Time Crunch: Time to Reevaluate How We Use Time

It’s Back to School, and I, like every other parent, is crunched for time and bowing under the weight of pursuing personal success and supporting success for her children.  Much of it all comes down to Time.

Time for school.  Time for homework.  Time to relax.  Time to get them to bed in time for enough rest.  Time for self-fulfillment, time for self-indulgence (mine are only 6 and 3 years old, after all!).  Time for physical activity.  Time for musical and artistic development or enrichment.  Time for play.  Time for cleaning up and putting away.  Time for reading.  Time for imagination.  Time to talk and question and answer.

That’s a lot of Time for a working professional mother like me who also needs a lot of Time for herself.  Time for work, time for overtime, time for the commute, time for my personal projects, time with my husband, time for sports, time for hobbies, my siblings, my friends?  Time… so much Time that the more I write the word, the less it seems articulate, or even real.

But the repercussions of Time are very real.  According to current social mores, if your child doesn’t start lessons in a particular instrument or sport at a young enough age, the child will probably carry a lag compared to others (unless the child has unusual talent in the domain).  If your child lacks the maturity for certain math problems, the poor grades of the time will negatively impact the child’s record and/or confidence and may be set back from hen as the child will maybe be excluded from the higher math class from then on.  If your child doesn’t excel at standardized tests, there’s a chance that the child won’t be able to stay in that school that has to keep its pass rate high enough to retain funding.  It’s even worse for working parents and, above all, working women who, with or without children, suspected to take away too much Time from her work to care for babies, children, or elders.

Yet, if our society shifted from this standardized, timed success towards a more spherical time in which maturity and naturalness enabled each of us to grow at our own pace and in our own way, we would all be greatly enriched by gifts of maturity and wisdom that life experience carries.  

In the past, I have made the case for incorporating our understanding of quantum physics into our lives, setting up a system that obeys natural maturational processes and qualitative growth instead of always reducing everything to the ticking of measurement and quantification.  In the past, I have argued that we refuse to minimize our lives to a Tayloristic, linear logic of “then and than” and move onto a more quantum, spherical approach to learning and achievement with greater emphasis on accomplishment and growth instead of squelched memorization and graded success.

When we allow ourselves to grow with experience, with scientific method of hypothesis and testing, when we leave time for play and imagination, our children are likely to learn more quickly and fully than when they plug away at hours of homework every night after school.  When we take time to debate and constructively argue, we stand to gain much more knowledge and wisdom than memorizing dates and trivia.  This might not meet the quantified and quantifiable expectations of “then and than” linear time, nor does anyone probably have any Time for it… but it is more likely to build better thinkers.  Children who have sturdier building blocks for learning and retaining their acquired knowledge both at school and during their free time.  Citizens who have  better grasp on how things (objects, systems, relationships) work and therefore a better hold on their own lives and the weight of their vote. 

As a working mother want for Time and worried about her children being able to survive in our “then and than” linear timing and Performance Society, I feel the drag toward ticking away steadily without question, marching to the beat of the drummer as best we can with no slack to ever consider a different tune, a more harmonious rhythm that would enable our societies to start to dream again a dream of progress, improvement, fullness, and sustainable growth.

 And if we mothers don’t have time to help imagine and build a better society, who will?

 It’s time for us to be freed up from the race-time imperative and give time back where we need it most:  debate, quality progress, sustainable growth, critical knowledge.

Talk to you next week for another bite from the apple,

Eve

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! 

When will we accept we are like quarks ? Part 4: Identity need not be definitive

As I have been arguing, it is time for us to make a jump in collective intelligence and benefit from what we know of quantum physics, integrating their principles into our way of living and allow 21^st century individuals benefit from being like quarks:

·         Accepting that virtualizing space should be used for individuals to live their lives more fully while also improving performance in their work

·         Enabling spherical time development so that individuals can get back in touch with natural life-progressing rhythms without being overly taxed socially or professionally…   and actually improve society and productivity. 

·         Integrating our “selves” into an “Integrated I” freeing us to cultivate our true selfhood and therefore contribute greater diversity to the benefit of collective intelligence and progress

Part 4:  Identity need not be definitive

Looking around, on TV, in the press, in the movies, in scientific journals and books, in advertising, we can see we’re living in a performance society.  This has been true of the United States for a long time and seems increasingly true of European countries.  Of course not everyone wants to honor that and there are more and more movements towards cooperation and interdependence, but on the whole, to “make it”, you’ve got to perform at most every moment and, it seems, against most everyone (including “invisible competition” coming from workers in other countries, as the current economic crisis readily illustrates).  A competitive interpretation of Darwinism reigns and we’ve got to compose with that as individuals wanting to pursue self-fulfillment and happiness within our societies (this is clearly something to be reconsidered but I’ll get into that in another post in the future).

In this competitive performance society, Western countries’ common conviction seems to anchor success is one’s individuality, and the identity with which others associate.    Enabled by relative material comfort, media-age communication habits, and social networking capabilities, people seem to build and solidify the identities they project in order to show the world the great life we have created for ourselves, to stage our great performance.  Instructed by the societal “then and than” logic, we seem to have enjoined a kind of “positive slope rhetoric” with which our exploits, even our challenges, are colored, so as to make our lives appear “more than” (or at least “as much as”) others’ (harder, smarter, more clever, more cheeky, more audacious, more complicated, cuter, lazier, etc.). 

All of these efforts allow for a more or less successful “marketing of me” with which we perform.  It comes out in every crack:  we have to be “google-able” to land that new job.  We have to show how even our downtime and our leisure time are productive, performant, enviable.  I spoke with a good number of recent graduates who explained the importance of qualitative experiences on resumes:  it isn’t enough to travel, you have to have traveled somewhere exotic in a new hip way, and have published a blog about it, etc.   

This marketing relationship with our own lives clearly impacts our “real” lives as we increasingly make our choices based on their resume value.  Back in the 60’s, David Riesman had identified peer-approval logic.  Currently, thanks to internet and other people-connectors, this peer approval has extended to include most every actor of every relational level.  Our “peers” are not only our social circle but now include our employer, our future employer, our parents and friends’ parents, etc.  Suddenly, our behavior (or at least what we or others post on facebook of us), must be crystalline at all times, must be palatable for the general public (consider the woman who lost her teaching credentials simply because someone else published a picture of her drinking a beer).  We are forced into performing rather than actually living.

Performing rather than living has some unintended consequences. 

As much of our performance is responding to societal criteria and approval, and building up whatever “projected identity” that is most winning/marketable/attractive, we are distancing ourselves from our natural talents and preferences, allowing ourselves to fall away from our personal center of gravity.  Like in Plato’s cave, we are rigidifying and reinforcing our projections but, as a result, we are under-nourishing our personal, core identity and its development, its growth.

It’s a great paradox:  in the context of believing that identity empowers individual liberty, we’re actually losing control over our own liberty as we limit our identity to watered-down, LCD societal expectations.  Indeed “performance” is often in itself a redundant logic, reproducing others’ acts instead of building one’s own life with one’s own creativity.   In this time of individualism, we are making ourselves clones.

This has far-reaching repercussions in today’s landscape in which we have the ability to increasingly man-make ourselves.   At every level: 

-          Body (including plastic surgery, botox at increasingly young ages, a normalized expectation of seductivity with which we’re pressured to be seductive to all people at all times… and which used to be mainly women’s lot but which is increasingly enslaving men too (Nickel, L’Oréal)…

-          Personality (molded to what’s most efficient and attractive to potential employers/ partners, etc. with which we tend to create memes instead of creating something new or more specific to oneself)…

-          Aspirations (for girls, “being hot” (The Lolita Effect), for going on 30s: having it all and having something to show for it (Midlife Crisis at Thirtysomething)…

-          Choices (limiting our personal activities in terms of Resume value and employability including sidelining important personal potential (either losing out on love, children all together or living them ‘in absentia’ as we have nannies etc. take care of it), trying to be more masculine than an alpha male at the executives’ table (“flight from woman”)…

These strategies have a cost.  They make our identity “taxidermist” as it rigidifies into a kind of still-life or snapshot despite our hyperactivity.

So what?  First of all, let’s consider the toll it takes of keeping up appearances – especially those we’ve projected and which are estranged from our personal core competencies.  Open up any journal or talk around you to discover the extent to which we, as a society, depend on medicated success (taking uppers to get a 4.0 GPA, taking uppers just to get through the day while remaining “pleasant, and pleasing”…).   Close to 10% of American adults were on anti-depressants in 2008 (before the financial crisis!), and the UK has seen a 43% rise in antidepressant prescriptions in the last four years.  And this goes without mentioning other strategies to which people are resorting to try to get a hold on their lives (over-indebtedness, eating disorders, dependence on shrinks …).

Second, carrying around a “still-life identity” is like using one’s identity for defensive or offensive purposes instead of constructive or developmental purposes.  This stifles growth for ourselves and creates antagonism rather than cooperation with others. 

Third, the more energy we allocate to maintaining a fixed posture, the less we can build new muscles, create new synapses, or foster new discoveries.  It is increasingly accepted scientifically that every experience, every interaction, every activity strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others.  It follows that maintaining a still-life identity undermines our potential and reduces our possibilities.  The more statue-like we become, the less we breathe or oxygenate our beings.  Meanwhile, we’re writing a chronic of a failure foretold!  No matter how hard we try, we won’t ever be able to entirely do away with nature, which will always rear its head.  Keeping up with appearances becomes less and less natural and requires more and more energy.  It’s totally unsustainable.

Clearly, we have developed unhealthy relationships with perfection leading to all types of indigestion due to immobility (decision paralysis, excessive risk management, cynicism vs. over-inflated optimism…).  I’ll comment on this in an ulterior post. 

Finally, it may or may not behoove us to build up such projections for we may be crystallizing aspects of ourselves we think are most winning when in fact our self-analysis may be faulty or may quickly become obsolete (cf. Dan Gilbert whose research shows that humans, as subjective beings, misperceive reality then use those misperceptions to build a mistaken view of the future).

What will quantum do for all this?

1.   The flexibility of being more than on being at once gives a greater margin of maneuver when it comes to building our identity.  I’m not talking about role acting via avatars or fictitious identities over the net.  I’m talking about integrating our dualities and inconsistencies into one, evolutionary being who is enriched by its versatility and multiplicity. 
Consider Sartre's insight into our being which can be applied to our identity.  For him, to be, "être", describes all that isn't human (objects, animals) for they are described by their physico-chemical properties whereas humans are also decribed by their potential.  For Sartre, this is a kind of "anti-being" ("le néant").  To be "anti-being" is to accept that "I" could not have been... and contingentally, that "I" could be something else and still have the liberty to become.
I call the quarkishness of simultaneous being and anti-being “fertile identity” with which identity shifts from being a still life snapshot requiring high maintenance to a springboard for further growth, exploration, discovery, progress.

Why a springboard?  Because the learnings we acquire in one aspect of our lives allows for exponential development in others (cf. blog time)

Because giving oneself to growth builds understanding and knowledge in a way that "living in abstentia" cannot.  Oftentimes the best relational bonding happens during downtime.  When we don’t participate in the actual building of aspects of our lives, we don’t internalize the learning curve, nor do we really reap the fruits of our labor.  Take the example of Dawn Lepore interviewed in this week’s Business Week who regrets having missed out on raising her kids.  This shouldn’t have to be the case. 

Because attempting perfection for each of our roles pushes us to look at each facet of our lives in a fragmented way instead of viewing the whole, not only leaving us blind to mid to long-term gains but vulnerable to burn-out, statistically rising in Western countries.

Because going against our personal, natural inclinations can never be fully controlled.  On the other hand, if we embrace our natural rhythms, we can bask in the facility inherent in going with the flow instead of corseting ourselves against it.  Of course this is not the message society is giving us – especially to young women hoping to “have it all” (family and career).  But if we can rewrite our societal myths and integrate the quantum, there is no real obstacle / we can overcome the current obstacles.  We can choose how our society is formatted.

Because, the ability to roll with the punches, to deal with the surprises life will always reserve for us, our survival and well-being depends on our flexibility.  For no matter how hard we plan, life will always bring out the unexpected (or worse, we might miss out on the unexpected entirely!  We need to welcome evolution even when it doesn’t come according to plans.

2.   Perpetual motion and a bildungsroman “growth visa” for women

-    Applying the quantum spherical, integrated space-time helps us accept that life is perpetual evolution and movement.  As long as we seek to convince others of our happiness by creating Kodac moments, we won’t succeed in acquiring happiness.  But once we channel the dynamic of growth, with its slow moments and fast moments, troubled times and easy times, we can take on a whole new perspective of happiness and success.  It’s unsustainable to give free reign to our societal dread of difficult times and determination to avoid them. 

After all, there is no such thing as “successful life insurance”!   But perhaps we can manage “life ensurance” : rent for mistakes and for spontaneity.  As has said Gilles Clément, « La réalité biologique est l’imprevisibilité ».  Integrating the quantum can include reinstating a bildungsroman approach to create a “growth visa” for women and a dedication to living deliberately.  So many are about men and their hero myth whereas we need to construct one for women enriched with our creative potential and the motherself.    

3.   This leads me to a third benefit of integrating the quantum in our societal outlook : exploring the fullness of both the masculine and the feminine in each of us.  Westerners know about the concept of the yin and the yang but this too is a perspective yet to be fully assimilated.  So many conversations are about gender, post-gender, performativity… but these postures seem to me prey to the still-life identity I described above.  The quarkish Idea of carrying both the masculine and the feminine at once would enable us to have better access to our whole nature and ourselves.  Instead of working to be the alpha male or the archetype of femininity, we could integrate relativity, thus improving our empathy for others (the basis of imagination) and our creativity, our constructiveness.

It would also free us from trying to beat men at their own game and instead empower women to redefine the rules on our own terms… The point here is certainly not to level all differences but, on the contrary, to foster (real) diversity while rendering traditional boundaries & stereotypes permeable … enabling us to demand acknowledgement of our talents (cf. "Lehman sisters") as we do what comes naturally, with all the pleasantness and aggressiveness that each of us embodies.  This is a vast subject that I will treat in a separate post.  Suffice it to say that we’ve still a lot of work to do on this topic! 

Here’s the point:  for all of us 99% across the world, we need to rethink our society and start putting to better use our history and collective intelligence to make strides and informed choices.  We can see the way things are.  We can see how we don’t want things to be.  Now we need to collectively think about how we want things to be in order for us to make it happen.   I am convinced we can use some of scientists’ knowledge and hypotheses of quantum physics to metaphorically inform our sociological and societal systems.

I will stop here and come back in later blogs for the fifth benefit 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 own knowledge and consciousness! 

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!