“Why do you want this job?”
A seminal question of any job interview — usually the second, directly following “tell us a bit about yourself”. It is not sufficient enough to be willing and able to do the job, to meeting the skills and experience required. You need passion. You need to want it. To have a narrative of personal history that demonstrates exactly why this is the job which destiny is pulling you towards.
It’s a subliminal decision of the cultural unconscious to suspense with the notion of skills and productivity. Deep down the realisation that no one in the email caste have anything of value to add is a realisation we are all teetering at the periphery of but refusing to speak out loud. We keep up the illusion with good thoughts, right words. The professional-managerial class are the new clergymen, upholding the myth of growth. They structure their lives productively as if the momentum of this ritual might somehow translate into real economic productivity. They get to their desk before 9am, schedule meetings in an Outlook calendar, talk about goals and order reality into the grid of a CSV. All to keep up the act.
We are not workers. Us thought-leaders of the future, we bright-eyed prospective owners of email signatures. We are mere consumers. Card carrying, fund spreading. Worker bees to pollen — errand boys of capital. It is not without our work that the economic machine would come to a halt. The truth is that it is without our spending. Our spending that enables other people in other countries to do other work — real productive work –catering to ever expanding lab-grown needs conjured up on a whiteboard by a marketing team selling a solution to a problem that was created by all the solutions which came before.
This is the true place of the email-man in the modern economy: to spend. His job no more than a performative act of faith that designates him someone with the legitimate god given right to spend. In the more than a century and a half since the first pamphlet calling for an 8 hour working day was produced, our economic prosperity and productivity has increased exponentially. Most of us live like kings thanks to businesses that have empowered themselves with technological innovation after technological innovation. All this progress and for what? We still work 8 hour days in spite of our productivity — still inhabiting the archaic structure of labour that Russian revolutionaries were willing to die for over a hundred years ago. Because if we reduced the demands of our labour in a way that was proportionate to gains in productivity we would not have to work 8 hours and we would earn more money for working less. And so the basis of legitimacy for our spending — those 8 hours or more that we sit at our desk, crumbling our spines, draining the fluid from our brains and developing heart diseases — would be completely undermined.
Society requires the email-man to spend lest the economic hierarchies we have so carefully arranged fall apart into pieces. Besides, the email-man is so disembodied, so drawn to images outside of him, a man whose life is spent staring into an OLED rectangle — how could he not need to spend? Where else can he go to reconstruct himself if not the graveyard of bargain bin simulacra at the local Westfields?
Or maybe he is the kind of person who thumbs his nose at the Westfield, the one who rolls his eyes at the thought that the words ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ need to correspond to a literal arrangement of objects that one can walk amongst. The kind of man who will never let himself get any closer to ordinary society than the lofty heights of the MCC members stand. All the better — the email-man needs his narrative of self-righteousness. He needs to believe that to spend is to exalt himself over others.
The job interview is this narrative’s place of inception. When asked what why you want the job, the question is not about the work but the meaning of the work — is it meaningful for you? Does it form part of a personal history — a career — that you can regard as your own, your true self an arrangement of dot points on a CV? Does human capital fill you with joy? When all the other kids in school drew pictures of cooks and cleaners — did you draw a business analyst?
It’s not enough to be misled. To be forced to relate to the world in a way you know is false, using categories that simply don’t exist. You have to want it. Spill out the contents of your soul and remould it as an offering to capital. Crave the conditions of your own misery. Keep the undesirables out. Let the righteous email-man in. Believe in the righteousness of your crusade against truth.
Beg for it.
