ‘feminine side’.”

But that is not how I see it at all.  I actually balk at the idea.  And for a number of reasons.

First of all, having a pregnancy dress is NOT what it’s like to be pregnant. 

That’s pretty obvious: 

·         They don’t undergo the hormonal changes that go haywire in a pregnant woman’s body, leaving her without control over her emotions or her physical development, which is terribly disconcerting and unpleasant, especially in an age when we are trying SO hard to control our own lives. 

·         They can take it off when they want to, which is not an option for the pregnant woman dealing with morning sickness or swollen ankles and water retention or sore breasts or back pains or trouble putting on shoes, etc., etc., etc. 

So who’s kidding whom?  What’s the point?  Pretending to be artificially pregnant does what exactly?  It certainly doesn’t give any indication of what pregnancy is like…

However it does, potentially, give the impression to someone who will never be pregnant to THINK he or she knows what it is like, having them falsely assimilate a misconception of the reality of it all.  I shiver to imagine the person having used the dress pretending, I mean believing, they know what it’s like to bare life.

Baby-wearers don’t go through the positive displacement of gravity from the “egocentric me” to the “me and other” duality of conscience.  9 months of pregnancy is, for a woman, a kind of Copernican revolution and awakening to being keen to more than one person’s acts and lives.  Gradually she takes on awareness that she will henceforth be wholly responsible for another than her own life.  And that her life is no longer only her own.  That dawning gestates with the growth of the fetus…   Donning a dress cannot represent this major transition within the life of a woman who carries a child. 

They also don’t deal with the social stigma of it.  I have heard young colleagues in France complain that pregnant women think they rule the world and that they suddenly have EXTRA RIGHTS… But in speaking with new mothers around me across Europe and somewhat in the US, announcing a pregnancy to an employer is more likely to REDUCE their rights and their status.  “Once I announced I was pregnant, my boss pretended like I was good for nothing,” told me a woman in Spain.  “As soon as I informed them of my pregnancy, I shot from promising talent to a woman with 2 neurons,” confided a French woman, whose sister lived through similar abasement.  “When I told them I was pregnant, they just presumed I would stop working to raise my kid, and therefore stopped putting me on the interesting projects” explained a German friend.  And I won’t even go into the trouble women live through once they come back from maternity leave, which I’ll comment on later!  Let’s leave it on the point that Western society has yet to be convinced that women can have children and still be sharp, dedicated professionals ( I’ll expound upon that in a future article too).   That’s why so many are obliged to demonstrate their loyalty by practically answering professional phone calls while in labor.  I’m not even sure what that proves…

Plus baby-dresses gracefully side-step the ordeal of labor.  I’ve been through 2; it’s indescribable pain, like your whole body being cracked open.  Even when you have an epidural.  Or a C-Section.  There’s the Exhaustion.   Plus the nursing or feeding before anything.  Plus the lion’s share of work at home – sometimes because the man doesn’t participate too much, most of the time simply due to the child who wants its mama and no one else.  And so on and so forth.  The point here is not that labor is labor, but rather the labor is just a middle stage between an exhausting pregnancy and an exhausting infant-raising plus all the bewilderment and life-alteration it entails.  People don’t often mention the duress of selflessness and empathy that it thrust upon as with this sudden “survival of two”.  Birthing is a miraculous, perhaps one of the most beautiful, acts of nature.  While the baby-dress expresses this admiration and wonder… it cannot come close to experiencing the real thing, neither the awesome nor the terrible.

A final thought:  it seems positive for these men to get in touch with their feminine side, even if we should keep in mind that each sex’s role is important and needn’t be confused …  Pregnancy and bearing life is woman’s work that she should continue to appropriate.  This is the way of the “motherself”.  While men can and should hear their feminine side, each has an invaluable role to play in the world, and in the family, with his very own characteristics. 
Just as contraception and abortion has allowed a woman to take back her rights over her own body, such should be the same for pregnancy and birthing, miracles only women can produce.  This point is crucial as we seem to be living in an era in which successful people must follow a very masculine, androcentric approach to life, success, and to living.  In a century in which there is a “flight from woman”.  This has led to many women ignoring or undervaluing their specific attributes such as motherhood as if they were incompatible with individuality and career.  I will argue through-out this blog that such need not be the case.

Rendez-vous next week for the next installment on "When will we accept we are like quarks ?   Part 4:  Identity need not be definitive"

When will we accept we are like quarks ? Part 2: Time need not be linear

As I said in my previous blog, 21^st century individuals are like quarks… and we owe it to ourselves to make a jump in collective intelligence and benefit from what we know of quantum physics, integrating their principles into our way of living.

In the first installment, I made the case for virtualizing space so that individuals can live their lives more fully while also improving performance in their work.  Now we’ll look at a new time proposition.

2.  Time need not be linear. 

We currently tend to live lives that are led by the nose of time ticking.  A kind of taylorism applied to lives with which our development marches to a set order.

It’s as if we were beholden to a kind of “then, than” logic with which we can only pass on to the next step once we have acquired the expected result (the “then”), a result which is bona fide by compared performance (“better than”).  Talk to many young educated women about life goals and she’ll generally explain that she’ll first make a career for herself and then, once she’s “made it”, she’ll find someone and have children, etc.  This isn’t surprising as beginning careers often leave little time for anything else and as, according to what I’ve read in various press, the talent pool selection for future high management is generally right around 30.

Yet nowadays, in most of the professional world, there’s never a moment to let up.  The “made it” moment never comes or never lasts…

- If in the 20^th century there was such a thing as punching the clock, most white collar jobs of the 21^st century expect professionals to be available 24/7.

- If in the 20^th century there were such values as company career and loyalty, with which a person could envision some down time along the career path, in the 21^st century “postemployment age”, to cite Robert Reich, cruising speed is anathema and the war of skills is making it so that a person’s day is never finished, always needing to make his/her credentials more appealing to land a job in a market of scarcity.

And so, “Never a moment to let up” translates into little time for anything other than work.

And so, these decisions, as rational and smart as they are, can engender unintended consequences.  “Finding someone” or “having children” or even devoting time to a hobby or other personal interests is not so easily managed.  And when individuals make the time… others aren’t necessarily at the same “then” and so they don’t ever meet.  Or, employers read it as a sign of waning implication or interest… pushing them to devalue the individual’s “than”.  This fear is illustrated, for example, by women who are practically on their blackberries with their work while in the labor room to prove their continued presence, implication, availability.  As for those who don’t, thinkers like Elisabeth Badinter who hints in her “Conflict: Woman and Mother” that once you’re a mother you can no longer be as good of a professional because you’ll never again be fully devoted to your job (!! I’ll dig into that one another time as well).  As such, women find themselves on an “off-ramp” without ever having degraded their level of performance or results! 

The problem with all of this is that oftentimes the women who buy into this and who choose to not have children or who minimize their motherhood almost to the point of non-existence in the name of career have a bittersweet tale to tell.  (I’m not talking about the women who simply do not want children.  That’s entirely their choice and, if truly convinced, are, I presume, likely to not have any regrets at all and live very happy and fulfilling lives.)  I’m talking about the women who have fallen into the professional cycle and or pressure of not having a “personal life” and/or a family without having ever made a conscious decision of not having any children, etc.  In those cases, a heavy price is paid.  Disappointment for not having known their children.  Sorrow for having missed their biological clock.  Frustrations of not having met the “right” person with whom they can live & share their lives.  Decisions of conceding to marry a friend at the last minute rather than miss their biological clock.  And when talking about it, most just shake their heads and refrain, “that’s just the way it is.”

And sure, life does go on.  But need it really be this way?  Not if we, collectively, start reinvesting  time as quantum instead of linear. 

According to my understanding, quantum doesn’t follow laws of causality (cite article of recent research) but instead includes all tenses at once and can come forth at any point in time, in any order.  This is already our reality to some extent: take the example of time zones.  My brother in Hawaii is just starting November 17^th whereas my November 17^th in France is ending (12 hours time difference)… and yet it’s exactly the same minute.  As for minutes, there’s a great passage in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in which Quentin looks at a clockmaker’s window display in which each of the watches show a different time.  It’s a good point of how arbitrary time can be in its absolute… and yet it continues to crush us with its societal pressure and our tayloristic way of wielding it.

Indeed, with our current cult of youth, we seem to ignore the gifts of maturity and wisdom that life experience carries with it.  We expect people to climb step by step (but stay visibly young and dynamic)…   Yet that expectation is in contradiction with people’s realities:  depending on an individual’s personal trajectory, he or she may be very mature on certain aspects at an early age but remain rather immature on other aspects of life, upon which even late in years he/she will have to improve and mature.  It is therefore more accurate to base oneself on the individual rather than on his/her age or measurable credentials (like a quark, his/her development and self-realization will not be linear or coherent in all areas of personal development across the board). 

This probably seems obvious and yet our current society and its general qualifications for “making it” are not based on this quantum reality but rather an arbitrary linearity with which:

-          Parents freak out if their child hasn’t accomplished something by a certain age (ex. toilet training)

-          Teenagers freak out if they haven’t gone as far as others in terms of social approval (ex. sex)

-          Bosses in the business world choose their talent pool hopefuls by age (late 20s early 30s) despite the fact that it’s smack in the middle of Western women’s maternity leaves

-          Employers penalize mothers on their career paths because they’re feared to be less implicated due to a 3 - 6 month maternity leave (even though it’s only 6 months out of 42 years of career...)

-          Individuals freak out about birthdays and wrinkles despite their spry attitudes and mindset   

-          Etc.

The unintended consequence of this habit is unnecessarily creating stress and pressure.  It can potentially make or break a career.  It makes people go against their nature (their biological clock, for example, which, like it or not, is a biological imperative of our species that we can’t just wish away).  It makes society go against its nature and natural rhythms (check out the great interview with Gilles Clément, landscape architect of international renown in the magazine Clés (june-july 2011) on the irrepressible biorhythm of living beings).  It forces companies to miss out on the maturity and diversity that fulfilling personal and/or familial activities can afford an individual.

The reality of this tayloristic “then and than” logic is that we’re never living our lives fully for we’re always harping on the future or the past. You know, waiting for happiness to come while letting it pass us by (cf. The Hours), and then wondering what went wrong, where we failed for us to have ended up as we have…   Many have written on “living in the moment” (cf. Eckhart Tolle) and that clearly has a number of advantages; not least in the way that living deliberately enables us to comprehend and therefore live more in phase with our personal preferences and talents, our strengths…   Yet, on more pragmatic terms, it seems somewhat naïve to try to condition ourselves to abide by only one dimension of our reality.

For me, the key is to approach life via a spherical rather than linear “then and than” logic.  It’s the only way for each of us to actually build upon our personal histories, desired future, and the focus and agency of the present simultaneously.

What does this mean, concretely?  It means merging the multiple roles we play in our lives at a given moment so s to be able to apply the full force of our knowledge and consciousness to each of our acts.  For the employer seeking talents, it means benefitting from the employee’s improved performance and productivity when having time to develop and enrich him/herself outside of work.  For the employee, it means taking advantage of the parenthood experience and applying its enrichment and empowerment as added-value to their contribution at work.  For the mother/father, it means taking care of personal expression or accomplishment as a better balance and a better model for their children.

I will stop here and come back in later blogs for the three other benefits of integrating the quantum into our current way of living:

1.       Space need not be physical

2.       Time need not be linear

3.       Individuals need not be singular

4.       Identity need not be definitive

5.       Love need not be crystalized

Rendez-vous next Thursday for a new bite from the apple.  In the meantime, share your comments based on your knowledge and consciousness!                                                                                                                                                                                              

When will we accept we are like quarks ?

21^st century individuals are like quarks.  Quarks can be waves and particles at once, can be matter and antimatter simultaneously, can be in more than one place at one time, until observed or measured.   

As with quarks, a 21^st century individual’s state remains multiple and fluctuant until observed, at which point it crystalizes into singular form.  Indeed, we humans can be many and one at once, defined and measured mainly when observed… after which we resume our multiplicity until newly observed. 

This multiplicity is representative of how many of us live…  And now with the many mediums and channels which facilitate it, internet is clearly a catalyst which may have finally brought quantum mechanics into our classical, physical world.

What do I mean?  Time and space have been altered, overcome.  We can be in more than one place at a time.  Thanks to telecommunications and real time technology, we can be across the world and at home at the same time.  With the aspects of identity we project or perform via diverse exchange spaces on the world wide web or even via our avatars, we can be many at once.  Meanwhile, when “observed” we are singular (for the chat on our profession, we are our professional singular while for the chat on our hobby, we are hobby singular for the social network with which we are interacting at that time), albeit enriched thanks to all that we have learned and grown via our multiplicity.

So what?  It’s time for Western society to integrate quantum physics into our way of living.

1.   Space need not be physical.  For me, this means embracing more types of distance work.  Of course in manual professions workers need to be physically present but in many service-sector or financial jobs, it is possible to do much of one’s work load at a distance.  Concretely, this means that parents should be able to not be penalized when their child or parent is sick (can still work from home), or when they need to leave the office at a certain time to be able to get their children from school or supervise their homework.  The purpose:  allow them to still be regarded as valuable contributors to their company despite extra-professional obligations.

By extension, this means facing culturally ingrained habits such as “réunionisme” and “présentéisme” in France (but I’d be willing to bet in other countries too) by which employees are pushed to hanging out at the office just to be seen at late hours by their superiors (even if they’re no longer literally working) and at which meetings are often used for power play instead of making real decisions.  Some of this is inevitable, so the idea isn’t to eradicate it entirely but there should be a new way of evaluating based on results rather than process and concrete contribution rather than brownie points.  As for ‘inevitable’ part of it, a colleague could still participate in some of those power meetings by video conference (using means like skype, etc). 

The result would be a more flexible workplace… and a more flexible career slope.  Until we deal with these aspects, we’ll continue to spin out of control in terms of hours spent at the office.   We’ll exhaust all the 100% dedicated employees, providing too little time for discovery and experience.  We’ll penalize talents only because they have made life choices of including personal life.  And we’ll penalize the organization by missing out on all the diversity, maturity, and experiences that their live choices or situations could contribute to the organization.

I will stop here and come back in later blogs for 4 other benefits of integrating the quantum into our current way of living:

2.       Time need not be linear

3.       Individuals need not be singular

4.       Identity need not be definitive

5.       Love need not be crystalized

Rendez-vous next Thursday for a new bite from the apple.  In the meantime, share your comments based on your knowledge and consciousness!