Арсен Аветисов – French Narratives. How France Taught the World to Live, Debate, and Maintain Balance (страница 2)

When measure is lost, even the most brilliant achievements cease to be felt as happiness. A person can possess much whilst losing the sense of wholeness. The reason lies in the loss of proportion between what they want and what is sufficient for them.

Over time, desires became more complex; ideals, ambitions, and goals appeared. These words gave life direction, but along with this came intensified tension. The quality of existence came increasingly to be measured by the quantity of what was achieved rather than the depth of what was lived. Thus arose the idea of an endless race, and together with it, the chronic sense that happiness is always somewhere ahead.

In attempting to ensure confidence in the future, a person increasingly loses contact with the present. They begin to live in a mode of postponement: ‘Just a little more, and then.’ But it’s precisely this ‘then’ that deprives them of the ability to feel now.

On the Quality of Time

We can measure time by the clock, but its quality is determined not by minutes but by attention. The simplest pleasures – a walk, a meal, a conversation – often turn out to be more satisfying than complex and expensive constructions promising a ‘high standard of living’.

Possession doesn’t equal presence; a car doesn’t replace the sensation of one’s own body in motion, and luxury doesn’t guarantee inner comfort. Things create an illusion of future security but often steal the ability to be in the present.

Modern culture has imperceptibly substituted meanings: vanity has become ambition, greed – success, exhaustion – productivity, and haste – the norm.

With the blurring of concepts, the sensation of life becomes blurred too. It becomes ever harder for a person to distinguish the necessary from the excessive, and need from imposed desire. The more things are ‘needed’, the less time remains. And a deficit of time quickly turns into a deficit of life itself.

Where True Quality of Life Resides

True quality of life lies in perception, in sensations, and in the clarity of one’s own meanings. In the ability to feel, think, be engaged in culture, space, and history. This is precisely what constitutes the human form of existence.

Balance is the inner equivalent of the golden ratio. Balance between desire and sufficiency, effort and enjoyment, goal and presence, action and awareness.

Different cultures have different models of this equilibrium. None of them is universal. The best is the one that helps a person maintain a living sense of their own life.

Why the French Model Works

The French have developed a special, remarkably whole model of relating to life. It manifests in the rhythm of the day, in food, in clothing, in the manner of arguing, in the ability to stop. This isn’t style, and it isn’t a pose; it’s a skill. Its basic principle is simple and difficult at the same time: happiness is what you can do every day.

The French consciously develop habits of measure. They don’t strive for the maximum; they strive for precision. In this sense their ‘unhurriedness’ is deceptive: in matters of quality of life they are surprisingly disciplined.

The Latin word disciplina means ‘order’, and its root discere means ‘to learn’. To be disciplined means to construct form. French culture strives to establish form in the most important thing – in the ability to live without losing one’s taste for life.

This model doesn’t promise happiness as a result. It offers something else: to learn to maintain the equilibrium in which life feels alive. This is precisely what we shall discuss further.

Facts and Contexts

– The term qualité de vie in France was originally used not in economics but in philosophy and the sociology of everyday life.

– French culture long opposed mesure (measure) to Anglo-Saxon success.

– The French school of aesthetics has always considered proportion an ethical category, not only a visual one.

– In 18th-century France, it was considered bad form to want too much: excessive aspiration was perceived as a sign of inner instability.

Notes in the Margins

– Quality of life is the proportionality between ‘I want’ and ‘enough’.

– Possession doesn’t equal presence.

– Balance isn’t renunciation of desires, but the ability not to lose life between them.

– Happiness is a skill of daily adjustment, not the result of a sprint.

Chapter 2: Life Balance

How we understand quality of life and what form and content have to do with it

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves… self-discipline with all of them came first.

I want man to act and live, not to freeze.*

Balance is not a standstill, but coordinated movement.*

Why Numbers Don’t Measure Life

We’re accustomed to measuring quality of life by numbers: income, square metres, the amount of free time, journeys, productivity indicators. Numbers create a sense of control. It seems that if everything is properly distributed, life will become stable and comprehensible.

But numbers don’t measure the main thing: inner state, the taste of the moment, the ability to be alive rather than just productive. Quality of life isn’t composed of items; it’s composed of rhythm. Of how people feel about themselves within the stories they live.

Balance isn’t the equalising of scales. Balance is the moment when inner narratives cease to pull a person in different directions.

False Choice and Its Consequences

We’re accustomed to choosing one of two: to be strong or gentle, to think or feel, to work or live, to maintain form or allow ourselves spontaneity. The world seems to demand unambiguousness, as if complexity were a mistake. Contradiction within is perceived as weakness, not as the natural state of a living person.

French culture leads a person out of this false choice. It reminds us: it’s possible to be rational and emotional, serious and alive, disciplined and sensitive simultaneously. This doesn’t destroy personality; it makes it rich and stable.

Balance is about coordinating inner lines into one story that moves forward.

Form and Content: Not Conflict, but Dialogue

Within us live pairs that we’re accustomed to clashing with each other: form and content, useful and pleasant, sensation and consciousness, meaning and action. We’re taught: ‘choose one.’ However, these pairs weren’t created for struggle but for dialogue.

Form is a way of presence. Content is the meaning of what’s happening. The useful sustains structure. The pleasant sustains life. Sensation is the body. Consciousness is thought.

We set the useful against the pleasant. The French unite them.

We say, ‘First work, then the meaning.’ The French ask, ‘If there’s no meaning now, what kind of work is this?’

We oppose beauty and functionality. French logic is different: if it’s beautiful, it means it’s functional for the soul.

When Balance Is Broken

When form and content diverge, a person loses stability.

If there is meaning but no action, it is dreaminess. If there are actions but no meaning, it is burnout. Style without depth is emptiness. If there is depth but no form, the person disappears from their own story.

When consciousness is active, the body is silent, and life turns into a project. When sensations are turbulent, consciousness can’t keep up; it’s chaos.

France serves as a mirror of how these levels can unite. A walk, food, conversation, debate, a pause – all this is simultaneously form and content, action and meaning. As if life itself is saying, ‘I’m already here.’

Balance as Rhythm, Not Instruction

We live in the logic of ‘first the obligatory, then the permitted’. First the result, then the taste; first the difficult period, then life.

French culture is arranged differently. It has no rigid boundary between the serious and the beautiful, between everyday life and aesthetics, or between the moment and meaning. This isn’t frivolity. It’s the ability to live by rhythm, not by checklist.

Balance isn’t stability. It’s a movement where an individual stops labelling themselves as ‘correct’ or ‘alive’.

Return to Oneself

We live in a culture of reflections. Quality of life is increasingly substituted by its image. A person checks not against sensations but against standards: effectiveness, success, development. They compare themselves with an ideal that doesn’t exist.

Such a race destroys the ability to hear oneself. But it’s precisely spontaneity, silence, small joys, and moments of presence that create a taste for life.

France returns to a person the right to check against themselves. The meaning of the day can lie not in productivity, but in the precision of form, in the sensation that you lived in accord with yourself.

Balance as a Form of Maturity

The French live not in the logic of ‘happiness must be earned’ but in the logic of ‘happiness must be able to be noticed’. For them, happiness isn’t an event but a skill. A competence requiring practice: the ability to stop, refuse, enjoy, and be honest with oneself.

A taste for life isn’t weakness and isn’t luxury. It’s a form of reason. Because if a person doesn’t know how to feel, they don’t know how to choose. And if they don’t know how to choose, they lose the authorship of their life.