There are norms.
There are practices.
There are practices within a norm.
Then there are practices within a practice.
The rabbit hole of norms and practices and their winding pathways
provide the humans involved with the illusions of success and failure.
This vacillation of the point of their attention is known to them as
"I am doing what I think I should be doing".
But their reality is something else...
"I do not know why I am doing what I am doing"
"Interviewing for jobs" is one such norm.
Within this norm, there are practices...
looking for jobs,
applying for jobs,
looking to fill a job,
interviewing or getting interviewed,
providing or accepting or rejecting an offer,
negotiating a salary,
...
Within each of these practices, there are more hidden practices...
apps or websites or techniques to look for jobs,
hiring recruiters to fill a job,
various ways of interviewing or "excelling" in an interview,
"best practices" of drafting an offer or rejecting an offer,
"how-to's" on negotiation of salaries,
...
The person who happily stays lost in the zoo of jobs,
interviews, offers, negotiations, etc.,
lives doused in the sadness which is his life.
One who forcefully goes into this zoo,
also goes fearfully.
The fearful either walks out with the excitement of "making it",
or never exits and gets driven deeper into his fear.
Rare is the person who questions this.
And even that rare person does not put forward
The Question.
For his questioning only allows him to see through
one of the many games society plays.
Having seen through one such game,
that rare person finds something he labels a "loophole".
He then comes up with a "better" way to handle the game that he sees.
He starts a "company".
And while it provides him the excitement he was really craving,
beyond the veil of that excitement,
he merely plays into a bigger societal game -
the one he does not see.
Instead of bypassing the norm altogether,
he only introduces a practice within the norm.
(Which soon gets impregnated with other practices)
No, I am not insulting such "companies".
Nor do I ask or advise people to bypass norms.
I state what needs to be stated.
At the root of the norm of jobs and interviewing,
hides this one sentinel of the human Mind -
Need.
...
A person needs a job.
A job needs to be filled.
A company needs to hire.
A recruiter needs to recruit.
An interviewer needs to interview.
...
And no,
this is also not to keep you from needing jobs,
or your company from needing candidates or recruiters,
or to blunt your new-found interest to interview college grads.
Society will go where it is headed -
deeper and deeper into the many recesses of itself.
Who am I to affect change in such an abomination?
So in closing,
I will merely state the gist of it all.
Norms and practices keep the human from the Truth.
They are established over decades of staying comfortable
and not questioning the obvious.
Not only the obviousness of the norms or the practices.
But that of even more obvious things in one's life.
When there is no questioning...
there is a search for answers.
And this search for answers done by society as a whole,
not only back these norms and practices,
but keep the illusion of society going for humans.
And in so doing,
humans strengthen the ties to their own demise.
Thank you.