As I said in my previous blog, 21st 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 20th century there was such a thing as punching the clock, most white collar jobs of the 21st century expect professionals to be available 24/7.
- If in the 20th 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 21st 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 17th whereas my November 17th 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!
No comments:
Post a Comment