Exit! Change your life [Thesis]

"BernardMoitessier set off from Plymouth on August 22, 1968, to take part in the non-stop solo round-the-world race organized by the Sunday Times. [...] It was, at the time, the longest solo voyage, 37,455 miles without touching land, ten months alone between sea and sky, with dolphins, flying fish, birds and stars." ( Bernard Moitessierwebsite )

Quoted in her thesis by Anne Goullet de Rugy, this story of a sailor who decides to chart his own course, beyond victory and defeat, offers us a powerful evocation.

On the high seas, forging ahead

We can imagine him changing course, tipping over (to borrow a notion related to socio-ecological transitions), or forking off (to take up the subject of this research):

"In the professional field [studied here], bifurcation is [...] a more or less long process of change, including a series of actions of detachment and disinvestment from a professional situation, search for another possibility, reinvestment, integration that can be investigated."

When they are top-down and chosen, bifurcations correspond to the representation of a social subject diminished from the point of view of "capitalist" subjectivity, which is questioned by the very existence of this choice.

This downward professional movement is associated with a sometimes significant drop in income, requiring several adjustments (to budget, practices, social image, sociability).

"Do it. Do it now. Don't save your dreams for tomorrow. It doesn't age well." (1968 Appeal)

We trace the historical filiation of downward bifurcations with existential anarchism. Then, in the 1960s-1970s, with "the refusal to achieve" and to exercise social domination based on power and money. A form of social protest with, at that time, a politicized and radical heart.

We find (in the references at the end of the chronicle) two trailers for Parisian documentary films made in 2019: the intellectual who sold nails on rue Monge, and Patricio, the anarchist newsagent on avenue de Flandre, with whom I loved to chat.

The downward bifurcations studied in the thesis are inscribed less in a militant and radical "heart" than in the "halo" of a daily professionalmalaise "that becomes a possible source of change" and redefinition of one's "form of life".

These are interstitial resistances: "latent, invisible and ambiguous resistances" in relation to"active struggles [that] explicitly aim for symbiotic transformations, or even a break with the capitalist order".

Why read this thesis?

A number of mainstream press articles highlight career transition paths: the financier who becomes a cheesemaker, for example (randomly suggested to a search engine, but it's a case in point). These articles are often hasty and ask more questions than they answer.

On the other hand, we have our own experiences and our own intuitions, which don't always find their right echo in today's common narratives. Our life courses are more fluid: when they are ascending, they don't question the social norm, but when they are descending, to what extent is this a downgrading or a voluntary downward bifurcation?

To read this thesis, then, is to clarify our intuitions and give us the knowledge to consolidate or justify our choices in the face of social pressure. It is to better understand the movements of the world and the historicity of ideologies (which contain the knowledge that they have a beginning and can have an end), and which can inspire us.

Downgrading? Social reclassification? Bifurcations might as well reclassify "professions according to a new hierarchical order". It could be a symbolic shift at work, slowly eroding away.

Studying paths of disengagement

The author conducted qualitative interviews using the comprehensive interview method, without questions, but with a memo of the themes to be addressed. People were selected if they met the following three criteria:

1. A professional change.
2. Reduced income (minimum 25%).
3. Intentional nature of the change.

There was no shortage of profiles to choose from.

"If the course of the change sometimes shows ambivalence between events undergone and decisions chosen, self-qualification as voluntary was not in doubt for any of the respondents."

These people all had an upward educational trajectory. They fall into three groups:

1. Firstly, students from the grandes écoles, who have the easiest and most profitable access to the job market; they are in an ascending situation "because you don't have time to ask yourself questions".
2. Then there are the students from less prestigious and less profitable university courses than the grandes écoles, who nonetheless have good access to the job market, without having the facilities of the previous group.
3. And finally, a last, more heterogeneous group with a varied career path.

With one exception, close to the upper middle class, the respondents come from the middle or working classes, so for them there has been a "mismatch in socialization between family values and professional values".

The emergence of criticism

"Generally speaking,the rejection of the omnipresence of money as an end in itself, whether in profitability targets or in daily tasks, is an element present in almost all accounts critical of the profession exercised before the bifurcation, and at odds with subjective values."

For the respondents, the emergence of work criticism stems from a discrepancy between aspirations and reality, in terms of working conditions and social relations. The issues raised :

• Boredom and lack of meaning, lack of autonomy.
• The pressure to meet deadlines, the demand for profitability with no regard for people, the absence of limits.
• Daily power struggles: hierarchy, customers, colleagues.
• Moral dissonance, like cognitive dissonance at the level of values: illegal practices (not uncommon in the panel, see pages 103-104) or practices at odds with one's ideals, the race for performance and lying about the quality of work.
• Criticism of work and the desire to change one's life.
• The omnipresence of money, "a world of sharks [...] hypermaterialists [...] ready to sell father and mother for money".
• The closure of the professional world and the homogeneity of recruitment at the grandes écoles, the reduction in open-mindedness over the years.
• The preoccupation with work taking precedence over family life, no longer being recognized by loved ones.

"Basically, what do you want to do with your life?"

The bifurcation is first a process of abandonment, then of transition and construction of the new life. The exit process requires"identifying dissatisfactions at work, [encountering] at least one trigger and [securing] the exit".

Moving towards a "beautiful job", which places utility "beyond the economic definition of employment". Thus, the social utility of the work sought concerns :

• The legibility of the result and an embodied job.
• Social ties, with positive social relations.
• Self-activation: learning while working.
• The aesthetic dimension of work: a beautiful working environment, a beautiful result.
• Work that is morally acceptable according to one's own principles.
• A freer relationship with schedules, autonomy in organization and respect for one's own biorhythm (even if shorter working hours don't accompany all bifurcations, on the contrary).

"No, we don't have any money, we're not going to the restaurant!"

Downward bifurcation requires us to adjust our consumption and to be able to acknowledge and/or explain it without activating the shame associated with lower incomes, without appearing stingy, and by facing up realistically and pedagogically to "the social distance resulting from the difference in lifestyles".

Reducing consumption also means counting everything, recalculating all fixed costs, and determining a hierarchy of non-essential expenses: "we don't buy clothes anymore", "we travel less", we've sharply limited and repositioned "restaurant and cultural outings", just as we've reduced "travel" and car expenses.

What remains: housing (often inherited or owned). What's prioritized (within budget): healthy and organic food, books, psychological and body care, sports equipment, cultural consumption, participation in emerging and alternative modes of consumption.

"The critique of consumption is less a motive for bifurcation than a way of accompanying the reduction of consumption and making it virtuous."

"[It] is articulated in three logics: a social critique of consumption, focusing on the conditions of production of the goods consumed; an artistic critique that sees consumption as inauthentic and alienating; finally, an ecological critique."

And with this?

The respondents' reflexivity presents "a moment of individual deliberation on ends and the possibility, even necessity, of a more collective deliberation."

"This deliberation is "systematically invisibilized, particularly in the economic representation of orthodox models, and the diversity of preferences is forgotten".

Little by little, through a process of erosion of commonly told narratives, our commitments to work and consumption could be collectively revisited, and current hierarchies could then give way to real societal biodiversity.

Image source: Geranimo, on Unsplash.

Read more:

Anne Goullet de Rugy, Changer de vie: une étude sur les bifurcations descendantes et la critique des formes de vie, Sociologie, Université Paris Nanterre, 2021.

Thesis available at: https: //www.theses.fr/2021PA100122

References:

"68, mon père et les clous", by Samuel Bigiaoui, 2019.
Trailer: https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=u62OWExBpIo

"Un tout petit pays", by Pauline Laplace, 2019.
Fiche : https://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/55903_0
Trailer : https://www.cinemutins.com/un-tout-petit-pays/trailer/1070