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

Entering a 21st Century Cult of Living: Building Youth with Age

21^st Century Call:  Move Beyond our Cult of Youth to a Cult of Living

I posited in my last entry that many of our strategies for living the Cult of Youth may actually be counter-productive due to the fact that our efforts to appear younger somewhat prevent us from being and living more youthfully.  After all, our goals should be about improving our quality of life; not simply about creating optical illusions for others!   

Here I would like to prolong that reflection by considering our current fears and goals in order to reframe them into a Cult of Living.

It’s time to reconstruct our fears of aging and our goals of youth.

There is societal significance in the obsession of effacing age.  Ostensibly, it is an attempt to defy mortality, in response to our great fear of death. 

But could it, in reality, represent a fear of being?

Indeed, wrinkles are often indicators of our past and the experiences which have built our personal character and have led us to make certain choices, good and bad.  They represent our gained perspective, right or wrong.  They are a visible mark of our growth and evolution, easy or belabored.  They are part of who we are.

And here we are trying to efface them.  Erase them.  Disown them.  Avoid ever acquiring them.  As if refusing our very being would allow us to relive our nostalgic idea of the easiness of youth, or start again with a clean slate; keep our options open.  Perhaps we are flirting with perpetual adolescence in order to flee the alleged constraints of being an adult:  the end of possibilities, the end of spontaneity, and the compromise of our dreams (as depicted by “emerging adults” (18-29 year olds in the Western world) recorded by socio-psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s extensive research).

But, could it be that out of fear of this type of stagnation, we are avoiding filling in our actual lives as completely as we could or should?  That we don’t want to accept who we are, opting instead to play act and perform, as would an adolescent, simply in the name of a figurative possibility of re-creating our lives?  Could this be the key to why we are rejecting any visible manifestations of “growing up”? And, by consequence, any overly defining characteristics?

These reflexes reveal erroneous representations of youth and of adulthood.   

Youth and adolescence are not so much about freedom but about conformity, as they try on different masks to figure out who they are and who they want to be.  Far from freestyle living and spontaneity, adolescents are beholden to others’ approval and an exacerbated need for belonging and approbation.   Even their dreams are normative, “everyone will find a lifelong partner, and a great job, and live happily ever after”. 

In today’s performance society, the need to make the “right” choice is acute; it’s not surprising we all shy away from closing doors.  But the representation of adulthood and age as only rigid, static, conservative, and anti-dynamic is inaccurate and limiting.  In reality, adulthood represents the life-stage during which we acquire at last the wisdom and maturity required for actually free and deliberate living, positive control, etc.  For, adulthood can (and should) be a very dynamic stage in which the individual has at last accepted responsibility for one’s self, making one’s own decisions, and with financial independence.   It is the stage during which the individual has shed the urgent need for approval and during which, thanks to having closed certain doors, we can open new ones more befitting to whom we have become and want to actually be. 

On the other hand, if we don’t (or society doesn’t) allow us the freedom to make choices and move on, we will continue to prevent ourselves from building a strong sense of who we are.  In this case, we quickly find ourselves up against the “void” of existence which is at the root of our Cult of Youth.   As has said Susan Ertz in her novel Anger in the Sky, “millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”  As a society, we seem to have opted for projections and appearances instead of actually building ourselves up to Be. 

Again, much of the confusion stems from our performance society in which there can only be one winner and in which we are each pitted against each other.  Part of the trouble is that as a person ages, that person, man or woman, as a social animal, needs to feel assured that he/she will not be ostracized, cut off from the community (especially as the person reaches an age that is less self-sufficient, depending more on society and social network for survival).  For that, he/she needs to feel desired, loved, included.

The trouble is, we’re all competing for the same places.  Cougars and Lolitas are aiming to charm the same men (who, clearly, still need to be liberated and realize that their manliness is not exclusively proven by their ability to seduce young women – they should move on to mature women!!!).  Just as are Snow White and the Evil Queen.  But attempting to retrieve the person we were at 20 is a chronic of a failure foretold… and can only lead to despair.  The Evil Queen is proof!  And putting all our worth in our looks is a second error that I’ll develop in next week’s blog.

The fact of the matter is that we owe it to ourselves, as individuals and as a species, to explore the full potential of each age and life-stage and, in this way, embrace the many dimensions of Being.

This is why, to make for a more durable societal scheme in the 21^st century, we need to clarify (and make, if so needed) roles for each, enabling older men and women to have a respectable and respected place in society.  In addition to the beauty of youth, maturity can and should have an appeal.   We must reshape our societal myth of beauty, charm, attraction, etc., to make it fuller and more extensive than simply an anti-age appearance.  It’s the only way to avoid having “being” reduced to being “young” (i.e. in one’s early 20s – which is also a problem for young girls and young teens). 

What is now needed is to foster conduits so that mature and aging adults’ contributions are recognized and valued… in order to induce a synergetic cycle that benefits each age and its valuable role.

We can begin by recalibrating our aims.  Currently, the way we are pursuing the Cult of Youth seems to be pushing us into incorporating mainly the negative aspects of youth:   

- effacing signs of wisdom, living, experience

- marginalizing memory and experience

- holding hostage our attention with nostalgia, however inaccurate it may be

- wasting our resources and energy on how many wrinkles we have (or could have one day) rather than living and thriving

- rigidifying ourselves to better resemble a 2-dimensional, taxidermic, still-life identity rather than embracing life as movement and evolution with ever more to discover

- giving into clannishness and identity appearance politics typical of adolescents who are copying instead of creating new paths thanks to the lives we have built… and the fruits of our experiences and travails

Instead, we should be trying to integrate the positive aspects of youth.  

After all, what actually constitutes “youthful” living?  Curiosity, liveliness, liberty, autonomy, eagerness, taking on new challenges, defying norms and trying out new playgrounds, being groundbreaking, audacity, excitement, innovativeness…  All characteristics that are potentially enhanced with age!

In reality, we need to age to be able to live young!  Instead of trying so desperately to reduce age to youth, we should be building youthfulness with age:

-     

- liberating our thoughts and wisdom, no longer beholden to adolescent conformity
- regenerating our brain acuity by continually learning new things, analyzed with due perspective
- confronting our ideas with others, including not like-minded people
- pursuing innovativeness which, as Regis Debray aptly put it, requires memory and experience
- being dynamic and constructive by activating our relativity & experience
- pioneering further as to how we want to live once our bodies are no longer as performing
- Expressing ourselves and living with passion now that we have shed the adolescent pitfalls of rejection, judgment, or alienation. “Living life out loud” as puts it Mike Robbins
- Revalue-ing as positive wisdom and experience, contemplation, analysis, etc. as a counterweight to today’s acceleration & superficiality

These shifts would enable us to move beyond performance society and embrace spherical rather than linear “then and than logic” so that we can actually build, at once, on our personal histories, desired future, current characteristics instead of trying desperately to efface them…  In short, we could actually benefit fully from “Being.”

In turn, this would enable us to actually welcome our human reality as growing beings who continually and renewably add and invest in their being through new experiences and perspectives… regardless of linearly quantitative “age”!

Let me know what you think, and stay tuned for another bite from the apple,

Eve

21st Century Demographics: We Must Re-Empower Our Seniors!

Recently in the New York Times, David Brooks wrote a think piece called “The Fertility Implosion” talking about the demographic pyramid’s inversion in most parts of the world (including the Middle East and China but not yet including India).   It’s a rapidly aging world, he says, and the US may gain in worldwide competitiveness thanks to its relatively slower pace of demographic inversion.

He quotes Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute who tempers that demography isn’t destiny and that you can have fast economic development with low fertility or high fertility (ex South Korea, Taiwan)… but Brooks note that, generally speaking, “rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the workforce could lead to long-term decline.” 

Living in Europe, the demographic inversion, in which the demographic pyramid reverses, leaving many more seniors compared to youths (or, in terms of workforce, mainly more retirees vs. number of young people eligible to work), is a reality of which we’ve been aware for some time and cause for great debate.   For a couple of years now, we have been debating a “decent” retirement age while keeping the social system sustainable (enough workers paying into the system to cover the retirement fund and health system among other civil structures (infrastructure, education, etc.).

Part of what is difficult for those of us following the debate is that each party shows often contradictory findings as to the realities of the economics of it all.  Canadian research institutes, for example, have published a number studies that disprove the side-effects of Philip Longman’s predicted “grey tsunami” showing that this is not what will cost the most in healthcare… but as a layperson, it’s always a bit complicated weeding out whose analysis is the closest to reality or the most trustworthy. 

That’s why I’d like to take on an entirely different angle. 

Let me quote it again: “rapidly aging population and the lack of young people entering the workforce could lead to long-term decline.” 

We are totally forgetting the valuable resource that our “seniors” represent.  In the workforce as well as in society.

Our old-fashioned ideas about seniors is exhausting and wasting a real asset for progress.

1.  First of all, we’re exhausting our seniors.  I have spoken often with aging professionals and retirees in a number of countries and different nationalities.  Many companies decide that once an employee has reached a certain age, he or she is no longer dynamic enough to help keep the company competitive.  They do what they can to dismiss them and hire on younger workers. 

Once someone in their 50s is looking for a job, they’re considered too old and often are unable to find a job (this is even more true for women who continue to be particularly strained by the social requirement to be young and beautiful).  In France, many negotiate an “anticipated retirement” which buys them out of the workforce but which, oftentimes, entails a lower pension.  Furthermore, there is a growing rate of retired women who are finding themselves in poverty, receiving, on average, 42% less than men at retirement. 

Once they’ve gone through this type of second-guessing and lack of consideration, it’s no wonder that they are exhausted and dream of retirement and the liberty and respect it evokes.

2.  Further, we’re wasting the valuable resources they represent and can contribute

In the past, a group’s “elders” were guides to wisdom and balance.  Our democratic societies have since overturned what was at times a rigid hierarchy and norms, empowering the voice of youth and the possibility and fresh perspective it can represent.  This has been a key step to progress, with young people often propelling movements (cf. social movements of the 1960s) to counterbalance the sometimes conservative reflexes attributed to the later life cycles (cf. Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory of Human Development).

Nonetheless, we seem now to have arrived at a point in which we perpetually reinvent the wheel due to lack of transmission.   Lack of sharing and handing down / passing on knowledge gained by experience and reflection.  Seniors’ knowledge and expertise are invaluable to companies’ performance, as are their perspective and relativism acquired by years of experience.  Yet seniors seem to lose their place to younger, less experienced talents who don’t cost as much (lower pay for longer hours all in the name of future success) and who are stereotyped as more dynamic.    It’s amazing that companies and society don’t calculate how much time experience can save a project and how much money perspective can bring to ventures. 

Beyond transmission, there’s also the established fact that seniors represent a growing consumer group, pushing companies to create and develop new offers for this target… they are therefore a concrete motor in terms of economic growth and stimulation (cf. recently published study by Ernst & Young, “La Révolution des Services”)… plus, their insight would be a decisive advantage in developing these types of offers.

On a societal level, shutting out elders can have further unintended consequences.  It can make them more conservative as they try to hold onto their former acquisitions against fears of the unknown… an unknown that is exacerbated by this same lack of transmission and exchange.   They then feel disenfranchised and are likely to resist change because of it. 

Instead, we should bring seniors into the debate, not as defenders of the past but as co-makers of the future.  Collective progress (and/or company performance) gains when there’s debate and when ideas are challenged and confronted… and when all actors / stakeholders are implicated so as to help them endorse the new direction.  Making our future a cross-generational goal can bring our elders into the debate, benefit from their know-how and perspective, and thus solidify and optimize our common responses & solutions for the issues facing our world.  

How can we make it happen?

We must change what work means at their age, redefining their specific role and legitimacy.

I have spoken with many individuals of 60+ years.  According to their stories, they are tired:  they don’t want to deal with so much stress anymore or work so many long hours day in and day out.  They tell me they can feel themselves not working as well as they used to, that they are no longer quite so efficient.  As conscientious professionals, they’re uncomfortable about not performing as well as in their “peek years”.  Above all, they want to avoid feeling devalued.

Meanwhile, many who have retired showcase the luxury of having free time, noting its positive impact on creativity and quality of life.  Oftentimes they are also desirous of playing a more active role beyond their intimate circle, making them a dynamic part of society.  They’d like to be taken for being as young as they still feel.

Others, who are retired… but continue some professional activity on a part-time basis, let me know that they feel better than ever; that they have worthy goals to meet without the exhaustion they could no longer bear due to the physical realities of their age.

For me, these insights point to some initial policy making:  we must allow our seniors to contribute to society while also improving their income by giving them paid, part-time roles across all professions and levels.  Too tired as a policeman to continue on the beat?  Pay him or her to help train new police recruits on a part-time basis.  Too tired as a teacher to deal with disciplinarian problems or too many students per class?  Pay him or her to give after-school help, freeing up time for the fulltime, overwrought teacher while also bringing an additional support system to help to the students (“it takes a village”).  Too tired as an executive to travel so much?  Pay him or her to coach, council, or transmit learning and best-practices to rising talents.  Etc. 

This would not be mandatory; no one would be required to do it, it would simply be an option allowing the volunteers to make more money (in addition to their pensions), share their talent, enrich the project, etc.… in short, work in a way that is pertinent for them and their situation.   In this way, our seniors would be very much part of a society’s well-being, progress, and performance.  They would no longer be a sign of “decline” but, on the contrary, a recognized force contributing to growth and quality of life.

But the crux of the matter is:  we are getting held up by our cult of youth.

This is a subject I’ll soon tackle in subsequent blogs (this post is already long enough!) but suffice it to say here that our “Performance Society” and our “Marketing of Me” is pushing us to always pursue “youth” no matter our age:

Madonna soon to be 54 years old

It seems to me rather counterproductive to pursue youth via paralysis, nostalgia, and refusal to mature… but, above all, it seems damaging to our society to strip the benefits of age and maturity of their value.

One final point regarding this alleged “fertility implosion”: where there’s smoke there’s often a flame.  If it is true that we need to be watchful over extremely low fertility rates (which is not what I have heard otherwise but…), then, beyond re-empowering seniors / age to make our new demography an asset, our other task is to do what’s necessary to make it easier to conciliate having a family and a career for both men and women!

I’d love to hear your comments.  Otherwise, catch you all next week for another bite from the apple!

Talk to you then,

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 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!