{"id":519652,"date":"2023-08-17T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-17T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=519652"},"modified":"2023-08-18T12:01:17","modified_gmt":"2023-08-18T10:01:17","slug":"to-be-old-without-being-adult-or-to-be-adult-without-being-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/company\/to-be-old-without-being-adult-or-to-be-adult-without-being-old\/","title":{"rendered":"To be old without being adult or to be adult without being old?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our society is saturated with directives designed to guide our actions. We need to preserve our autonomy, by remaining responsible adults, i.e. free and aware of what we are.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

If Jacques Brel, in his sublime Old lovers' song<\/em>, As the French poet and poet-songwriter sang that it took him and his lover \u00aba great deal of talent to live to be old without being grown-up\u00bb, the opposite objective could be aimed at for our lives as citizens and taxpayers: to be grown-up without being old. For we, as adult beings, are gradually becoming old children, while the servility that the lover shares with the child should not be our compass. Yet this is the kind of program that the state, and the private sector too, are increasingly offering us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like our thematic dossier of the month<\/a> The examples are legion: incessant injunctions to eat one's fruit and vegetable ratio every day, systematic recommendations by public authorities and the media to drink water in hot weather, the arrival of \u00abdrinking kills\u00bb labels on wine bottles, visual rewards from our telephone at the end of a good day's sport, audible congratulations from the city's garbage cans when we throw away our garbage... These are all good causes, but the means we use actually supplant our individual responsibility, and that's probably not good news for adults' ability to react to the unexpected, to judge their own actions, to assume the consequences of their actions or to innovate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n