Mars 2020, an event arises, which upsets all lives: confinement. Overnight, because barricading oneself at home is the only solution to escape a virus against which we have neither medicine nor vaccine, the French find themselves, in a country at a standstill, locked up. It’s unreal and incredibly violent, but we don’t really have time to think about it because everything has to be urgently organised: school at home for the children, homework for parents, everyday life.
Everything that happened outside now happens in the house, which must permanently contain, whatever its surface, all the members of the family and all their activities.
As for the exterior, it has become a territory which we can no longer survey every day, and for a limited time, only an extent that is also limited, and that we look out the window, the nose glued to the glass like bored children.
Once freedom is regained, thousands of people, hungry for air and space, will no longer have – how can we be surprised? – only one dream: to push back the limits; find, inside and outside, more space for their lives. Dream to which the heat waves will add that of fleeing the big cities, which some think, like one of our readers, “doomed to become giant heat islands where humans would live in caulked air-conditioned interiors”. Many inhabitants of these big cities will therefore try to leave them for smaller ones, at more affordable prices, and from where one can reach the countryside more easily.
Today, many of them continue to congratulate themselves on their decision, but others regret it and say they are disappointed. Some for reasons they state clearly: they set out for a dream, and the reality in which they arrived, and which they had perhaps not studied closely enough, is not there. image of this dream. Their life – personal or professional – in this long-imagined “elsewhere” does not live up to their expectations.
But the origins of the disappointment are, for others, more vague: they do not blame their new life, but only note that it has not freed them from the malaise which had pushed them to leave and, therefore, wonder.
How to explain that, despite their change of life, their discomfort remains?
The answers to this question are obviously specific to each person, but we can generally say that a desire to change one’s life is always very complex, and above all can have very different foundations.
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