Reducing Yourself to Keywords | CareerAngles.com

I used to wear tie-dyed jeans, a straw skimmer for a hat and not give a damn about anyone or anything. Life was fun knowing that I was being backstopped by my parents who provided me with a bedroom in their apartment. I thought I was rebelling but, in fact, I was accumulating different keywords for my bio than what they wanted for me.

We’ve developed a bad habit of reducing ourselves to keywords to define ourselves. The keywords could be a job title, what you know, what your business is, whether you’re a particular race, religion, age, demographic, sexual orientation, etc.

Because one political season, I think of “suburban women,” but that says nothing about who these women are except where they live.

I watched the evolution of TV commercials where a woman was defined by how white her laundry looked on a clothesline to the wardrobe she wears to work and the incompetent husband she has waiting at home. He has gone from being, “the breadwinner,” to an imbecile who can do nothing right in her eyes.

We start to think of ourselves in these ways and start to see ourselves through comparisons to idealized others that serve no purpose other than to sell something to us.

We are always reminded of how we rank as keywords when we look for a job.