In this 21st Century, We, Men & Women, are Entitled to Demand "Having it All"

Just back from a trip to India, my intention was to comment on some of what I saw there… but that
will have to wait; I want to weigh in on the Slaughter article and the reactions covered by the Atlantic Monthly & the New York Times.

I agree with much, though not everything, of what Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”. In the past, I have actually made many similar points in this blog. For example,

- The workplace is out of synch with the realities of non-professional life, has given into quantity of hours/face time over the high value of quality of work; that for professionals to optimize performance, downtime, and time for other aspects of life (hobby, family, leisure) are key contributors to professional performance (for men and women, with or without children). I have also proponed pursing an “integrated I” (for men & women) to counter what Slaughter refers to as a “fetish of a one-dimensional life”.
- I also agree that the expected career curve needs to be revised considering the number of
decades we’re each going to invest in our careers: the idea that a few months of maternity
leave slows a woman’s potential and/or represents a lack of investment in one’s career
(apparently it represents an 11% gap that grows over time) is a flimsy excuse, not
a reflection of reality.  It’s utter nonsense (or simply discrimination) to decide such a short
leave out of 40 years plus of work should put such a hard lid on a woman’s career
development! Especially considering that the big fad is “mompreneurs”: women who start
their own businesses in order to have the flexibility of seeing their kids and having a career.
If someone can balance the bottom line of an entire business on her own while leaving pockets of time to spend with her kids, an employee is also likely to have the capacity to handle both while remaining performing… But such is not current corporate wisdom and mothers are generally suspect unless they exhibit total devotion. This is not just a glass ceiling, this is a glass cage!
- I even go further by arguing that, beyond kids needing their parents, adults spending time with kids (their own or someone else’s) is in itself an asset in terms of the insights it brings, the empathy
& relativism it fosters, and the joy it produces (children’s laughter is infectious), not the
mention our enrichment from the questions they ask and the solutions they provoke.

To tell the truth, what really surprised me was not so much Slaughter’s propos; it’s the reactions they drew. Half the writers didn’t even get the gist of her piece, which, for me, is as follows: with societal mores so much aligned with corporate capitalistic ideals, Americans cannot hope to “have it all”… but with a little more pragmatism, these mores can evolve and create a more propitious environment for a better work-life balance for everyone.  It’s a very positive proposition, even if it will take time.  But many reactions concentrated on details… and ended up either defending the status quo (“of course you can’t do both! It’s a spoiled child’s dream of ubiquity to think you can; adults make choices and stick to them”) or arguing it’s a non issue because many already “have it all” (even though each admit to an awful lot of regrets along the way).  Over all, many reactions showcased great inertia in terms of reframing our society and the potential we want to achieve.

I am not aligned with this criticism. There is a real, fundamental problem and it’s counterproductive
to dismiss the debate for details.  What is missing from Slaughter’s analysis are testimonials from other men and women than those among the elite.  What’s missing is the voice of second and third tier classes.  People like me who have great degrees from great schools, who aren’t trying to be number one but who want to have a good job and build a career… but who face everyday discrimination and suspicion of not being committed enough because I leave work at a reasonable hour to get home for my “second shift”.  People like me who have good heads on their shoulders, have acquired experience, have real value to contribute… but who discover an exceptionally low glass ceiling because we have kids and don’t want to entirely outsource parenting.  My argument is that I don’t see why I can’t expect to have an interesting job (not spectacular!) + a decent wage + a decent life balance.  That’s what “having it all” means to me.  And any of those journalists with their cushy salaries and their flexible, mobile professions can come to me when they pretend “having it all” is a fictitious and elitist predicament.  Why should we settle for less?!  Who dare feel comfortable with the idea that I and other people like me should be sidelined only because we have multiple priorities?!  I am fighting daily in this trench.  Slaughter is touching a major need eve if she isn’t the most legitimate spokesperson.  We need a good dose of realism/ pragmatism and catapult ourselves into the 21^st century with a demand for the society we want.  A society that’s a little more lucid about what actually constitutes worth and value.  A society that believes anew in progress.

Let me know what you think. 
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

When will we accept we are like quarks ? Part 3: Individuals need not be singular

When will we accept we are like quarks ?  Part 3:  Individuals need not be singular

As I said in my two previous installments, 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.  In the second installment, I argued in favor of enabling spherical time development so that individuals can get back in touch with natural life-progressing rhythms without being overly taxed socially or professionally…   in a way which can actually improve society and productivity.  Now we’ll look at a new take on “matter”:  our individuality.

3.  Individuals need not be singular. 

Quarks are simultaneously matter and antimatter, both particles and waves, until observed. 

We humans base our relationships a lot on behavioral and visual codes.  The easiest place to witness it is at a high school where many budding individuals help to categorize themselves by being part of a clear-cut tribe, with which they identify themselves by adopting the correlate codes (think Gothics vs. hip hop, etc.).  They are actively still-life-ing themselves when observed so as to be identifiable and gain belonging to a well-defined social group.

In our digitalized media age, we adults are also constantly observed and observing.  If before we were observed at precise moments of socialization (present at religious gatherings, professional gatherings, blood-related gatherings), nowadays these moments never really end or begin; with facebook, linked-in,  SMS, and mobile phones, we are more or less constantly linked... and observed (even in abstentia!). 

Yes, observed and observing… With less and less time for simple growth or learning, for living or experimenting.   Instead, we are performing.

But there are a lot of down-sides to performing. 

Performing entails type-casting ourselves in order to be more intelligible for our audience (employers, friends, etc.), forcing certain traits, casting in shadow other aspects that don’t sell your performance so well (at least, in today’s age, hopefully for you!).   In this sense, performing is a rather redundant logic as it requires ostensible visual or oral cues that can place more fixedly the person within the social system, meaning it builds on established patterns instead of leaving full latitude to creative or innovative behavior. 

Performing also requires keeping up the performance, keeping up appearances, which is hardly sustainable considering how many roles each of us must perform.  This is a real issue to be considered for as long as we’re in a performance society, we have to be performant in each and every of our dimensions and tasks we undertake instead of enabling a balanced, more holistic approach.

That’s why I plead for a quarkish “Integrated I”:  integrating our different facets, for a “mosaic me” instead of a “tribal we”.   This doesn’t mean we should be everything to all people at all times.  What it means is moving away from crystalized perfrection for each of our “tribes”.  This is particularly a challenge for modern women who are constantly spinning plates and playing every female archetype for her many roles (more manly than a man in business, more seductive and ‘wild’ than a sex-worker in bed, more motherly than June Beaver, as good of a friend as the Sex in the City crew, and as good of a hobbyist as the role Meg Ryan plays in The Women, etc.) 

Let us 21^st century women move away from multiple and simultaneous perfect performances towards an “Integrated I”.  Instead of one thing and another, we should embrace a kind of multiplicity, a mosaic in which the glimpse of one facet of an individual is colored and contoured with that same individual’s other simultaneous facets… with which our different facets serve to multiply our energy and added-value in each role (instead of the commonly perceived quagmire of superwoman or exhausted woman who’s spread too thin to do anything as well as she thinks she should). 

On the contrary, living our “Integrated I”, we actually synergize our diverse experiences.  In this way, motherhood and the experiences and learning it entails becomes an asset for sharpshooting professional problems.  Womanhood and the experiences and learning it involves (consider Ginger Rogers’ quote, “I did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels”) becomes a boon in the business world (consider “Lehman Sisters”), professional growth becomes a positive force in raising a family and running a household, hobbies become a real oxygenator of our minds helping us to be better friends, mothers, and professionals.  And so on and so forth.

This “Integrated I” is also a-temporal, or spherical-time, as discussed in a previous blog.  It allows us to pull on all dimensions of our own resources at all times.  Imagine a kind of time warp that activates the strengths of our past and potential futures in order that we better live our present.  Sounds obvious and yet so often people talk of their lives very linearly and generally present them as a positive slope, emphasizing causality and logical construction.  Their focus is on the future and their ambitions.  When this happens, in some ways, they seem to be always pushing forward, almost running away from their pasts in order to keep up the pace of success, to catch happiness.

Unfortunately, in the race, we risk leaving behind the riches of lessons learned, roots, preferences, tastes… we risk leaving behind some of the elements that make us unique.  Specific.   Authentic.  Self-worthy and worthy of Self.   As we perform, we tend to reproduce the current model instead of valorizing the personal traits and diversity we could contribute.  And we know the importance of diversity in the survival of a species.

The point here is that many of us have lost touch with what are our personal gifts and with what is natural for us as women and as individuals.   The unintended consequence of this is that we are no longer reaping the fruits of our individual labor… that in the absence of living deliberately (due to being caught up in the societal flow and expectations), we have given in to a kind of “absentee living” with which we may check off the list certain clichéd accomplishments, we haven’t actually benefitted from them or grown with them (cf. If it's Tuesday, this must be Brussels).   Living according to our “Integrated I” reclaims the full dimension of our selves, nourishes us with what we have lived and experienced, coming full circle to our roots and our personal story which become a source of strength for our present selves and helps to shape our future selves.   This was a part of Almodovar’s El Flor de mi secreto. 

For, however politically incorrect it may sound, NO, we don’t all have the same talents.   Many of us have a tendency to think that what’s easy for “me” is easy for others… whereas each of us have skills which come easily and others which do not.  Each of us needs to regain focus on what comes naturally to us instead of fixating on a societal ideal of 360° perfection.  After all, 360° perfection is a very fragmented way of looking at life.  Fixating on one small fragment of a whole necessarily distorts the image and often expresses an entirely different message than that of a more holistic consideration.   As said Germaine Greer, one needs to know onself to gain “self-determination”.   The “Integrated I” helps each of us to find ourselves, our true selfhood… and thus allows our world to delect in true diversity. 

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 own knowledge and consciousness!