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

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!