Alors, heureuse ?
A study that came out in France in 2011, and was recently presented in England, has been making the French press rounds, and now the English-speaking ones. It's a study on France's culture of unhappiness, by economist Claudia Senik. Here is the original study, "The French Unhappiness Puzzle: the Cultural Dimension of Happiness."
I've been reading it in pieces, discussing it with Jean-Baptiste and non-French friends, and many hypotheses have been offered for what we've all confronted as a frustrating, perplexing French phenomenon of seeming not so much unhappy as dissatisfied. Perfectionism, cynicism, the idea that being content with one's situation equates with settling, fear of bragging, ideals that require constant resistance against authority -- the list is endless, and rich with possible explanations for why the French are perceived as relatively unhappy.
The New Yorker suggests another dimension : France breeds a culture that values intellectual reflection as its greatest commodity. Indeed, critically analyzing the state of affairs of one's life, country, world is considered a worthy pursuit here; whether or not anything tangible or "useful" is produced is sort of beside the point. It's as if the Socratic notion that an unexamined life is not worth living is taken literally in France. And there is rarely a great deal of joy or happiness produced from analyzing. The mind is doing all the work, and the heart, well, the heart is mired in romantic affairs and mucking up what the supposedly neutral brain is working hard to untangle.
I remember laughing with my brother at a card many years ago that said, "Smile, everyone loves an idiot." My smirky teenage self thought it was quite clever. When you're drenched in idealism, as teenagers often are, sometimes bliss does look like the fruit of ignorance and that, "if you're not angry, then you're just stupid, you don't care" ('sup, Ani). Not to say that the French are simply in an arrested state of development, behaving like sullen teenagers who think they know better than the rest of the world, i.e. the adults, and everything here sucks but a perfect world could exist (coucou, Le Parti communiste!), all the while being pretty well taken care of by their welfare state, ahem, parents.
I've been reading it in pieces, discussing it with Jean-Baptiste and non-French friends, and many hypotheses have been offered for what we've all confronted as a frustrating, perplexing French phenomenon of seeming not so much unhappy as dissatisfied. Perfectionism, cynicism, the idea that being content with one's situation equates with settling, fear of bragging, ideals that require constant resistance against authority -- the list is endless, and rich with possible explanations for why the French are perceived as relatively unhappy.
The New Yorker suggests another dimension : France breeds a culture that values intellectual reflection as its greatest commodity. Indeed, critically analyzing the state of affairs of one's life, country, world is considered a worthy pursuit here; whether or not anything tangible or "useful" is produced is sort of beside the point. It's as if the Socratic notion that an unexamined life is not worth living is taken literally in France. And there is rarely a great deal of joy or happiness produced from analyzing. The mind is doing all the work, and the heart, well, the heart is mired in romantic affairs and mucking up what the supposedly neutral brain is working hard to untangle.
I remember laughing with my brother at a card many years ago that said, "Smile, everyone loves an idiot." My smirky teenage self thought it was quite clever. When you're drenched in idealism, as teenagers often are, sometimes bliss does look like the fruit of ignorance and that, "if you're not angry, then you're just stupid, you don't care" ('sup, Ani). Not to say that the French are simply in an arrested state of development, behaving like sullen teenagers who think they know better than the rest of the world, i.e. the adults, and everything here sucks but a perfect world could exist (coucou, Le Parti communiste!), all the while being pretty well taken care of by their welfare state, ahem, parents.
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