Cursed Pressure | The Press

The departure of Horacio Arruda has made me think over the past few days about the pressure, the cursed pressure with which we have to live on a daily basis.

These days, no one is safe. Everyone experiences it.

Thousands of students will find it this week, teaching staff too, as well as parents who are going back to teleworking, managers who have to manage from a distance, doctors and nurses who will have to deal with the famous “peak” .

This pressure is part of our lives, and it’s kind of our fault. We have trivialized it, integrated it, I would even say magnified it. We are now rated on our ability to handle pressure and we find that completely normal.

We have created supreme models of pressure. How many times have we heard that Celine Dion has become the greatest singer in the world thanks to her voice, but also to her way of giving the best of herself in moments of enormous pressure? The Oscars, the Olympic Games in Atlanta, the Stade de France… Each time, Céline galvanized, electrified. Celine was a machine.

The thousands of athletes preparing to converge on Beijing are conditioned to live, to breathe, to sweat with pressure. Can you imagine the stress load they take? And the means they develop to deal with that?

We are constantly told that there is good in stress and pressure. So, we accept that until we receive, without our knowing it, an unbearable and harmful pressure.

Pressure is a scale, I told you. And beware of those who are not capable of undergoing it. To the famous question asked in an interview, “Are you able to work under pressure?” “, how many people dare to say no?

The pressure that we are inflicted (or that we impose on ourselves) accompanies this damn obsession with performance evaluation. We lived our childhood hoping for little stars in our notebooks. Now adults, we hope for the greatest number of likes for a publication.

This “acute evaluitis” which we suffer from borders on delirium. We are asked to rate the cleanliness of the toilets of a gas station, but in the end, it is the work of Jérémie, the young employee paid at minimum wage who cleaned the toilets two hours earlier, that we are ask to judge.

The pressure is more present in our lives because the opportunities to compare our ugly and ordinary daily life to that which seems exhilarating in others have multiplied in recent years.

I discussed the matter with psychologist and author Arianne Hébert. Stress and anxiety are among his favorite fields. “A few years ago, our scales were our family members, our neighbors and our co-workers. It was very limited. Today, we compare ourselves with all the students with whom we went to primary school who are our Facebook friends. It’s a lot of people. »

How to put a stop to this cursed pressure? No doubt you are able to find a way that suits you. For my part, I admit that I like the thought of Fabrice Midal, who published in 2017 Get away from it all!

This philosopher says that the first step is to drop the famous injunctions with which we break our ears: Be zen… Carpe diem… When we said that, we said nothing, we did nothing. According to Midal, the secret lies in one thing: getting rid of the image you think you correspond to. It sounds simple like that, but it’s quite a job.

In this context, we should not be surprised to see an “anti-pressure” movement at this time. More and more people dare to make this decision: to refuse the pressure.

Have you got used to the term “telecommuting” in recent months? You will now have to tame the “dework”. All over the world, a movement is taking hold.

In France, the Collective Work Less (CMT) advocates retirement at… 30 years old. You read correctly. Those who are part of these groups, whose motto is “Working less is living better”, explain that “deworking” does not mean not working, but thinking about the place of work in our lives.

This movement creates a certain revolution. And drains a lot of prejudices. A doctor recently confided to a friend of mine that it was difficult to make a comment to a young internist, such as that he was late. “We get a complaint for intimidation, it doesn’t take long,” she said.

Oh, sloths! Oh, the Roger Bontemps! Oh, those young people with sensitive rinds! You have to be careful not to go easy.

Arianne Hébert observes the rise of this movement in her office.

This is where you say to yourself: OK, that’s all well and good. But if we work less, if we devote fewer hours per week to our jobs, the labor shortage crisis we are witnessing will become very serious.

You are right. It will completely change our structures. And our lives.

The moment of stopping that the pandemic forces us to take accentuates this awareness. “Absolutely,” continues Ariane Hébert. If we had spoken a year ago, my speech would have been very different. The extension of the pandemic changes a lot of things. I have the impression that we are going to come out of this as if we had lived through a war. »

While we devote a lot of energy to protecting our hospitals, finding screening tests and carrying out vaccination operations, we do not realize the magnitude of the revolution we are living through.

Above all, let’s not put pressure on ourselves to decode it. Let her come.

The tree house

I was finally able to speak with Tim Thomas, mayor of Pointe-Claire, about the treehouse built by a resident.

Many of you have asked me to keep you posted. The mayor maintains his position and wants it to be “relocated”. He is awaiting the opinions of the federal government (the tree is partly in a federal zone) and of Hydro-Québec (wires are near the tree). Employees came to inspect the premises on Friday. At a glance, I think we’re headed for demolition. In short, no accommodations or flexibility on the horizon.