When you’re in university, most of the career advice offered surrounds the push to do labour that you’re passionate about. However, much career discourse online encourages the opposite, urging viewers to chase an elegant corporate life without recognizing the ways in which luxury is more accessible with class privilege and passive wealth.
As we enter the winter semester, the end of another school year draws nearer. For many soon-to-be graduates like myself, the daunting task of moving into a new chapter of life waits just mere months away.
Luckily for me, university has been a place for my passions to flourish. I love the discipline I chose almost cluelessly at 17, and I am incredibly grateful for the wonderful opportunities that I’ve had along the way.
Even if the subject you study isn’t a lifelong passion, our prospective fields shape our identity in some way; your chosen career path may not align with a dream you’ve always had, but it will shape the way you understand and interact with the world.
That said, there is growing online discourse echoing that we should shape our passions around the lifestyle our jobs could provide — jobs that are assumed to be easily attainable with enough effort, bringing a one-way ticket to financial abundance.
Though this trend is undoubtably connected to our rising cost of living and subsequent bleak financial outlook for young people, the rhetoric has nevertheless led to the romanticizing random corporate positions as if they represent a universal key to luxury for all.
While career talk swirls on your timeline and graduation looms for many, it’s time to recognize that the “dream careers” encouraged in motivational career content online don’t actually revolve around the passion one would derive from their employment, but instead the capital — social and material — that they might accumulate if they followed in the career footsteps that TikTok suggests. Of course, these videos fail to mention that corporate life isn’t always a fast-track to wealth for everyone.
Take for example the countless videos on TikTok romanticizing a (high-paying) corporate life, wherein you could become the wealthy “finance girl” or work an unnamed job for a company that will immerse you in a high class work environment, which, according to TikTok, inevitably includes being constantly surrounded by men in suits, champagne glasses and private jets.
Much like the approach taken by TikTok’s wave of motivational self-improvement content found under “#winterarc,” much of the career motivation rhetoric found online is generally ignorant to the privileges that can fast-track some into the glamorous high paying corporate lifestyle depicted in the videos.
This tension is revealed through user interactions with videos romanticizing corporate work lives as if they are solely a vehicle to wealth and elegance. Take for example a TikTok aiming to display the iconography of corporate life, with centred text reading “she studied business administration” on top of a plethora of quickly changing pictures depicting high rise office buildings, elegant penthouses, expensive clothes and jewelry alongside other wealth signifiers like sleek cocktails at fancy restaurants and women riding in the passenger seat of luxurious cars.
In the comment section of the video, a user warned others who were taken by the seeming luxury corporate life could bring by noting that the field is “not easy” to navigate with recognition to “the pay gap” and “glass ceiling” — a term that refers to the systemic barriers that women and minority groups face in white collar environments that make high positions in the corporate hierarchy more exclusionary. These barriers are intensified when individuals are marginalized across several identity lines, creating layered oppressions.
This user isn’t wrong. According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation (CWF), the gender pay gap persists despite common misunderstandings that it was eradicated long ago or that it is a myth.
As CWF notes, it is illegal to pay women less than men under Canada’s Human Rights Act. However, several social factors result in women working full-time earning an average of 75 cents for every dollar made by men working full-time.
Since women are more likely to shoulder the majority of unpaid domestic labour due to deeply entrenched social expectations, they are more likely to work part-time or take leaves from work to attend to caregiving duties. Fields in which women dominate are also more likely to pay less, and male-dominated fields are less accessible to women due to workplace culture. Once again, the pay gap is wider for women facing layered oppressions through marginalization across several identity lines.
Evidently, romanticizing any career could mask the potential difficulties of entering the field. In the state of our economy, it is quite appealing to see a random career title that brings the promise of financial abundance and social mobility, but the promise that chasing a random corporate title will allow you to unlock the upper echelons of society is not realistic. Relying on TikTok for career advice might place your future on a shaky foundation.
Though this career outlook may seem bleak, talking about the issue of social inequalities and financial (in)stability is the only way for meaningful change to arise. Masking the issue with the illusion that everybody’s “hard work” is treated equal and that we all have a level playing field to follow our dreams is the same method taken by the right to keep social hierarchies strict and take away meaningful opportunities from workers who rightfully deserve their dream job and financial freedom.