Salut YouTube my name is Rosie I'm a Kiwi living in France this month I have
celebrated my 4th anniversary of life in France and to celebrate or kind of
anti celebrate I wanted to do a video on the three things that I still find
bizarre about the French people so these are the unhappiness paradox the smoking
and the relationship with mr. Ching Ching aka money these are the topics
that I just feel like I haven't really cracked yet from a cultural standpoint
so if you have any insights for me this time please leave them in the comments
below to help me figure these things out but without further ado let's get
cracking something that I noticed almost instantly and something that continues
to baffle me is that the French at times sort of seemed collectively unhappy well
I don't know if it's unhappiness as such but I do know that complaining is a
national sport here and it kind of seems like things are never good enough maybe
we can call it a kind of perpetual pessimism
Just say you have a French friend that just went on a beautiful holiday in the
south of France and you ask her how it was it can be pretty common to have the
response of like oh yes it was good it was good but and then you get the list
of buts - but it took three hours to get there there was traffic on the road oh
and there were heaps of people there "il y avait un monde mais un monde" it's like
you always have to present the facts and then critique and put down what
just happened it's like oh it's so cold it's giving me a sore neck or oh it's so
hot at the moment I can't sleep at night in New Zealand if you complain about
stuff like that honestly it's kind of like oh well you know your friends are
kind of like oh well you know, harden up, you get on with it it doesn't
here complaining is kind of like a way to bond right and at one of the jobs that
I've had here in France it was someone in the office who is always talking out
loud and they were always saying things like oh oh la la, j'en peux plus là
"mais c'est pas possible! Mais c'est vraiment pas possible!" and you run
through and you'd be like oh can I help what's going on is there something you
know something urgent that's happened and they'll be like oh my computer's taking
a while to start you're like okay is that all?! And when you talk about the
future with French people I think many people would agree that there's a lot of
pessimism about the future in France you kind of have the impression that
France is in this huge social moral economic decline in fact a recent study
by Viavoice consulting showed that over fifty three percent of French people
believe that the state of the nation is going to decline
in the coming year and for a third of them their personal situation was only set to
get worse! A recent Win Gallup report found that the expectations for French
people for their lives in general were lower than those based in Iraq or
Afghanistan and it kind of confuses me because you haven't so good in France in
a lot of ways you've got freedom of expression sexual Liberty you have free
health care free education you've got wine you've got cheese I mean it's
France and compared to a lot of countries France still has a relatively
high standard of living it has a high life expectancy and a high standard of
general prosperity these kinds of factors usually a correlated with
happiness and optimism and all of those kinds of measures so I mean what's going
on in France?! I found that France is actually described in a lot of papers as
an economic outlier and a paradox because it's often a lot less happy and
a lot more pessimistic then it's general wealth
and lifestyle factors should deem it to be. It was French economic researcher
Claudia Senik that looked into this paradox into greater detail and what
she found was that it's not so much a problem of the country because when she
studied the happiness levels of French people based in France and French people
based abroad what she found is that the French people based abroad, no matter
which country they were in, whether it were New Zealand Australia Thailand
Russia they would be consistently less happy than the local populations in
these countries but the last interesting piece of data is that she tracked the
happiness and perceptions of well-being of immigrants coming into France and
what she found is that the longer that immigrants stayed in France the less
happy they became over time no matter where their base country was from so in
the end this French researcher concluded that it was really a question of
mentality of culture and early socialization tactics which make the
French as pessimistic as they are one example of this that she offered was the
French education system and that perhaps because it's an education system based
on negative reinforcement it is very harsh and disciplined and it's the kind of
education system where you always have to do thèse, synthèse, anti-thèse
you're educated in a way that always sees the one side critiques the other
side and then concludes and maybe it's just kind of a general rule that they've
applied to their life and happiness in general
Okay so the second point chez les français
Can we just take a moment to talk about the smoking thing I just want
to say that I'm probably your least uptight
person when it comes to smoking both of my parents are smokers I've got lots of
friends who smoke casually whatever no judgment
I'm not that concerned by it but it's hard to live in France and not notice the
smoking and surprisingly there aren't necessarily enormously more smokers in
France than in other countries but with 32% of the population smoking and there
are 67 million people in France more or less, it actually ranks really highly for
rich countries or so-called rich countries but I think the reason why
France keeps this smokey reputation and that Paris is known as the ashtray is
that there's a huge proportion of young people smoking in France and that's
where the statistics get interesting so obviously if you're a young person
you're more likely to be out and about in the bars on the terraces and so we
can see it more so it's a lot more visible of a phenomenon 40% of 17 year
olds in France are smoking and it's really common just when you're walking
around outside the colleges and the middle schools here to see these
beautiful young people puffing away and you just think to yourself what are you
doing and to put the 40% of French youth smoking into perspective only 10% of
youth are smoking in the UK and only 12% in Germany and the crazy thing is with
these teens smoking as well is that they don't even try to hide it that is
puffing away in their school uniform or right outside the school gates gosh
Growing up in New Zealand if we were going to smoke well you better do it in
the bushes it's so frowned upon my parents would have killed me and you would get in
serious trouble from your school if you were caught smoking like you would get maybe
even suspended from school, definitely detention, there would definitely be
punishment involved but it's funny because when you ask French people about
why they're smoking especially the young ones they're very confident that they're
going to be able to quit like ah you know I choose to smoke now because I
want to and I'm definitely gonna quit when I'm older. It's really sort of
seen as something that young people do and enjoy doing and it's no big deal at
all because they'll stop when they want to stop - right you keep telling yourself that
The third and final thing that I wanted to talk about and I still find a
bit bizarre about French people is their relationship with money I think I
noticed that the French were different about money when I first started dining
out with them I would notice that they would split the bill at the end of the
nice evening together like really by the cent you go through the list and
it's like well I took the lamb I had two beers and I'll play for a quarter of the
nibbles that we had at the beginning because there's four of us. In New Zealand
like I feel like we just kind of split the bill like if we were two couples
eating out together for example it's fifty-fifty, it doesn't matter if one couple
drunk more of the red wine and you only took Coke Zero I mean it's not a drama
like it's just ok we'll pay for it more this time who cares they can pick it up
for next time or not - not the end of the world. You're often being really generous
and shouting people out when you take them out when you meet up with them for
drinks you'll buy their drinks kind of thing and I've thought about this a lot
and I'm trying to figure it out I mean is it because there's such a strong
value of égalité or equality in the society that makes it socially awkward
to shout someone or to pay more because it would kind of show that you had more
resources than them or is it something going on there if we split it perfectly
equal we're all equal and there's nothing that we can say about it and
there's no judgment that can be had but I also
think maybe it's a little bit more than that in general we don't really talk
about money I don't know what my friends are earning in general especially my
French friends okay between international friends we open up a
little bit more but I feel uncomfortable asking what they're earning for example
I don't know maybe my friends are super rich maybe they're struggling with debt
and I don't know that and it doesn't bother me that I don't know that but
it's just different because I'm used to knowing that kind of thing about my
closest friends but here I know that talking about money and especiall
talking about your money it's kind of vulgar and very nouveau riche in the
language itself there's barely no word to say it it was cheap everything's
cher (expensive) so I could share a 3 euro baguette -c'est cher - a 500 euro ticket - c'est cher
there is this word bon marché but it doesn't really work it's not exactly the
same and I find it kind of interesting that there's no even linguistic
equivalent that can help you say oh it was cheap it was a good deal because
maybe that's a way of bragging like I've got so much money that I find
that cheap, I don't know, but anyway I find this super interesting so please
help me understand anyway guys that's all I had to say and the sun is setting
on my face so you're not gonna be able to see me very soon anymore anyway I'm
looking forward to your comments I'm looking forward to your stories I'm
looking forward to picking your brains down below so until next time I will
sign off now and say à bientôt!
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