#4: When Building Your Portfolio Becomes An Existential Crisis
Plus, a Manchester music journey and chicken content!
Laid Off Life is a place of respite for the weary workforce. Whether you’re unemployed, on strike or just trying to make it through the workday, let this be your 5-minute mental break from the grind of late-stage capitalism.
In this weekly newsletter, you’ll find musings and insights about work and life, things I’m finding useful (or useless) in my job search, gems from my DMs, and recs about worthy ways to waste time - from articles to TV shows and podcasts and beyond.
Portfolio Woes
The thing I’ve been avoiding all these months refuses to be ignored any longer. Like an ouroboros eating its own tail, I must, bit-by-bit chew, digest and regurgitate all of the work I have done in my career, curating and making it palatable for people who might want to hire me. In other words, I need to build a portfolio.
This is a newer trend in the hiring process, for creatives and beyond. In the past, I’ve certainly been asked to provide samples of my work, but now, pretty much every job I apply for asks for a link to my website or portfolio. I’ve been leaving that field blank but increasingly, it seems like a barrier to entry for being considered a viable candidate.
Why is this task conjuring existential dread?
I’ve asked myself that question a lot this week as I’ve tried to motivate myself to start chewing.
When you work on the Internet, which I have for 15 years, your work is liable to disappear.
In 2016, at my most recent job, I was forced to delete a large volume of my existing web content due to a lawsuit. (It had nothing to do with my work specifically but a larger issue with the website.) Then, in 2018, there was an unexpected site migration. I didn’t have time to save what little was left of my work. Now it’s gone.
Also in 2018, the popular website I worked at for many years was bought by Nebojsa Vujinovic aka DJ Vujo#91, a Serbian music producer whose videos for songs like “Miami” — in which he parties on a boat with two scantily clad women — get millions of views on YouTube. This is the person who owns a once-feminist website?
Luckily, I had saved a generous handful of articles from that site, but, considering that I wrote an average of 6 pieces a day for 5 years, there is soooooo much of my writing that is forever lost in the graveyard of the Internet.
The site still exists but is in a very altered state. Some of my articles remain, but the photos have been stripped and my byline has been replaced by a woman bot named Lana Vrzic, who is supposedly the Editor-in-Chief. It’s a near-impossible saga to explain to potential employers who want to see my writing samples.
Funny enough, the only thing I could find in tact is the site’s YouTube page. DJ Vujo#91 must have missed it. But it’s there. Like a time capsule from the 2010s. I spent an entire afternoon watching the videos and lamenting how much I’ve aged.
Layer on the social media of it all, which was a primary responsibility in my most recent job.
Given the ephemeral and ever-changing nature of social media, how do you save, curate, and showcase 7 years’ worth of content from 15 feeds?
Photos, Tweets, podcasts, and videos of every shape, size, and duration. Instagram Stories and Snaps that have vanished. More than 10K posts a year!! (Please, don’t lecture me about how I should have been saving everything all along. I saved what I could when I could, but it would be near impossible to save it all.)
What I’m left with are disparate pieces of work in disparate places that have no coherent narrative. It’s the perfect metaphor for how I currently feel about my career. What has it all meant?
I’m resisting having to confront what I’ve actually accomplished in my career and measure it against what I thought I’d accomplish and what I’d still hope to accomplish. The truth is…I’m finding it hard to swallow.
Worthy Time Wasters
Here are my weekly recs to combat doom scrolling.
READ: What Was Lost In Lahaina (National Geographic)
I think all of us have been watching what’s going on in Maui with heavy hearts. I’m using the tragic fires as an opportunity to learn more about the island’s cultural heritage.
Inspired by my love of the Manchester (often referred to as the “Madchester”) music scene and my “want to be young again” nostalgia, I went on a bit of a consuming journey.
LISTEN: The History of the World’s Greatest Nightclubs The Haçienda - Manchester, UK
You might remember The Hacienda from the movie 24 Hour Party People. It was the nightclub in Manchester run by Factory Records - the label behind Joy Division and then, New Order. Lots of greats passed through - The Smiths, The Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses. Eventually, the club became the home of Acid House in the UK in 1989, dubbed the “Summer of Rave.” Anyhow, this podcast episode really broke down the club’s history.
WATCH: The Hacienda - The Club that Shook Britain (BBC Documentary)
I wanted to know more about Hacienda and even more about the music. So I chased the podcast ep with this BBC Doc. It brought the mythical club to life and provided such great context around the Madchester music scene.
The BBC Doc lead me to C86, which is a cassette compilation released by the British music magazine NME in 1986. It features new indie bands of the time. An NME staffer called this mix “the most indie thing to ever have existed.” Eventually, C86 became shorthand for that lo-fi, jangly guitar sound paired with poppy melodies. Indie is long since dead (as is my youth), but this week, I’m feeling moved to groove with its ghost.
Gems From My DMs
The best stuff people sent me.
Big Cluck Energy
Switching gears from nostalgia to presentism. I was completely unaware of the deep well of chicken content available on social media until I got an important DM and took a deep dive into all the ways people are getting creative with chickens. There are songs, there are dances, there are costumes! There is comedy! This is the content we all deserve after the last few years. Here are a few videos to get your algorithm clucking.
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