myn 2004, the monthly report Technikart published a file titled “I work, then I enjoy.” Through this almost advertising formula, a profound truth was captured: work is a way of capturing our libidinal energy. Sometimes when you’re too involved in your professional life, it’s hard to want anything more than the work itself. This may be due to an excess of passion that makes your daily work the receptacle of impulses that are no longer (or less) expressed through other channels.
But more often than not, it’s fatigue and stress that leaves you unavailable for everything else. In 2012, an extensive survey conducted by the company Technologia led to the conclusion that employees’ intimate problems are inextricably linked to the pressures of the professional environment. For 66.6% of respondents (70% among executives), stress at work has a negative impact on their sexual and love lives, including erection problems in men and lubrication problems in women. More generally, 72.6% of those surveyed acknowledge that the fatigue accumulated during their workday has already prevented them from having sex at night. “Never being able to make love when you want means giving work symbolic power over your personal life, your love life, and your sex life. It happens that some employees change jobs for such reasons, without even officially explaining it.”the report stressed.
Control of work over our desires.
The massification of hybrid work after the pandemic seemed to partially undo the control that professional life exerted over our desires. A kind of new honeymoon with its own daily organization. Managing time more freely during the day, escaping the panopticon of office life, avoiding exhausting transportation: all this ultimately contributes to redirecting desire somewhere other than within the four walls of open space. According to a 2022 QAPA study, 72% of people surveyed say they make more love with their partner when they are teleworking.
In light of the changes in this libidinal economy, we can interpret the current return to the office imposed by certain companies as a desire to reestablish relational exclusivity, as a possessive lover would do (it’s him or me!). If Amazon or JP Morgan want employees to return to the fold, it is not so much to encourage informal interactions and collective intelligence as to prevent their libidinal energy from finding new outlets.
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