Once flooded with Aerie deals and American Eagle coupons, my email inbox now knows a different audience altogether—the dreaded LinkedIn alert swarm. It’s that time of the year again; as if midterms and the rather difficult shift into an online fall quarter weren’t enough, the constant stream of job updates that never fail to characterize recruiting season in all of its competitiveness makes its comeback yet again. Despite the slight increase in tension this recruiting season, only enhanced by the looming ominosity of presidential election, LinkedIn job alerts remain stubborn in their pursuit to remind every college student in the country that the pandemic is somehow not enough of an excuse to put their careers on the backburner. In response, the unrelenting pressure to aim higher that forms the framework of American academia remains ever-present.
The early stages of the pandemic saw a skyrocket in Chloe Ting’s views as half the population followed along to her ab workout videos on YouTube, and motivational articles and blog posts encouraging their readers to take on a new skill quickly made their way to the top. “Forget the sinking feeling in your stomach, learn how to make crème brulée!” “Get toned abs in 30 days so maybe you’ll finally feel in control of your life!” We had successfully preserved the desire to constantly be productive even in the midst of something so novel and unprecedented that grocery stores resembled a set on the plot of The Walking Dead. A few weeks later rose the stream of tweets and op-eds discouraging this idea. Self-care was new trending topic: “Productivity isn’t everything!” “Celebrate the small victories. We are in a pandemic after all.” The landscape of online lifestyle and self-help content shifted entirely in its nature and direction for a few months, only to return back to its roots in the fall when the pressure to go, go, go made its huge comeback.
It seems like we’re constantly at war with the part of ourselves that wants to take on more, to prove to ourselves, our friends, family, and complete strangers on the Internet that we are worth something.
The issue comes from the deeply rooted misconception that the only people that are allowed to feel like they are deserving of love and friendship are Google interns and Microsoft employees, because we have effectively adopted the idea that productivity equals worth. It’s a difficult idea to live with, but even more difficult to purge ourselves of because it is instilled into us—it is only the basis of 21st century academia. It seems almost silly at first that we worry about something as trivial as our LinkedIn profiles in the face of cities falling and our political climate facing one of the most stressful elections in American history; but under a more powerful magnifying glass, this is how young people across the country cope with large-scale change.
While it is true that modern academia encourages competition over collaboration, and that American capitalism has been effective in conditioning us to equate self-worth with productivity, so much of this year’s recruiting season is marked by a degree of fear that past years haven’t seen before—fear that we won’t have careers to fall back on post-grad, fear that the world will swallow us whole before we have a chance to experience it, fear that even amidst a pandemic, we are still not doing enough. Students across the country look to employers and professional opportunities because it provides them with a sense of normalcy, like securing a job for the summer will somehow ensure that we will be okay in the face of unfamiliarity. It’s what we know.
The strange thing about fear is that it is rather powerful, but rarely rational. The voice in the back of your head telling you to go, go, go is good at getting your cortisol levels up but not really for much else. The sinking feeling in your stomach and the skip in your heartbeat when yet another connection from high school secures an offer from Microsoft is just your body responding to its evolutionarily programming, misinterpreting a spike in stress as an imminent threat to survival. It’s in our blood. But we are larger than this, larger than a product of our lowest moments and darkest thoughts and primary instincts.
Fear is powerful, but rarely rational. Remember?
In rebuttal, I hope you choose to rely on hope. Hope that despite massive societal and political change, you will turn up okay; hope that the lives you haven’t yet lived and the version of yourself that you haven’t yet become are waiting for you as eagerly as you are waiting for them. Hope for the job market, for the state of the country, and for yourselves. The world waits for you.