France would be seized with a great laziness. That’s what we learn a recent analysis note by Jérôme Fourquet (Ifop) and Jérémie Peltier (Jean-Jaurès Foundation): 30% of respondents say they are less motivated than before the health crisis, and particularly young people (40% of 25-34 year olds), while those over 65 years are only 21% to have fishing at half mast. Of course, the health crisis and the confinements only accelerated a trend that was gradually taking hold in the West. When a single finger is enough to eat, watch a movie, meet your partner, go shopping, consult a doctor, have a drink with friends, etc., who still wants to move the heavy mass of his aching body outside from the protected sphere of his home-world?
We now have a less powerful jaw than that of our great-grandparents, biting into an apple has been tiring us for a long time, since the food has become soft like for children. Have you noticed how the “junk food” does not require the supreme effort of chewing? Doesn’t laziness correspond to a prolonged state of adolescence in the West? For twenty years, the press has been full of articles describing the phenomenon of the teenagerthis adult who refuses to take flight, who sleeps, eats, dresses, moves like an adolescent, seeking refuge in the reassuring lap of parents who have long since capitulated to education, preferring affect – who learns neither healthy frustration, nor the taste for effort, nor the desire for independence.
To emancipate oneself it is necessary to revolt and, to do so, to encounter resistance. How could a teenager want to grow up when nothing stands in the way of a lasting childhood? When is he going to get a tattoo with his mother? To assert oneself, it is not necessary to do one’s kit and go to war to contradict one’s pacifist parents, transgressing can start with a banal tattoo to which the parents oppose a clear refusal.
We circle around ourselves
The fashion for sneakers and joggings, which have definitively invaded the public space – following the decidedly catastrophic confinement – is part of this laziness. We want to feel good in our clothes, in other words we want soft, wide, non-compressing. That is. But the fact of getting dressed, of making the effort to put on adult shoes, of standing up straight in fitted clothes is also part of a state of mind, of a mind. Sagging is not a sign of desire, of envy, of the future. I remember a high school principal from the north of France, of Italian origin, underage father, housekeeper mother, who had kept the scar on his face of violent and racist school harassment, dressed to the nines, invested in his work as in community life, who was sorry to see young and old sporting basketball jogging from Monday to Sunday. He saw in it the sign of the abandonment of the future, of pessimism, of the absence of self-respect.
Laziness has a serious health consequence: 41% of French people feel more tired than before the Covid crisis after physical exertion. A sedentary lifestyle takes hold, especially among young people who have lost a quarter of their lung capacity compared to adolescents in the 1990s. It is slow to measure the urgency of the phenomenon of a sedentary lifestyle, while Americans are losing years of life because of this same immobility doubled by junk food and the consumption of opioids.
When we have never been so well cared for, we are shooting ourselves in the foot by dint of seeking refuge in a home that stiffens our muscles and weakens our cognitive abilities. We go around in circles around ourselves, we are only our own purpose, otherness is only a distant memory. And when you decide to confront others, it’s through social networks, where the algorithm protects you from the danger of divergent opinion, from a new perspective, from an unknown path. Cinemas and theaters are neglected because, beyond the laziness of going out, who still supports the breathing of their neighbor?
Laziness is the sign of a lack of curiosity, of a sigh that repeats “alas”, of a capitulation in front of the encounter with this other than oneself, of a withdrawal into one’s present, of a false protection. Life shouldn’t just be about waiting for it to pass.