‘When you’re promoting brand You, everything you do – and everything you choose not to do – communicates the value and character of the brand.’ These words, taken from the article that first popularized ‘self-branding’ back in 1997, have come to epitomize the dogma of our work-obsessed culture: employability. In an age of ubiquitous social media, when lives are curated for market, employability no longer simply describes our work-based skills and training; it has become a way of life. We are each our own brand now and every moment is an opportunity to build our personal equity, or so the story goes.
Millennial life often feels like endless work to find and sustain more work. Networking online and offline, posting images and opinions, not to mention answering e-mails at all hours and neverending job applications, our so called ‘brands’ require constant attention. Consequently, ‘leisure time’ seems laughable, a derisory concept to a generation encouraged to spend its weekends and evenings priming employers with witty, memorable tweets, and editing daily events into glossy lifestyle images. If work/life balance feels like a bad joke, the need to market oneself is even worse – a joke that goes on forever, never to deliver. Needless to say, the joke is on us as we spend our lives working ever-more to receive ever less.
While too often seen as a generational dysfunction, the problem is clearly socioeconomic. Growing up in the shadow of a labour market unable to provide the stable, long-term employment of the post-war settlement, millennials have had to become ‘flexible’, the watchword for a new era of precarious work. No longer are there jobs for life – even a year is a privilege for most; a fact well known to millennials who expect to manage a diverse portfolio of transient ‘gigs’ and projects.
