Fortunately, this piece doesn’t have to be that good. I’m just a substitute, your regular columnist is on vacation. I can write about what I want (except my latest book, the editor said). And then I get paid for it.
The only problem is that I will try too hard. Which is therefore unnecessary, but the performance of this piece will be measured. And while I won’t be judged on those reading grades, I’m going to check them out later anyway, nervous as a teenager waiting for an exam result.
After all, we live in a society in which we let self-esteem and the meaning of life depend on figures, tests and performance indicators. We count too much and listen too little.
If we did listen, we would hear the ears of the whole society ringing. From home care workers who get exactly six minutes for a standard action, such as making a person’s eyes drop. Up to courts that are paid on a case-by-case basis. At home on Instagram and TikTok, the counters keep going, so we’re ‘always on’.
A little Matthijsje has also crept into my head: an internal number cruncher who pushes me to the limit. Which makes me a less fun person, makes me snap at people on the bike path. And by the way, those people on that bike path often snarl at me.
Because I’m not the only one. University lecturers, nurses, police officers, artists, mail sorters, MPs: they all let themselves be rushed by the numbers, they know that, but they are too perfectionistic, too afraid or too dutiful to stop.
Recently I gave a talk in a room with judges. Of course I had prepared it too well. Had pieces by journalist Marc Chavannes read, about the unhealthy high workload of judges. That workload seemed to me to be crippling, not only for their personal lives, but also for the law itself.
So I called for a strike, to my horror they responded quite enthusiastically. But they did not strike. Way too driven people, I suspect. Or too many Matthijsjes in their heads.
I wanted to write about money first, thought it was because of that. Money matters. I had the book Exploited read, from research collective Investico, about how we squeeze employees, not in Qatar, but just at home. From Albert Heijn order pickers to post docs at the university (the university is the most brutal employer in the Netherlands).
Investico’s investigative journalists, they confessed, also lived on rickety contracts. Also in the newspaper you are reading now, by the way, the flex people often earn less than permanent people, which is unfair; yet I am not going to write about it.
Not because grumbling about your boss is unwise – mine can handle it, I guess – but because it would be an untruthful story. I no longer believe that money is the big issue.
Until recently I thought: let’s go on strike en masse, demand better working conditions, then everything will be fine. And luckily there are many strikes again, Friday at the Bijenkorf. Beautiful. But you can’t get rid of the stress with some extra money.
How else do you explain that people with wonderful permanent jobs and extremely tender bosses so often run into a wall? And how else do you explain – that is the most embarrassing part – that people who do not even have to work, such as children, are increasingly stressed? 33 percent of girls in group 8 now have emotional problems, I read in a recent study. The workload experienced by children has doubled in the last ten years. Children!
Permanent contracts will not help them. And in those classrooms there are no Matthijzen raging on whom we can hang the sin of the whole world. Grote Matthijs was just the epitome of measurement culture. And probably the toughest tyrant to himself. Bogeyman and scapegoat at the same time.
Now that he’s gone, the little Matthijsjes turn out to be still there, the children still have a stomach ache from TikTok and tomorrow’s test, the streets are still full of excitement.
Not Matthijs, but time is sickening. We have come to believe that our self-esteem and the meaning of our existence depend on measurable results. And apparently that’s how we raise our children too: to be a Matthijsje for themselves.
There should be a total ban on performance measurement.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 26, 2022