Tribune. The battle for a slowdown in our livelihoods and a more moderate consumerism has begun. It is no longer the preserve of environmental activists, but now affects all social classes. “Sobriety” represents this new mood and spreads as citizens tire of a society unsuited to the new challenges of climate change.
The silent revolution of sobriety is interfering in many areas of our lives, silently urging us to slow down our pace, no offense to modernity which pushes us to speed.
Sobriety embodies this slowdown in our consumption, this slowing down of our modes of existence which releases a new horizon where performance and success at all costs are no longer the unconditional signs of our imaginations of successful lives. What a long way since the asceticism of a few aficionados of the Larzac plateau in the 1970s, under the mocking eye of the society of the time …
A survey on three fields (teleworking, participatory housing, “drop-out” executives), carried out as part of a doctoral work by interview and questionnaire between June and September 2021, highlights a gap between the incantations of policies to consume more for support the economy and a segment of the population, all social classes combined, which opts for a slowing down of its way of life. The new climate situation is undoubtedly not foreign to this new reflection on material life.
the last barometer of the National Association of Human Resources Directors (ANDRH) of June 2021 underlines that nearly three employers in ten have been faced with the relocation of their employees since the advent of teleworking, a marker of a new sobriety.
Spaces of solidarity
Teleworkers, mostly in their thirties, leave Paris to migrate to places closer to nature, far from the hustle and bustle of the city, all the more so as this urban development seems to them difficult to reconcile with children’s projects. Often from the provinces, they opt for family reunification rather than the choice of a “holiday postcard” region, even if the two are not incompatible.
This reconnection with the land of his childhood and the extended family builds spaces of solidarity which, according to them, “Softens and slows down their way of life”. Improvising childcare, undertaking work in its new habitat becomes easier thanks to the game of family solidarity and a neighborhood that the big city had partly ousted, even if the table of reunion with the clan is not exempt from tensions.
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