Describe yourself in 6 words or less. Find your passion. Find your purpose. Have you been thinking about your goals? What is the world issue you most want resolved? What are your hopes and dreams? Can they be succinctly described in 6 words or less? Can they be summed up on a Linkedin post? Can your passion become your career? Can you monetise this? Can we monetise this? Can you make us money?
Vacations for Oxford students more often than not mean dedicating a significant proportion of your time to an internship. Bleary eyed and exhausted by the term-time workload, we make space in our schedules to write endless cover letters, touch up our CVs, and find tutors who like us just enough to write the perfect reference. We send off our applications and, in short, beg for companies to allow us the privilege of being an entirely insignificant part of their workforce for a limited period of time. Alongside the internship itself will often come endless mandatory careers sessions and talks – motivational speakers with this or that book to promote, who stand up in front of us naive youngsters and promise the much-sought-after key to finding our place in the ever-elusive and seemingly impossible to break-into workforce.
This is an article, more or less, about these careers talks themselves; God knows I sat through enough of them this summer. For the lucky reader who has yet to experience this mind-numbing phenomenon, allow me to introduce it to you. The speaker begins by asking us if we know what our purpose is. Usually, internally answered by each member of the crowd who begins to panic, something along the lines of: “I didn’t know I was supposed to have a purpose. What is that? How do I find it? I wonder if everyone else knows their purpose and I’m already super behind?”. The speaker will then, graciously, offer to help us out. That’s right – by listening to one simple presentation, we will understand the very meaning of our lives, and how we can fit into this world!
But here’s the catch. This is not a philosophical exploration, nor a valuable exercise in introspection, nor a spiritual awakening designed to find inner peace. No, this is watered-down psycho-babble mobilised along neoliberal lines. To help us discover our purpose, the presenter will ask us what we dream of. So what do I dream of, I think. I dream of a pretty house, with lots of natural light. A place where the one I love is just down the corridor. A house that is never quiet – that is brimming with the clattering of our many pets, and perhaps a few kids. A house that smells of the bread I will make fresh every week, and always has a supply of baked goods on the kitchen counters. My friends would come round often and their laughter would fill our halls. My parents and sister would be just a short drive away, and we’d meet often for Sunday lunch. I dream of a home. A place where I will feel calm, loved, at peace.
Oh, sorry, is this not marketable enough? Ok, then I dream of surfing in the icy Devon sea and feeling that rush of energy when you finally catch a wave. I dream of creating beautiful music, and even not so beautiful music, with my instruments or even my voice. I dream of writing; on my laptop, in a notebook, anywhere I can, I dream of entire days I could spend watching my ideas materialise on the page. I dream of a world and a life without pain, where there is no suffering, for anyone, anywhere. I dream of justice. I dream of dancing, painting, acting, running, singing, screaming, laughing. I dream of joy, pain, beauty, exhilaration, and peace.
Oh, still not what you were looking for? Ok, a word I would use to describe myself is, Amy. I think of all the Amy’s I have been, all the Amy’s I have yet to be. All the Amy’s I am to the different people in my life, all the Amy’s I wish I was, and even the ones I wish I wasn’t. I think of how every year, month, day, hour, and even second I am becoming an entirely different person to who I was, but I am also, somehow, still the same me I have always been. I think about how none of this can be described in 6 words or less.
Neoliberalism feeds on hyper-individualism. As the government increasingly de-regulates the market and privatises public services, it becomes the individual’s responsibility to ensure their own security within this new world. Only the fittest survive – and to do so, you must only think about yourself. Yet, ironically, none of this serves you. You are told that through your hard work, your effort, your sacrifices, you will succeed. But at the end of the day, there is a reason only a few CEOs are household names. And in your tireless efforts to become the 1%, you instead become the product. When you put on your clothes in the morning to fit into this- or that- TikTok “aesthetic”, when you eat the breakfast cereal you’ve had for years because it came up on a TV advert when you were 5, when you visit the gym to conform to the “standard” of attractiveness propped up by multiple billion-dollar industries, when you go on social media and your data is farmed to advertisers, and finally, when you sit in a presentation and your inner most dreams and desires are hauled out of you – everything about you is bought, sold, and profited on. You are the product.
So go on, look inside yourself. Find something within you. Oh but don’t look too hard, no don’t really consider yourself, your place in this world, and what you actually want out of this life. No. Find something marketable. Find something you could say in a job interview. Find a job. Find something your boss will enjoy. Find something we can incorporate into our company’s message. Find something we can profit off of. Find something that makes us look good. Find your place within this system, within this order. Become a cog in our machine. Survive on our terms. Make us money. Succeed.*
*This definition of success is rather rigid.
