This time it was an article from Le Figaro étudiant that kept me awake. The kind of article you read with one eye in 20 seconds. Except this one had me thinking for several days…

It is the portrait of a 14-year-old middle-schooler, a good student, who spends up to 4 hours a day on artificial intelligence tools. He develops applications to "automate wasted time" for companies.

The journalist paints an admiring portrait: a prodigy whom only age prevents from starting his own business. A budding entrepreneur. We learn that the father "works in digital" and the mother in medical. And the journalist concludes: a middle-schooler's life "perfectly ordinary all in all".

What bothered me was not the boy. He has nothing to do with it, he is 14 years old and growing up in the world offered to him. It is rather the way the article presented this young person's path as a happy obviousness without questioning its conditions. Three questions emerge from my reflections:

When the paper tells us that the father "works in digital", it is actually more than a euphemism. The father is a senior consultant in "digital" transformation with more than 20 years of experience - including stints in the largest consulting firms - advising listed companies.

Intentional or not, this euphemism has the very real effect of naturalising the son's path while omitting the father's professional background. In science, it would be like running an experiment without stating the temperature and pressure conditions.

Indeed, we rarely come across 14-year-olds talking about "automating wasted time" or "return on investment". This vocabulary must have an origin.

It certainly circulates at the table, in family exchanges, in the way adults name work and the value of things. Further on in the article, the teenager declares: "I detect the need, I understand it and then I analyse how to solve it". Detection, understanding, analysis, resolution. It sounds like a consultant's mantra, except here these are the words of a 14-year-old child. I do not claim that the father is pushing his son, but the environment shapes mental categories before one is even aware of it. A child raised in a home where optimisation structures daily speech will reproduce these categories through imprinting and not through deliberate choice. Fortunately the article also tells us that the young man plays tennis for, as he says, "the balance". In my head I almost wanted to add "work life / personal life". Except no, he is a child.

The article presents this whole story as an individual destiny. When this phenomenon is, at least in part, a form of social determinism.

René Girard provided a theoretical framework for this type of transmission. Desire, according to him, is not spontaneous. We do not desire an object for its own qualities: we desire what a model desires. This is the theory of mimetic desire. Here the model is the father. The son does not mechanically imitate paternal gestures.

He internalises what the father values: operational efficiency, the ability to solve productivity problems, the transformation of organisations. The article goes on to mention that the son developed an application to help his father sort job applications. The son is already contributing concretely to his father's professional universe.

Girard distinguishes between two types of dynamics. When the model is distant, inaccessible, the distance ends up freeing: the subject finds his own way. In our case - and when the model is close to the subject - reinforcement is mutual and nothing regulates the loop. The son performs in the father's professional world. The father is confirmed in his value system. The son, encouraged, continues.

When the paper publishes the article, a third term is added: the media narrative turns a family mimetic process into a story of individual merit. The loop, which until then was private, becomes a model offered to everyone. For the sake of brevity I omit the father's post on LinkedIn and the reinforcement of other mimetic loops.

Now that we know - at least in part - the son's desire, let us look into what this desire destroys.

In Émile, or On Education, Rousseau lays down what he himself calls:

the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of all education: it is not to gain time, it is to lose it.Rousseau, Émile, or On Education

The idea is not paradoxical, it is even well-founded and contemporary developmental psychology continues to defend it: the child needs to wander, to be bored, to fumble without aim, because it is in this apparently unproductive time that curiosity, judgement, and sensitivity to the world develop. This wasted time is, for Rousseau, the raw material of education.

Now what does this teenager want? To "automate wasted time". The wasted time of companies, he specifies. But the project says something about the one who carries it. A fourteen-year-old boy who devotes his days to tracking down the inefficiency of others has already internalised, for himself, that unproductive time is a problem to be solved.

He spends one to four hours a day on AI. His observation internship turned into a production mission. His latest app is for his father. This boy does not waste his time. That is precisely what Rousseau would have us question. Managerial discourse has reclassified wasted time as inefficiency. I had written on my board, in red marker, the phrase "be an entrepreneur of yourself" (borrowed from Foucault). Byung-Chul Han named what this injunction produces:

In a neoliberal regime, exploitation no longer takes place in the form of alienation and self-realisation, but of freedom, self-realisation and self-optimisation. Here, the exploiter is not the other who forces me to work and alienates me from myself. On the contrary, I exploit myself.Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other, p. 64

When a teenager says he wants to create his startup, one can wonder whether he is expressing a personal desire or whether he is executing an internalised programme, transmitted by his environment, validated by the media, reinforced by the tools he uses. ChatGPT does not suggest he go play outside. The tool - by design - is there to provide the code for his application, to serve him.

Han, in another work, takes a seemingly innocuous image: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, where when the children have a problem they call a kind of companion that looks like a smartphone and offers "helpful things" through its menus and options.

From childhood, a thinking of feasibility is thus instilled, the idea that there is for everything a quick solution, better, an application, and that life itself is only a problem-solving exercise.Byung-Chul Han, The End of Things, "Upheavals of the world of life"

The child in the article lives in this thinking of feasibility. Even his middle-school observation internship, done at an AI startup, was transformed into a production mission: "a functional application delivered in 5 days", praised by the company head. There is no visible victim, no apparent constraint. Just a middle-schooler who talks like a 35-year-old consultant and "everyone" thinks it's great.

Finally, the last question: why no one is worried about it. Or rather: why this process is not accidental at all.

Jürgen Habermas, who died at the age of 96 a few days ago, formulated a concept that sheds light on what we are reading here: the colonisation of the lifeworld by the system.

In his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas distinguishes on one hand the background of our daily life (the "lifeworld", based on mutual understanding, culture and education) from the sphere of the economy (the "system", governed by instrumental rationality, output, money). What is proper to our era, Habermas tells us, is the tendency of the "system" to overflow and colonise intimacy.

The imperatives of autonomised sub-systems penetrate from the outside into the lifeworld, like colonial masters in a tribal society, and impose on it a forced assimilation.Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II

This boy's childhood illustrates this assimilation. The vocabulary of consulting, ROI, automation, operational processes: this is systemic rationality installed in the family and educational space. Girard shows us how it installs itself (through mimesis), Rousseau shows us what it replaces (wasted time, that is, educational time). Habermas shows us why this replacement is not at all accidental: it is a structural tendency of advanced capitalist societies. The system tends to extend itself everywhere it is not contained. Childhood is not spared, it is annexed.

The drama, here, plays out neither on the side of the middle-schooler nor on the side of his parents. That a family transmits the social codes it masters is - all in all - a banal sociological fact. This boy adapts (brilliantly, by the way) to the rules of the game presented to him. No, what poses a systemic problem, on the other hand, is the normative function played by the media narrative. By going into raptures over the early optimisation of a teenager, the Figaro étudiant article illustrates what Habermas called the "re-feudalisation of the public sphere". A media outlet that should exercise a critical eye on society turns into a public relations showcase. It is not alarmed by this anthropological mutilation; it erects a new model. The ideal child of our era is a profitable child. A piece of human capital in the pre-incubation phase.

Mechanically, this standard devalues everything else. Immaturity becomes an anomaly. The child who reads aimlessly, who dreams or is bored becomes an under-exploited asset.

What is being plundered here, at the scale of society as a whole, is the very status of the present. That of an age that should have the absolute right to exist outside market logic. The point of this critique, by the way, is not to worry about this young developer, who will do very well in the world as it is. The point is also not to look back, nostalgic, at a past and a childhood that are over. We will surely not bring back skateboard or BMX races, the hours spent lying in the grass wasting a child's time. Innocence, carefreeness and connection to the real, in Lacan's sense, seem very far from the preoccupations of today's youth.

No, the point is to defend what is left of our humanity in the face of the advance of its colonisation and enslavement by technology and techno-capitalism.

Youth is not a business to be optimised. It is the inalienable right to waste one's time.

Because, in the end, their present freedom is our future freedom.