To produce the meaning of one's own life, in a real world

The great expansionist ideologies of the industrial era allowed individuals to subscribe to a collective project/meaning, which prevented them from asking themselves too much about the meaning of their own lives. The end of this era has sent each person back to his individual responsibility to develop himself, to produce the meaning of his life, to be responsible for his evolution. "Be yourself!"

This injunction condemns each of us to define the meaning of our life when it is no longer determined by an explicit collective ideology. But do we have the skills to do this? Is the emergence of coaching not an indicator of the individual's difficulty in constructing this meaning that would allow him to self-regulate in a way that satisfies him? Left to his own devices in this task, each person goes off to seek his spiritual advisor wherever he can.

The loss of meaning

Why this loss of meaning? The machinization of activity has allowed the division of labor to be pushed to the extreme. Now the division of labor generates a decoupling of activity from meaning and virtualization completes the stripping of its reality.

When an operational person can only perform a tiny part of a task without perceiving its ins and outs, this activity no longer has meaning. This is the first factor in the disengagement of the actor at work, but it is only the first degree of disengagement. 

The feeling of being alive is directly related to the perceived sense of usefulness. Perceived usefulness is measured by the transformative effect we have on our environment. A nurse who performs an act of care or a farmer who brings his vegetables to market has before him the evidence of his usefulness and therefore his existence and therefore the meaning of his life. This is not the case for the majority of those who produce through the interface of machines.

If what is offered to each person to measure the value of his work is only its financial value, its salary, then its value "effect on the other and the world" comes second, or even is erased. The financialization of activity associated with the extreme division of labor tends to make all evidence of its usefulness disappear and leads to a second level of decoupling, that of the activity/sense/motivation dynamic.

The activity/sense/value dynamic

This double decoupling generates a separation between the activity and the values of the individual. The circle of motivational dynamics is broken: activity => meaning => value: I act according to my values and at the same time my action allows me to verify my values. Verify in the original sense of "make true". My action allows me to verify my values and incidentally to transform them. It is thus a systemic loop that permanently produces the motivational dynamic and thus the identity dynamic in the sense of M. Kaddouri.

For want of being able to be maintained, the loop "activity => meaning=> value" is no longer active when the activities are too fragmented or virtualized. The division of labor and the financialization of activity endangers this loop, and there comes a time when activity no longer feeds values and values no longer determine activity in return. 

We tend to think banally that the automation of activity, whether through artificial intelligence or technologies, relieves the actors in the company. This is partly true, of course! But at the same time that technology relieves, it generates this decoupling between the actor and his activity. The actor is no longer in direct contact with the reality of his activity. The real in Lacan's sense: the real is what we bump into. When we only bump into algorithms, we come to doubt the real.

The sculptor with his gouge shaping his piece of wood, confronts himself directly with the material and thus verifies at each second the reality of who he is and the validity of his creation project. The machine interface cuts off from reality and can produce a disturbing psychological situation.

A psychological situation that could explain a good part of the problems of suffering at work. In particular the "burn out" which can be seen as the desperate attempt to revive this dynamic. An attempt doomed to failure if we admit that doing more and more of the same thing while waiting for another result leads nowhere.

The social disengagement we are currently witnessing in society has its roots in this double problematic: the decoupling of activity without value and the recent discourse on ecological collapse. A rather pessimistic discourse on the effects of our activity on our world.  That is, not only can I no longer verify through my activities that my values are right, but I am also told that my activity endangers our collective survival as a species.

While in the industrial era even if the actor could not find meaning in his activity, the social discourse about the power of the value system, the fact that the great Europe or that the great Russia, the wonderful America, the Chinese Middle Kingdom or that of the Rising Sun, was right against the whole world, indirectly nourished the activity/value link.

The "great resignation" that reaches the world of work is perhaps only an observable of a more general problem: We are all aware of the negative and nihilistic effects of our ways of life. We can no longer situate ourselves in the glorious discourse of the conquering society of the colonial or industrial era. Conquering the Web, which can pause at the first breakdown and break up at the next technical novelty, does not offer the same attractions.

The end of an era

The question of meaning has become a preoccupation in this period or the end of collectives and the collapse of great integrators pushes each person to succeed in life by his or her own effort alone. But our incompetence to respond to this injunction and the absence of a political way out of the ecological crisis transforms this injunction to be autonomous into a general "sauve-qui-peut" or recourse to the spiritual advisor coach appears to be the only way to both "think" and "heal" one's suffering.

Our era is experiencing a misery of meaning, which could also be called "spiritual misery." It is expressed in the demands for meaning at work but it is also expressed through collectives transgressing established rules such as the zadists, the yellow vests or more violently the terrorist behavior. The profile of the terrorist has qualitatively changed since  these days.

In contrast to an earlier time when, like the Bonnot gang, we were dealing with people in need of money (economic misery) and total inculture (intellectual misery), today we are dealing with people who can be perfectly socially inserted, not necessarily economically weak, but who have in common a spiritual demand. This proposal will seem unacceptable as long as we confuse spirituality and religion.

A society of this 21 st century that would not propose a systemic and holistic vision of the problems has little chance of perpetuating itself. We see this in a trivial way with the issues of global warming. Our inability to have a global approach to environmental issues condemns us to do more and more of the same thing and to sink a little further.

The automation of tasks creates the conditions for the disengagement of the actor. And if on top of that he is told that what he is doing is dangerous for the world, we have the all the conditions of a kind of state of depression of the individual in his relationship to work.

A depression that can be collective around the idea of work as the great resignation indicates. Signs of a collective depression that can be seen in the decline of the birth rate, the growing isolation of individuals, the tendency to leave the collective to set up his own business, try his luck alone but perhaps also acts of terrorism, the acts of sick people can be interpreted as cries of suffering of the collective. 

Produce the meaning of his life?

The question of meaning is first a question of value. An action has meaning for me from the moment I make a link between what I do, the expected effect on the world and my values. Psychological balance at work comes when I am able to see the link between my activity and its usefulness from the point of view of my values.

Today we are asked to take responsibility for thinking about our lives. This injunction to be responsible for one's destiny leaves us helpless in front of a task for which the school that does not teach the practice of philosophy has not prepared us.  So the "be an actor of your life" becomes a kind of "sauve qui peut".

Until then, the fact that each person does not necessarily find meaning in his life was compensated by the existence of a collective project/sense. What took the place of a dominant ideology, "progress", "conquest", containing individuals. A kind of global and extrinsic meaning.

Today we no longer have the ideology of the expansion of the greatness of the states or the capitalist, communist, pan-Arabic world, etc. to compensate for the loss of meaning and in addition we are beginning to have the means to be able to think. Basically we find ourselves in a moment where we have become financially rich to the point of having the time to reflect in a world that is heading towards its end, and at the same time spiritually deprived.

The tendency to develop a feeling of dispossession, of not belonging to the city is spreading.  Political and associative commitment is only more difficult. This commitment has all the less meaning as it is not at the service of a feeling of belonging to a collective.

The search for the meaning of one's life to which we are invited could be an illusion insofar as the meaning of each person is in the way in which he or she belongs to a collective and produces this collective. The meaning of my life is inscribed in the relation to a collective that produces me at the same time as I produce it. There would be a kind of impossible paradox in seeking meaning outside of interaction with a collective.

For a nourishing sociodiversity

Intuitively, spontaneous movements such as the hairy marginals of Larzac in the 1970s or the Zadists of Notre-Dame des Landes reinvent the conditions of a return to the conditions of engagement :

• human-sized collectives,
• regenerated sociodiversity,
• close proximity of individuals,
• practices of commensalism,
• very short exchange cycles, and
• direct links between activity and its reward.  

At bottom these conditions are not very different from the soil microbiology model. One could arguably develop a soil biomimicry approach to recreate sustainable, robust, engagement-producing social environments. Such an approach would make it possible to define the systemic conditions of individual engagement in group regulation and socio-political life, a collective consciousness and a shared vision of ecological issues. 

Making this state of engagement possible for individuals would make it possible to get out of frantic and dead-end consumption, so much so that "having more all the time" has never been satisfactory. We could thus create the conditions for a certain frugality in the satisfaction of needs. 

There is no doubt that, even if it is not paradise on earth, it would be less the hell of loneliness and spiritual misery to which we have allowed technology to lead us.

Illustration: DepositPhotos - a3701027d

Bibliography

- Barrel Y. - La société du vide - ed: Seuil 1980
https://www.decitre.fr/ebooks/la-societe-du-vide-9782021262704_9782021262704_1.html

- Kaddouri M. -  Dynamiques identitaires - in Vocabulaire des histoires de vie et de la recherche biographique (2019), pages 66-69 https://www.cairn.info/vocabulaire-des-histoires-de-vie-et-de-la-recherch--9782749265018-page-66.htm