In August this year, the UK officially entered a recession. We know from the 2008/09 recession that graduate employment shrank as firms froze recruitment and stopped advertising. While we can’t know how long this will last, or how significantly the employment market will contract, we do know it will be harder for the class of 2021 to find graduate employment. As this year group begins looking for work, we are inundated with suggestions from the internet, our families, peers and university staff. Utilising LinkedIn is one of the more frequently heard suggestions.
While the site can be a valuable resource for making connections and finding employers, for many, LinkedIn represents feelings of failure and inadequacy. Logging onto the homepage bombards you with the success stories of your peers and role models. People flaunt their achievements, and leave the rest of us feeling as though we are falling behind or not working hard enough. LinkedIn is like a rabbit hole of internship announcements, firsts, and new shiny jobs. However, behind those not so humble brags are often family connections and networking contacts gained from opportunities afforded to few, not by merit, but by chance. Is that really how we want to define success? Look a bit closer at that course-mate’s internship and you’ll soon find a surname or two in common with a vice president at the very same organisation. The normalisation of nepotism does little more than create an echo chamber of like-minded, similarly privileged people who do not represent the best this country has to offer. For those without a graduate job assured from birth, this constant comparison of ourselves to others can push us further into the downwards spiral of hustle culture.
The mindset that if we are not constantly monetising our time and energies then we are wasting our lives; It is as the New York Times called it, ‘performative workaholism’. We’re sold this packaged lifestyle brand without the disclaimer that in order to reach the levels of success we see on LinkedIn, we often need to have been born to parents with the “right” jobs or into the “right” circles. However, in a cruel twist, we aren’t allowed to define our success by any other barometer than the maximisation of our labour, ultimately, in profit of a larger system of worker exploitation.
For many students, this results in a bad case of recurring burnout. The effects of this culture of working to extremes (for minimal payoff) has tangible impacts on people’s lives. In 2018, YouGov conducted a poll for the Mental Health Foundation which found that 74% of people felt stressed to the point of being overwhelmed or unable to cope. These external stressors are compounded by the feelings of failure that LinkedIn stokes. For many, LinkedIn can be the most stressful social media site, above even Instagram.
This is not to say delete your account and give up on finding that internship or graduate job, however, keep in mind that all is not as it seems. Don’t allow yourself to fall into the trap of hustle culture and defining your worth by what you see your (very privileged) peers “achieving”. While it can be easy to say try to diversify the ways in which you feel validation, not everything you do has to be done with the sole, single minded focus of making yourself more employable. Take up painting and don’t show anyone, write poetry and keep it in your journal, go for a walk without feeling like your time could be better spent reading The Economist. The totality of your life shouldn’t be about serving the capitalist machine that will take and take until there’s nothing left. You’re more than the labour you can provide.