My friend Marie Genier from Paris almost every day after work on her way home goes to a very expensive boutique, takes two or three sets of clothes and goes to the fitting room. After 10 minutes, she comes out and gives the clothes to the saleswoman, saying that nothing fit her. Marie has been going to this store for several months, but she has never bought anything. In truth, she never even tried on anything. In fact, she enters the fitting room, takes off her shoes, sits down on a small ottoman and sits there for 5-10 minutes. The thing is that a small booth in a fashion store has become for Marie the only place where she can at least be a little bit alone and in relative silence.
Marie is 38 years old. She wakes up at 7.30, wakes up her two children and her husband, prepares breakfast, helps the girls get dressed and, like in the movies, ties her husband’s tie. They all leave the house at the same time. The husband brings the eldest daughter to school, Marie takes the youngest daughter to the kindergarten by bus and then goes to the office by metro. She is a designer at a large book publishing house and sits in a huge office for 20 people without any partitions. In the evenings, she either goes to group dances at a nearby fitness club, or goes straight home, where the children, nannies and grandmothers are.
Marie is no exception, she is the rule. This is how we all live: those who have a family, who go to work and who live in a big city.
Privacy is no longer in vogue. The office should be a newsroom, Facebook should be installed on the phone to keep in touch with friends, Fridays should be spent in a packed pub.
This is exactly what a big article in The New York Times came out last week: we are almost never alone, there are always people around, talking, laughing or swearing. And it is considered good. The article was written by psychologist Susan Cain, author of the recently published book Silence: The Benefits of Introverts in a World That Can’t Be Silent.
She argues that we exist in a time of collective thinking, herd mentality and community of interests.
This sounds strange, because we are used to thinking that we are individualists. But it turns out that one does not contradict the other. According to private psychologist Hugh Hardy of New York, a member of the New York Psychological Association, people are indeed different from each other than ever before, but they are placed in a situation where they often — more than ever — have to compromise and seek a common way. The world has changed. Kine writes that in 1970 there were about five square meters of office space for every American employee, and in 2010 there were no more than two. In addition, in the 1970s they sat in small offices. Now, employers put employees in a huge common room shoulder to shoulder and explain this by the fact that this is how team spirit is brought up and new ideas appear.
It’s like communal life in the countryside, only in the office and in 2012: ownerless cups, clubbing pizza, one in four taxis home. Here you like it or not, but you will look for a common language with an unloved colleague and cherish in yourself the feeling of a common cause with the rest.
At work, we spend 12 hours a day, another couple of hours are spent on the road in a transport full of people, or in our own car, but in a traffic jam, among the same angry and desperate drivers to get home at least a little soon. There are only a few hours left to communicate with family, check mail and social networks. Holidays for friends and family. There is no personal space left, and even less personal time.
One of my acquaintances goes to the toilet twice a day at work for 15 minutes: the only place where you can be alone, without colleagues. Another friend of mine does the same thing at home in order to have a little rest from his wife and child.
Classical psychology claims that a person has two basic needs — in communication and in solitude. Numerous studies have proven that only in solitude a person receives the necessary psychological relaxation, comparable to the rest of the whole organism during sleep. Doctors are sure that the absence of such discharge leads to diseases of the nervous system.
For example, Professor Alan White from the University of Leeds, exploring the need for privacy in a person of any age and gender, pays special attention to its role in the lives of men, since they are more prone to heart disease than women. Like, solitude provides complete relaxation, which allows you to stabilize your heart rate and normalize blood pressure.
Build sheds in the dacha, White advises, and let your husbands go there: they will be healthier.
They will also treat their wives better, says Philip Hodsan of the British Counseling and Psychotherapy Association. After all, for good relations with other people, a person must establish contact with himself, and this is real only when he has the opportunity to be at least a little alone. And preferably, of course, not in the fitting room.