So where are they and what are they doing? (page 16 of 33)

Yeah, yeah, don’t worry, we’ll be out of your hair soon. Haha! 😛

Oh, please, no! A Herodotus leaving is like the Library of Alexandria going up in flames.

After that, I might be the next Jeanne Calment or you might be a super-centenarian.

That’s funny, I pictured you more as Jeanne Annoying

Maybe, but people didn’t live long back then either.

True, but not any less than in the 18th century—or even, to some extent, the 19th. What I mean is, we tend to associate the words "medieval" or "Middle Ages" with obscurantism, which isn’t fair. It’s all thanks to Renaissance scholars who coined the term "Gothic" as an insult. Let’s give the Middle Ages the credit it deserves!

But we’re getting off track...

it’s a Library of Alexandria going up in flames.

No, it’s way more than that—it’s the BNF and the Library of Congress disappearing, come on! 😛

Maybe, but people didn’t often live to a ripe old age back then.

True, but no more than in the 18th century and, to some extent, the 19th. What I mean is that we tend to associate the words "medieval" and "Middle Ages" with obscurantism, which isn’t accurate. It’s all thanks to the Renaissance men who invented the term "Gothic" out of disdain. Let’s restore the Middle Ages to its rightful glory!

The idea we have of "time passing" makes me smile... First of all, time doesn’t flow—it’s *us* moving through it... What will our descendants say about our era when they can live to 120 or 130 years old? With twenty years or more (very likely) spent in a wheelchair in a grim nursing home? Euthanasia will be on the agenda, and many will certainly ask to end things sooner than planned! What’s the difference between 40 years or 85 years in the face of infinity? None. When life expectancy was 40 or 50 years, people lived their lives just as fully as they do today with a life expectancy of 75 or 80 years... The perception of "time passing" could have been different. And when the end was near in the Middle Ages, I think the idea of impending death was more accepted (at least by most) than it is today...

Women's independence, medical advances, technological innovations—none of that matters compared to the fact that real estate is more expensive?

In the Middle Ages, a roof must have cost less too, but strangely enough, I prefer living now.

(After the war, you couldn’t find housing either because of the destruction... And then the repatriated Algerians must have been thrilled in their shantytowns...)

You’re focusing on real estate and forgetting everything else, as if it were a given.

And besides, the baby boomers are a dying generation. Soon, you won’t have anyone to envy.

Oh, it’s not about envy. Every generation has its problems. We’ve made undeniable progress socially—being gay, child-free, or just different is way less frowned upon. We’re making strides in gender equality. When you love traveling, you see it’s more accessible now.

But we’re regressing in other areas. Real estate is just a symptom. Before, one salary was enough to support a family modestly, and now two salaries aren’t even cutting it.

Everything’s becoming more unstable—work, housing, relationships, you name it.

There’s never been so much depression. Sure, people talked about it less before... And the skyrocketing insecurity.

Anyway, I won’t go on and on.

What really gets to younger people is the moralizing from boomers who are completely out of touch with reality (no one in particular).

On the other hand, we’re heading toward a healthcare crisis because soon there’ll be too many "old people" compared to the working population, and I’m not sure how that’s going to play out.

Before, one salary was enough to simply support a family without excess

Really without excess. A life no one would want today: mom in the kitchen, doing laundry, ironing, shopping, cleaning... dad at work then feet under the table... kids at attention... A little movie now and then, but no other paid activities. Card games, board games, reading, TV in tiny doses, walking, etc. I don’t know if people under 30 could handle it?

Even in my parents' time, one salary wasn’t enough anymore.

And then, one salary meant the end of the other’s independence, leaving them high and dry in case of divorce. A great way to exert pressure.

Everything is becoming more and more unstable—work, housing, couples, etc.

It’s also because people allow it. A society of constant zapping where we no longer know how to be bored.

And besides, not all older folks ended their careers in the same place. In times of full employment, you’d slam the door if you weren’t happy and go somewhere else. Lifetime housing didn’t exist either. You might start more modestly: a studio, then a two-room apartment, and eventually a house. As for divorces, it was better not to know what was really going on in couples...

When it comes to work, door-slamming is making a comeback. It’s very hard to retain younger generations.

There have never been so many depressions.

It seems to me that the depressive side of the French isn’t new. It’s not even linked to the standard of living. I think a lot of undocumented immigrants are much less depressed than salaried workers earning 3000 €.

I don’t know what’s wrong. Why does this nation see the glass as half-empty rather than half-full? I get the impression that developed countries aren’t swimming in happiness, as if they’ve forgotten how to enjoy life’s little joys.

Rising insecurity too.

This point is indeed quite sensitive. It’s especially a certain violence that stands out. But didn’t it exist before? Today, every incident makes the headlines, whereas yesterday it would’ve just been three lines in the local rag.

What really annoys younger people, though, is the moralizing from boomers completely out of touch with reality (no offense to anyone).

I think this phrase works both ways...

And besides, the generational conflict has always existed.

Yesterday, we’d say "yes, grandpa" and do the opposite. Today, we say what we think. It’s certainly less hypocritical, but it creates more tension...

Soon, there’ll be too many "old people" compared to the working population

Not if we open the tap to selective immigration.

And besides, boomers are the last to have had a fairly healthy life in their youth (non-industrial food, physical activity...). I think other generations will have more trouble reaching old age. Especially the most recent ones, where obesity is starting to cause real damage.

I don’t know what’s wrong. Why does this nation see the glass as half empty rather than half full?

Because men and women belong to a nation, to a people, when it feels like an obvious truth to them—when it’s tied to an ethnicity, a language, a culture, often a religion, and, to put it bluntly, blood. You’re Polish, Hungarian, Greek, Scottish, or Russian as a given; and if you’re part of a nation by choice, like in the United States, it’s because you live in communal freedom, not under centralist ideals. As a French person, you have to accept values that sometimes forced your parents or grandparents to deny their roots, a language, to stop passing it down. Values that are very intellectual, very globalizing, very universalist, very isolated in the modern world—values that only offer the comfort of abstraction. If you’re okay with that, great.

Michel

Why would I have a problem being French?

I'm struggling to follow your reasoning, to understand what's stopping you from feeling French. Before speaking French, my parents already spoke two languages—they never denied their roots, and that didn’t stop them from integrating and feeling perfectly French. I went to a public school in France and felt completely French from early childhood, even if my mom sometimes spoke to me in another language when I was little. I see that as a plus, as a cultural richness.

Hello Jean Michel,

We have different experiences. France absolutely wanted to impose monolingualism, and that’s still the case today. It has nothing to do with the Welsh, the Scots, or the Irish, who preserved their languages by allying with the English. When I was a child, when my parents were, when my grandparents were, it was forbidden to speak anything other than French—Breton or Corsican, for example—and this ban was tied to school humiliations and denigration. I’m orphaned from my cultures, and I know who’s to blame. Every language gives you a different view of the world; one less language is a poorer world. Speaking "at home," in secret, a language that’s been part of the land you’ve lived on for centuries isn’t the same as immigrating and blending into a culture you accept while knowing you’re a foreigner. If foreign language education in France is such a failure, it’s actually a sign of this monolingualism push. As for the current situation, we’re seeing a kind of hardening of French universalist ideas, which clash with a globalized world that no longer really accepts them. That’s why, around the 2000s, there was a shift from a secularism that protected freedoms to an increasingly authoritarian secularism, where this mindset no longer applies just to the state but to more and more public spaces—even recently affecting sports practices. Our friend Agnès, like I’ve had the chance to do, can discuss this in Central Asia and hear, as I did, the serious image damage it leads to. I remember very reserved comments from taxi drivers, for example, on this topic: "France is surely very beautiful, but what you’re doing really isn’t good for us."

Michel

Hello,

When I was a child, when my parents were, when my grandparents were, it was forbidden to speak anything other than French, Breton, Corsican, for example, and this ban was associated with school humiliations and denigration.

A language dies when it’s no longer spoken. There was nothing, in principle, preventing parents (if they spoke Breton) from speaking Breton with their children (in private). North African children manage to express themselves (more or less) in both languages. If French was required at school, the state didn’t send spies into homes to check if the rule was being followed, right? When I was a child, I had family in Munster (Haut-Rhin). When we walked around town or went shopping, everyone spoke Alsatian. French was taught at school, and many children of farmers didn’t know a single word of it and learned it when they started school at age 6... Before that, it was Alsatian. Later, I went to Corsica, the Basque Country, and all over, and you could hear Corsican in Corsica and Basque in the Basque Country. I’ve been to Brittany several times; my sister-in-law is Breton, the daughter of a fisherman in Morgat. I’ve spent time in bars, restaurants, and nightclubs in her region (Crozon/Morgat) and never heard a single word of Breton spoken... Strange, isn’t it? What reason(s) could there be? Was there a special regime for Brittany?

Yes, I understand your reaction, Jean Michel, but it doesn’t do justice to the reality of the constraint, which didn’t stem so much from positive law as from moral pressure. You have to understand that many people indeed refused to pass on their language because they feared doing their children a disservice and excluding them from any social or academic advancement. Bretons are generally quite marked by a culture of duty and shame, vestiges of Christianity, and in the situation from roughly the 1920s to the 1980s, there were more discreet and subtle ways than coercion to discourage passing on one’s culture.

https://www.xavierdelanglais.bzh/la-honte-de-enfants-parlant-breton-a-lecole/

Regardless of the means—legal bans or moral pressures—the generations at the time, in a position of weakness, gave in. That doesn’t diminish the consequences.

Michel

The fact is, life is getting more and more expensive—that’s just how it is.

As for the instability, I’m not here to judge; it works for some people and not for others.

But it can really cause anxiety.

I don’t know if there were studies on this before, but we’re definitely seeing more and more of these kinds of issues.

When it comes to selective immigration—without getting into a cultural debate—it’s mostly about the fact that it costs money, and that’s where things get stuck.

The retirement system is falling apart, and so is the healthcare system.

Basically, everything’s kind of collapsing, more or less. It’s a slow decline.

You just don’t feel as good in a dying society as you do in a time of growth and improvement...

I wouldn’t want to be 20 years old today. I’ve already done most of the hard part—phew! !

You’re all describing a deculturalization of Brittany and noting the disappearance of the Breton language. I have to respond to such a misrepresentation: which region of France can assert its cultural distinctiveness as much as Brittany, with its multitude of summer festivals where *bagadoù* and Celtic dance circles perform? Go to Lorient for the Interceltic Festival or to Quimper for the Cornouaille Festival; look at the last Sunday in July, when a hundred bagpipers spectacularly close the festival on the banks of the Odet to see the proof. Even the French Navy has a *bagad*. A radio station broadcasts in Breton.

As for the language, it’s kept alive especially by Diwan schools; there are still speakers despite the French Jacobin steamroller, which has finally accepted Breton as an option for the *bac*. My ears have been charmed several times by the ancestral language heard in Kemper, Gwened, Kraozon, Sainte-Anne-la-Palud, and Sainte-Anne-d’Auray.

I don’t know where Choucarde is—she could speak about Breton culture better than I can; Breton is her reason for living.

I can’t conclude by saying *"Breiz Atao"* since those words were taken by a collaborationist movement, but I express the same sentiment with: *"Bretagne toujours"*.

You also have to understand that we’re no longer just Breton, Corsican, or Alsatian—we’re mostly a mix of all that plus contributions from across Europe and beyond.

If I had to learn, understand, and absorb all the cultures of my ancestors, I wouldn’t have enough time in one lifetime.

Brittany, Alsace, Lorraine, Normandy, Île-de-France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Auvergne—who knows what else? I haven’t even finished my family tree...

Those days when you never ventured more than 20 kilometers from home are pretty much over.

The fact is that life is getting more and more expensive—it’s a fact

Inflation does exist, sure, but it doesn’t affect everyone the same way.

How you spend matters too.

Back in 1967, a color TV cost the same as a 4L.

Who would buy a flat-screen today if it cost the price of a Dacia (12,990 € as of now)?

But we’re still seeing more and more issues like this.

It’s possible, like everything else, that it’s just getting more publicity. And isn’t this anxiety the flip side of a more cushioned upbringing than before? Newer generations are less used to boredom or frustration. Parents are obsessed with zero risk and might be passing their anxiety on to their kids.

As for selective immigration—without getting into a cultural debate—it’s mostly about paying for it

???

Attracting educated people from other countries is all upside for France. No need to pay for their education.

You feel worse in a dying society than in a time of growth and improvement...

You sound ready for expatriation...

Clearly, all of this is multi-factorial—I agree.

Young people today often had divorced parents who experienced unemployment, which probably didn’t help reduce anxiety levels.

Still, I do see that inflation is very real and hits basics like housing and, increasingly, food.

And I stand by my point about insecurity.

Expatriating might be an option one day, but the problem is global—I don’t see any promised land. If I were forced to, it’s a possibility, but for now, I don’t see myself anywhere else and have no plans to move.

If I had kids, though, I’d encourage them to go see the world elsewhere.

Good evening Agnès,

We must also understand that we are no longer Breton, Corsican, or Alsatian, but above all a mix of all that plus European influences or even more.

I get that you think and say that, but I can assure you that you’re completely out of touch with the current mood. Here are a few references, including this one from 2018: More French than Breton: 17% Only French: 22% All while saying and showing themselves to be very European. https://hal.science/hal-03713437/document

Michel

Hi François,

You’re mixing up culture and folklore, nation and revival.

Michel