Mathéo had not yet set foot in an office, yet he was already disillusioned with work. As a teenager, he watched his mother come home from her job, year after year, increasingly overwhelmed. “She spent over 20 years at La Poste [France’s postal service]. She always worked very hard to move up, starting out without qualifications. But she saw her work lose its meaning,” recounted the young man (who requested anonymity), now 25 and living in Brittany. In a context of changing management in the public service, she faced “forced job changes, unattainable target figures and growing tensions with customers,” Mathéo said, adding that these difficulties took a toll on his mother’s morale.
This first glimpse left him with a strong conviction that “the world of work is a trap,” as he put it. “I’ve seen firsthand that whatever efforts you make as an employee, you hit walls.” Now entering the job market after studying cultural presentation, he was struggling to envision a secure professional future. “Especially since I already feel like I’m enduring things. I’ve done one internship after another and still had to settle for an ultra-precarious civic service contract. When I think about the future, all I see is uncertainty,” he said. For him, there was no doubt: It was more reasonable to “find meaning elsewhere than in work.”
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