With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us, in turn, their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to Émilie Bibeau.
Posted October 16
It’s a small Monday.
We don’t feel particularly exceptional.
Things haven’t been going the way we wanted lately, and we blamed it on Mercury going retrograde, on accumulated fatigue, on COVID-which-maybe-dragging-at-less-than-that -be-something-else-it-comes-that-we-know-not, and then, in the face of hardships, we relied on the fact that we must not let go becauseanywayafter all, Hollywood studios didn’t want Al Pacino for The GodfatherMichael Jordan didn’t make the high school basketball team, Charlotte Cardin didn’t win The voice and Jacques Brel arrived penultimate in a song contest.
I cite these anecdotes because they were told to me recently in the face of an unsuccessful prize, an unsuccessful position, an unfulfilled desire…
A friend also confided to me recently that in hindsight, she had a feeling of guilt at the fact that she had not accomplished anything exceptional during confinement. But as Dany Laferrière said so well: “We will not become exceptional because we are in an exceptional situation. This friend, therefore, told me that she would not belong to the people who could say that they used this forced suspended time to learn the piano, or Japanese, or some other incredible thing and that she did not had not taken advantage of the freedom of this forced downtime to go after herself.
However, on his jacket, one could read: Just do it…
This famous slogan is worth dwelling on for a few moments, because, as Carlo Strenger, psychoanalyst, points out in the book The fear of insignificance drives us crazy : “The myth of just do it rests on a profound and widespread philosophical error: the image of freedom as the absence of limits. »
And that’s what concerns me here.
To think that a sudden freedom makes us capable of anything.
More than the motivating element it wishes to generate, such a slogan can have a completely negative impact on some people. “Limits experienced as insurmountable engender intense self-contempt. […] The myth of just do it is supposed to encourage us to do what we really want. But for many it can be paralyzing,” continues Carlo Strenger.
When we push this reflection a little, we also realize that we have been fed in large mouthfuls ofAmerican Dream, of “when we want, we can”, since we were very young. However, here too, we do not interpret the famous pursuit of happiness of the United States Declaration of Independence.
As Georges Minois explains in his book The Golden Age, History of the Pursuit of Happinessthe right to this famous pursuit of happinessan expression we owe to Thomas Jefferson, speaks well of the desire to lead a life at the height of one’s dreams, no matter where one comes from.
The problem is that we forget to apply an essential nuance: we are talking about the right to the “pursuit” of happiness and not the right to happiness as such. It is not happiness that is guaranteed, but its quest…
This nuance is essential and implies a dignified life where it is possible to fulfill oneself, not a life where happiness and success are promised, where fulfilling oneself necessarily means becoming the exception who will write history.
And therein lies the problem, the “exception”. There’s this interesting theory called “survivor bias” where we overestimate our chances of success because we look up to successful people, even though they’re very rare, statistically speaking.
It’s not a defeat to simply do the best you can in the face of extreme adversity. It’s called being normal. And being in the norm is not a failure.
Automatically associating resilience and surpassing oneself, as if the two were synonymous, is a kind of trap, in my opinion.
On the contrary, thinking that this association is a decoy frees us.
I deeply believe in the right to “the ordinary”. Don’t get me wrong: resilience, success, stories that make you dream, all of this is extremely positive, important and an integral part of life. I am speaking here rather of a mistrust in the face of a resilience that could be described as “performative”.
For my part, I prefer to rely on this quotation from Montaigne, seemingly simple, but deeper than it seems, which had so marked the philosopher André Comte-Sponville: “For me therefore, I love life “. Because anyone can love happiness and success, but loving life as it comes, happy or not, is the true nature of the adventure of human existence.
With or without success story.
With writing on his jacket ” Just do it “… or not.