We have been told for a long time about the articulation of life times and more recently about the right to disconnect... But can we still imagine separating space-time while strictly preserving the private area of work ? Isn't the " blurring " of professional/personal boundaries the very marker of the lifestyles of our time ?
We take stock of what, much more than a trend, could be, a real anthropological rupture.
Blurring is nothing new !
We would be tempted to associate the porosity of space-time of life with recent technological innovations, such as the Internet and the smartphone, which allow what the digital jargon calls ATAWADAC for " Any time, anywhere, any device, any content ". And then, you can see yourself checking your emails on a chairlift, doing an e-learning module on the beach or taking a break from work watching a sketch by your favorite comedian.
But blurring is nothing new. It was even the normal way of life for a very long time. Moreover, this has never changed for the majority of farmers, shopkeepers and craftsmen who most often live and work in the same place, work as a couple or even as a family, have a social life closely linked to their professional activity, etc.
The creation of salaried employment at the time of the Industrial Revolution changed the situation a little, by creating a de facto separation between the time " due " to the employer and the time " free ". But in the nineteenth century, the Western paternalistic model perpetuated the continuity of space-time by housing workers on the factory site and offering them family facilities and leisure activities in the place where they lived and worked.
The invention of " privacy "
In fact , it was not until the end of the Second World War that privacy became both officially a right fully recognized for all (and enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights of 1948) and a " way of life " in its own right.
This " invention " of private life is the result of a series of converging factors: the triumph of suburban housing, which will also influence the configuration of housing in buildings in order to restore as much as possible the feeling of " being at home " when one is at home ; economic prosperity and full employment, which change the balance of power between employers and employees and with it the order of values; the successive laws on working time that " free" enough time for us to consider having several " lives " (and not just an alternation of work and rest); the generalization of women's work, which makes visible the problem of domestic work time, which had been unthought of until now, and will in the wake of it raise the question of the articulation of life times (first for half of the working population and increasingly for everyone)...
When you could " cut out " time
In short ! From the 1950s onwards, work began to compete with other interests. The challenge of this competition : the length of the days. Until the end of the 1990s, the equation was relatively simple : all you have to do is cut out time. There are times to devote yourself to work, without being mobilized for other activities. And there, there is no question of making a personal phone call, except in exceptional cases and by asking for permission in advance. We take half a day to read the electricity meter. We leave (in theory) our family worries on the coat rack when we take on our professional role in the morning. In a pinch, you keep a family photo on your desk.
Symmetrically, outside of working hours, we are not disturbed by work. Evenings, days off and holidays are sanctuarized. We come home late if we work overtime, but once we pass the door of the hostel, we are not supposed to continue working.
The separation of life times, a fiction ?
In reality, this temporal separation has its limits. As early as the 1980s, sociologists and psychologists pointed out the permeability of these space-times. Here, the theorists of the school of human relations, including Abraham Maslow, to whom we owe the famous pyramid of needs, emphasize that in the face of certain dissatisfactions and/or emotions, humans are not able to manage a conscious agenda. For example, the feeling of security, which is particularly vital, cannot be so easily separated between the realm of private and professional life. Understand : whatever the origins of a feeling of insecurity, this feeling is likely to degrade work and personal life indiscriminately. The same goes for self-confidence , which finds its springs in different dimensions of our personality and our journey and which cannot be very high in one aspect of life and deplorable in others.
The sociologist Monique Haicault completes the picture by forging in 1984 the notion of " mental load" which clearly shows that even if we organize the spaces and times of existence, the brain does not make that much of a difference !
In other words, it is an illusion to believe that one can " not be the same person " depending on whether one is at work or in other circumstances. We are capable of putting on masks, taking on roles and " playing the game ", it's true. But this is at the price of authenticity, which is not without effects on our physical and mental health, on our relationships, on our commitment and on our resilience.
The new porosity of life times
The debate on whether or not it is possible to draw boundaries between the space-times of individuals' existence has come up against a massive phenomenon since the early 2000s: the nomadization of all our uses ! Everyone perceives, in their daily lives, as now, the mere fact of owning a smartphone, having an Internet connection and/or having a laptop produces " blurring " in all our days. And now that we're familiar with working from home, there's no real doubt about it: wherever we are, we're potentially at work and at home.
Beyond the mere possibility of working from home or dealing with personal matters when we are in the workplace, " blurring " also covers the rapprochement of sociabilities (we have never been so close to our socio-professional environment, in so-called working hours as well as in so-called personal life times), networking practices (especially on social networks where you show yourself both in a personal light and with a certain concern for personal branding), the uses of personal development (both being good for yourself and being more efficient) etc.
For sustainable blurring
And what about the right to disconnect, then ? It exists as an obviously necessary measure to prevent, on the one hand, excesses coming from unscrupulous or abusively demanding employers and, on the other hand, the risks of over-commitment of certain workers who can only stop working once the exhaustion thresholds have been exceeded.
But we have to face the facts : the legal response is on the run after what looks like an anthropological mutation. It seems difficult to imagine that we can return to a state of separation of space-time equivalent to that of the 1960s and 1970s.
Also, the question to ask ourselves is not so much " how to find our borders ?" but rather how to achieve a sustainable " blurring "? Because in absolute terms, " blurring " is not bad in itself : it is even more in line with the normal functioning of our psyche. We are whole beings who exist holistically, reason by associations of ideas, know how to transpose the acquired knowledge of one experience into the practices of another, we are crossed by emotions that by definition are not " manageable " and we are not made to divide up our lives...
On the other hand, we cannot accept requests ad infinitum. Because the days are only 24 hours long. Because our brain doesn't know how to make more than 6 to 7 conscious decisions a day. Because our body needs sleep but also a frequent alternation (several times a day) between moments of intense activity, moments of less intense activity and moments of inactivity. Also, it is not necessarily more borders that we need, but more space and time to do things, to live relationships, to acquire learning...
So let's continue to " blurr " but better respect our rhythms !
Marie Donzel, for the EVE&Octave webmagazine
