College campuses are filled with entrepreneurship LARPers. These students, inundated in startup mythology through their teens, look at creating startups like religion. To achieve salvation is ‘starting a (venture backed) company one day’. Influencer VCs are the saints that will help them get there. They obsessively read the same 10 books, quote the same people, and consume the same information. An excruciatingly small section of the internet is both their Bible and their Church. They rediscover normal concepts like friend groups as heavily corporatised ‘communities’. Somehow, they’re all mildly discontent with life. They’re always thinking- thinking about ‘what to work on’, where to live, but there’s often a curious lack of doing to match it. They look down at almost everything institutional, but it’s unclear whether this is an aesthetic and logical conclusion, or merely because they can’t seem to find their place in them themselves.
Lack of self-confidence for college-age students is definitely exploited by high-status companies, i.e. the only ones who can afford to pay $$$ to recruit on-campus. They offer an easy answer to the decision fatigue of carving your own path by narrowing the world down into a handful of legible options (tech, consulting, etc) while promising you the optionality to do whatever you want "later" in life. Of course, there are tradeoffs to how long you defer that decision…
Really well-articulated! I think for some (including me), it's hard to imagine the bigger picture when there's gnawing feeling of financial insecurity at the base of Maslow's hierarchy (https://kzhai.substack.com/p/061-examining-the-purpose-of-knowledge).
Lack of self-confidence for college-age students is definitely exploited by high-status companies, i.e. the only ones who can afford to pay $$$ to recruit on-campus. They offer an easy answer to the decision fatigue of carving your own path by narrowing the world down into a handful of legible options (tech, consulting, etc) while promising you the optionality to do whatever you want "later" in life. Of course, there are tradeoffs to how long you defer that decision…