Free Article | 31/08/22

Fatigue Society and the Law Intern

By Maria Clara Nascentes

 

The normalization of unhealthy practices in the legal environment as a driver of a feeling of unease in the young professional.

Acceleration, productivity, dynamism, globalization, technology. These are some words commonly used to describe the world in the last 20 years. There is no doubt that it has undergone profound transformations in its structures – through technological advances, possibilities for connection between different individuals and products from all over the planet arise, with a speed unimaginable for someone who lived 50 years ago. It is due to this context of intense changes that sociologists seek to understand and conceptualize it, in order to explain the effects of contemporaneity for the individuals included in it.

The Frenchman Gilles Lipovetsky denotes this era as Hypermodernity, a hyper period, that is, in which one sees an intensification of all the values ​​present in Modernity, such as the acceleration of time, work, consumption and productivity.

Sociologist Byung-Chul Han, in his book “Society of Fatigue”, in turn, starts from the idea of ​​the Frenchman to demonstrate the way in which this context reverberates within individuals. For him, we are inserted in a world of excess positivity, that is, performance is intensely valued, seeking to produce, consume, work and have fun in the most intense way possible. The crux of this issue is that society no longer has a coercive character, that is, there is no longer an institution that oversees and disciplines individuals, but they themselves perform this function. In this way, differentiation is constantly sought, viewing the individual as a competitor. It is clear, therefore, that this exacerbated positivity exhausts the subject and, due to individualism, places him in a solitary space of self-exploitation, causing strong violence.

Thus, we see a society permeated by fear, pressure and anguish, in which imposing limits or failure generates contempt – stress, apathy, restlessness, inability to relax, difficulty concentrating, physical and mental fatigue become a common symptom live in this context, being no stranger to the world of law, which is marked by the large volume and intense work routine in highly competitive environments. The president of the OAB Health Commission, Sandra Krieger, pointed out that mental and behavioral disorders were the causes of 30% of lawyers’ dismissals between 2012 and 2018.

It is clear, therefore, that the professional culture of law is sick, lacking a human perspective focused on mental health, especially for young professionals and interns law students. This is because they are entering a highly competitive professional sphere in this hyper-described context, with all the symptoms that compose it. In other words, just as there were structural changes in society as a whole, study and work relationships were strongly modified by contemporaneity – the class as a moment of distancing from the internship and uninterrupted engagement with studies, with technologies and computerization of life, no longer exists. Now, the student can receive demands or WhatsApp messages from work at any time, requiring immediate responses.

On the other hand, the way in which the academic world is organized at this juncture also contributes to the general malaise – technologies make it possible to charge for a greater load of tests and work in a less expensive way, increasing the study load in parallel with the increase in hours of work. job. In addition, their performance is used to classify students who aim to enter extracurricular activities or exchanges, which are valuable for the improvement of specialized curricula that allow them to enter an increasingly competitive environment.

The Law intern is increasingly inserted in the logic of positivity of the Tiredness Society, valuing (and normalizing) mental and physical exhaustion in order to minimally succeed in entering the job market. It is crucial, therefore, to open discussions on this topic with a critical and non-productivist view, so that it is possible to reverse this scenario of generalized malaise. Academic institutions and law firms must move away from the hyper logic, ensuring compliance with Law No. 11,788/2008 (“Internship Law”) and promoting environments in which learning is valued and quality is prioritized over quantity, in order to create healthy, empathetic future professionals with good interpersonal relationships. It is necessary to remember that these characteristics contribute to a calm and peaceful professional environment, which can bring good results in the future, in addition to having lawyers with a keen sensitivity to deal with others and the demands of life. It is inferred, therefore, that we must actively seek to discourage the normalization of unhealthy practices in the culture of a profession that actively deals with delicate human relationships, in order to reduce the symptoms of a Fatigue Society.

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