Welcome back to the deep dive. I want you to
just, you know, picture a file on your computer
right now. It's probably sitting in a folder
that's labeled something like personal or maybe
career or just desperation or yeah, please hire
me in all caps. And it's this one document that
for better or worse claims to summarize your
entire existence as a productive human being.
It's the paper key, isn't it? It's somehow the
single most important document. in a modern adult's
life but we spend most of our time actively dreading
it absolutely we are talking of course about
the resume or early we're talking about the cv
you see Even just starting this, I can feel that
little bit of anxiety rising. Oh, yeah. Because
the moment you start to really look at this document,
the sheer weight of it hits you. I'm talking
about the term itself, curriculum vitae. Just
sounds heavy. It sounds so heavy. Just say it
out loud. It does not sound like a list of summer
jobs you held at the mall in high school. It
sounds important. It sounds academic. It sounds,
well, a little intimidating. That's because it's
carrying the weight of history. It's Latin. And
the literal translation is the course of life.
The course of life. See, that is heavy. That
is so profound. It sounds like something a philosopher
would write, you know, right before they die.
Not a PDF I upload to some online portal for
a mid -level marketing job. Right. Here is the
course of my life. I hope you like my experience
with pivot tables. Exactly. It feels like we're
dealing with something ancient and sacred here.
And we are. And honestly, just sticking with
that term curriculum vitae, that's where the
trouble begins for a lot of people. Because right
away, you slam into the core conflict of the
working world. Is it a CV? Is it a resume? Are
they the same thing? Oh, absolutely. If I upload
one when they ask for the other, have I just...
you know committed some kind of mortal sin am
i out of the running already this is the classic
panic moment you are applying for a job you see
the button and it says upload cv but your file
is named my resume final v3 dot doc final v3
yeah do you rename it do you panic do you need
to write a whole new document from scratch i
feel like every single person listening has had
that moment of just complete hesitation It's
an incredibly common point of confusion. People
use the terms interchangeably all the time in
casual conversation. You'll hear someone say,
hey, send me your CV, when what they really mean
is just send me a one -page summary. Right. But
depending on where you are geographically or
what specific industry you're trying to get into,
getting that terminology wrong can be a major,
major faux pas. How so? It sends a signal before
anyone has even read a single word of your qualifications.
It says, I don't know the norms of this field.
All right. It's the first test. Basically, it's
a shibboleth. If you know the password, you get
in. If you don't, you're out before you even
start it. So that's our mission for this deep
dive. We are not just going to give you formatting
tips that we will touch on structure because
it absolutely matters. We're going to decode
the language of employment. We're going to look
at this massive shift that's happening right
now and how we value careers. There's a whole
narrative trend that's popping up, especially
in the sciences. And we are going to explore
some absolutely fascinating and frankly, sometimes
depressing terminology that's buried in the footnotes
of the working world. The see also section of
our source material today is a complete goldmine
of modern workplace psychology and sociology.
We're going to talk about bore out golden parachutes
and the precariat. It really is a full tour through
the modern condition. We're pulling from a really
comprehensive breakdown of the term, its history,
its academic usage, and that whole surrounding
lexicon you just mentioned. So buckle up. We
are going to unpack the course of your life.
Let's start at the very beginning, the words
themselves. The Great Atlantic Divide, or I guess
we should start with the Great Linguistic Divide
first. Segment one, terminology and geography.
You mentioned course of life. Let's dig into
that Latin a little bit more. Yes. Curriculum
vitae. Etymologically, it's really quite beautiful,
but it's also quite rigorous. Curriculum comes
from the verb curere, which means to run. To
run, like a race. Exactly like a race. A curriculum
in ancient Rome wasn't a syllabus for a class.
It was a race course. It was the actual track
where the chariots ran their laps. Wow. So it
implies a circular motion, you know, laps, a
defined path that you have to traverse. It's
not a casual wander through the woods. It's a
track. That feels incredibly appropriate for
the modern corporate world, doesn't it? It feels
like a grind. I am running the laps. I am on
the track. That's the feeling. And vitae, of
course, is the genitive singular of vitae, which
means life. So you put it together and you get
the running of the life or maybe a bit more poetically,
the race course of the life, which is. Again,
so poetic, but then you have to actually say
it out loud in a modern office. And this is where
I feel like I'm back in high school trying to
impress a teacher and just completely failing.
How do you actually pronounce this? Because I
hear everything. I hear V -E -T -I, I hear V
-U -I -E -T. What is actually correct here? Well,
there's a legitimate debate, and it's actually
recorded in the dictionaries. If you look at
the source material, there are three distinct
variations that you'll find in English, and they
each tell you a little something about where
or maybe when someone learned their Latin. It's
a linguistic fingerprint. It is, yeah. It's a
classic case of linguistic evolution. Okay, so
lay them on me. What's option one, the one I
can say without, you know, getting laughed out
of the room? Option one is the one you probably
hear the most. It's the traditional school Latin
pronunciation. Okay. That sounds standard. That
sounds like what I would expect to hear maybe
in the Yuko or in a law firm. Very common there,
yes. And in most American legal or academic contexts
as well, it's the safe bet. If you're not sure,
go with Vitae. Okay. But then you have the second
variation, which is becoming more and more common
because of how Latin is actually instructed in
modern settings. That pronunciation is weakras.
With a W sound? With a W, yes. In classical Latin,
though, the way that Cicero or Caesar would have
actually spoken, the letter V, was pronounced
like a W. There was no V sound in ancient Rome.
So Vini, Viti, Vici was actually pronounced Wini,
Witi, Witi. Wow. OK, so curriculum we tie. That
sounds I don't know. It sounds a little soft.
Maybe here is my we tie. I feel like if I walked
into a corporate boardroom in New York and said,
here are copies of my curriculum we tie, they
might they might laugh me out of the room. They
might or they might think you're offering them
a breakfast cereal. Right. It definitely signals
a very specific academic background, though.
It does. It tells the listener I study classics
or I really care about historical phonetic reconstruction.
It's a flex, but it's a very dirty flex. It's
a dangerous flex in a job interview. It can be.
And then there's a third variant, which is less
common but still out there, mostly among older
speakers, and that is AVT. BT. Okay, that sounds
like a vitamin. Or like mighty curriculum vitae.
It's an anglicized vowel shift. It comes from
the great vowel shift in English where we basically
changed how we said all of our long vowels. It
sounds very, I don't know, 19th century British
barrister. My good man, pray examine my curriculum
vitae. Okay, so just to be safe, sticking with
vitae seems like the best middle ground, but
it's fascinating that the pronunciation alone
can be a shibboleth. It signals which group you
belong to. But the bigger signal, the one that
actually affects your job prospects, is how you
use the word itself versus the word resume. And
this is the geography part because I think a
lot of our listeners might just assume, oh, CV
is just a fancy word for resume. Right, like
flat versus apartment or lift versus elevator.
It's just a dialect thing, a bit of local flavor.
And if they are in the UK or New Zealand or Ireland.
Or most of the Commonwealth? They're absolutely
right. In most English -speaking countries outside
of North America, CV is the standard default
umbrella term. For everything? For everything.
If you are applying to work at a coffee shop
in London, you hand in your CV. If you're applying
to be a bank manager in Dublin, you hand in your
CV. It's just the word for a short summary of
your career. Okay. But then you cross the Atlantic.
You land in the U .S. or Canada. And suddenly
the rules change completely. Completely. In North
America, we have a strict bifurcation. We have
two very different documents with two different
names and two very different purposes. And mixing
them up is, well, it can be fatal to an application.
Let's break that distinction down because the
source material is very, very clear on this.
Okay. So in North America, the resume, which
is a French word, it originally means summary.
That's the document you use for almost all non
-academic jobs. So corporate, nonprofit, industrial.
All of it. If you're applying for a job at Google
or Ford or a local charity, you send a resume.
And a resume is short. Right. The name itself
implies brevity. Exactly. It's short. It's concise.
It's a summary. It's a highlight reel of your
career, not the full feature film. Okay. So then
what is the CV in North America? The CV is reserved
almost exclusively for academia, for medicine,
and for scientific research. And it is not short.
At all. It is a... comprehensive, often massive
document. that lists absolutely everything you
have ever done professionally. So this is where
all the confusion comes from, because you have
American dictionaries and universities like UC
Davis, which is cited in our source, pointing
out that people do use them interchangeably in
casual conversation. Right. An American hiring
manager might absolutely say, hey, shoot me your
CV. What they really mean is send me a resume.
And usually in that casual context, it's fine.
No one's going to penalize you. But if you are
applying for a Ph .D. program or a tenure track
position, at a university or a research fellowship
and you send them a two -page resume, you've
failed. Because you haven't shown them enough.
It looks like you haven't done anything. Exactly.
You haven't shown them the course of life. And
conversely, if you apply for that marketing job
in Chicago and you send them a 15 -page academic
CV listing every single conference you ever attended
in graduate school. You've also failed. You've
also failed. They'll think you don't understand
the corporate world at all. It's the Goldilocks
problem. One is too short for the professors.
The other is way too long for the recruiters.
That's it precisely. And the source explicitly
mentions that despite this conversational confusion,
the distinction in North American academia is
rigid. You cannot fake it. You just have to know
the code. So let's dig into what actually makes
these two documents so different. Not just the
name, but the format, the function, the whole
philosophy behind them. This is segment two.
Let's start with the industry resume, the common
North American style. Okay, so the purpose of
the industry resume is speed. It is a screening
tool, first and foremost. Speed for who? The
person writing it? No, no, no. Speed for the
reader, the employer, the hiring manager, the
recruiter. The source notes that employers rarely
spend more than a few minutes reviewing a resume.
A few minutes feels generous. It is. Yeah. In
reality, multiple studies have shown it's often
just seconds. The most famous one found an average
of a six -second scan. Six seconds. Six seconds
to judge my entire course of life. That's just,
that's deeply depressing. It is. I spent four
years in college, three years in my first job,
all of that effort, and I get six seconds. It
is depressing, but you have to understand the
reality of the market. A recruiter might get
200 applications for one position. They can't
read 200 life stories. So the goal isn't to find
people. It's to get rid of people. The goal is
to screen applicants out as quickly as possible.
That is why the format is so brutally concise.
One to two pages maximum. And the source emphasizes
what it calls the scan factor. The scan factor.
Success depends on having enough white space
to make it scannable. White space. So literally
the empty space on the page is valuable. Incredibly
valuable. Think about cognitive load. If you
get a document and it's just a solid wall of
text, size 8 font, margin set to zero, your eyes
just glaze over. You can't find the key information.
You can't see the skills. You can't see the relevant
job titles. It's just noise. So the industry
resume is really more like a marketing flyer.
That's a perfect analogy. It's a flyer. It highlights
only the experience, the education, and the skills
that are tailored to that specific position you're
applying for. Less is more. Precisely. In the
corporate world, brevity shows respect for the
reader's time. It also shows an ability to prioritize
information, which is a key executive function.
It says, I know it's important here, and I'm
only going to show you that. OK, now let's pivot
to the academic CV, because if the corporate
world is less is more, the academic world seems
to be more is more. More is everything. The purpose
of the academic CV is to provide a complete,
exhaustive, unabridged history of your academic
accomplishments. It is the literal realization
of that Latin translation, the course of life.
So what goes in there that doesn't go on a resume?
Oh, everything. Your detailed teaching experience,
every course you've ever taught with course numbers,
every research grant you've ever applied for,
won, or even been a part of, every award, every
presentation at every conference, every honor,
all your service to the university committee
work, departmental duties, and most importantly,
publications. It's publication. Every article,
every book chapter, every book review, even the
ones from 20 years ago that you're not particularly
proud of anymore. They all go on. And there's
no page limit. There is no page limit. In fact,
length is often seen as a proxy for seniority
and for productivity. A short CV in academia
can actually be seen as a sign of inexperience
or, worse, inactivity. So if you're a tenured
professor with a three -page CV, people are going
to start asking questions. They're going to wonder
what you've been doing for the last decade. It
looks suspicious. This brings us back to that
specific example from the source material that
just... It blew my mind. It mentioned an academic
CV that was 69 pages long. 69 pages. Just try
to visualize that for a second. That is the size
of a novella. Can you imagine being a recruiter
at a tech startup? You open an application and
you're greeted with a 69 page PDF. You delete
it before you even got to page three. You would
assume it was a prank or that the person is completely
and utterly out of touch with reality. Right.
But in a tenure review committee meeting, that
69 -page document is gold. It's the main event.
It is a testament to a career of relentless scholarly
output. It reflects a completely different value
system. In the corporate world, the key value
is, can you do this specific job for me right
now? Right. It's about immediate utility. Yes.
In academia, the value is, what have you contributed
to the great body of human knowledge over your
entire lifetime? So the 69 pages isn't just a
list. It proves the depth. It proves you've been
running the race, the curriculum for a very long
time. And that you haven't stopped. It's an archive.
It's a repository of a life's work. I love that
distinction. One is a flyer. The other is an
archive. But speaking of archives and, you know,
dusty academic traditions, we have to talk about
the grammar. Because nothing says I'm smart like
correcting someone's Latin. And nothing says
oops like getting that correction wrong. Exactly.
Welcome to segment three, the grammar corner.
Ah, the plural trap. This is a classic. It's
the kind of thing that gets debated at faculty
cocktail parties, probably after the second glass
of wine. Okay, so let's set it up. Curriculum
vitae. Singular. One course of life. What is
the plural? If I am a hiring committee chair
and I have a stack of these documents on my desk
from different candidates, what do I have? If
you want to be correct in both English and Latin,
you have a stack of curricula vitae. Curricula
vitae. Okay, so the first word becomes plural,
curricula, and the second word, vitae, stays
exactly the same. That is correct. Curriculum
is a neuter noun and the second declension in
Latin. The plural ends in A. It's a pattern you
know from other words. Datum becomes data. Medium
becomes media. And curriculum becomes curricula.
Okay, that part's easy enough, but why does vitae
stay the same? That's the part that trips people
up. Because vitae is, in the genitive case, it's
possessive. It means of life. So when you say
curricula vitae, you're literally saying courses
of life. The concept of life itself remains this
singular abstract. You have multiple courses,
but they are all courses of life. OK, that makes
perfect sense. But this is where it gets tricky,
right? Because sometimes people try to be a little
too smart. They think, well, hold on. If I have
multiple CVs from multiple people, surely there
are multiple lives involved. It's a logical leap.
I have Bob's life and Alice's life and Steve's
life. Multiple lives. So they decide to pluralize
the second word too. They say curricula vitarum.
Vitarum. Vitarum. What does that mean exactly?
So vitarum is the genitive plural of vita, means
of lives. So curricula vitarum would literally
translate to courses of lives. Now that sounds
technically accurate. If I have Bob's CV and
Alice's CV on my desk, those represent two different
lives. It is technically grammatical in Latin,
yes. If Cicero were talking about the different
life paths of different Roman senators, he might
use that construction. But the source material
identifies this as a hyper -correction based
on superficial knowledge of Latin. Ouch. Superficial
knowledge. That is a sick burn coming from a
dictionary source. It's a brutal takedown. It's
basically a trap for the pretentious. Because
while it is technically acceptable if you're
referring to a group of CVs belonging to different
people, it is arguably incorrect in standard
modern usage. Why? Because it draws attention
to the grammar rather than the document itself.
It's fussy. In standard usage, the usage that's
recorded in Merriam -Webster and the Oxford English
Dictionary and American Heritage is always curricula
vitae. So the advice here is don't try to be
the smartest person in the room by dropping a
Vitarum. You'll just look like a show -off who
might actually be wrong. Exactly. It's the linguistic
equivalent of wearing a tuxedo to a casual lunch.
Yes, you're technically dressed well, but you
just look ridiculous. Stick to curricula vitae.
Or if you want to be really safe and modern,
just say CVs. CVs works. We like CVs. It's democratic.
It's easy. But let's move on from the grammar
of the past to the structure of the future, because
even though we just marveled at that 69 page
list of publications, it turns out that the academic
world itself is actually starting to rebel against
the list format. This is a really fascinating
development and it's happening right now at segment
four, the evolution of the CV. We are seeing
a major shift toward the narrative. Right. Because
the problem with a list, even a 69 -page list,
is that it's just raw data. It doesn't tell a
story. It has no soul. Exactly. A traditional
academic CV is just a long list of publications,
grants, and citations. It's basically just counting
beans. I wrote 50 papers. Okay, great. But did
anyone actually read them? Did they change public
policy? Did they help a community? A list can't
answer that. answer that question. It measures
output, not outcome. Perfectly put. It measures
quantity, not quality or impact. So to fix this,
enter the responsible research movement. What
is that? It's a global movement, particularly
strong in the sciences and medicine. And the
goal is to shift the focus of evaluation. They
want to emphasize the societal relevance of research,
of teaching, of outreach, rather than just counting
how many citations you have in a database. They
want to know, so what? That's the core question.
So what? You discovered a new protein. Fantastic.
So what? Who does that help? How does that move
science forward? How does it benefit society?
And this isn't just some vague philosophical
idea. This is actually being implemented by major
institutions. The source mentions a very specific,
very recent event, October 2024. The Canadian
case study. This is a huge deal for anyone in
the research world in Canada, and it's being
watched globally. The government of Canada's
main research councils, we call them the tri
-agency, it's NSERC for science and engineering,
SSHRC for social sciences and humanities, and
CIHR for health research. The big three. The
big three. They announced a transition to a brand
new CV template for all funding applications.
And what's the big change in this new template?
They're now allowing a free -form narrative personal
statement. A narrative personal statement. So
instead of just bullet points of your achievements,
you get to write paragraphs. You get to actually
tell a story. You get to explain who you are
as a researcher and why your work matters. And
this isn't happening in a vacuum. It aligns perfectly
with trends we're seeing in the U .S., with the
National Institutes of Health, the NIH, and in
the U .K. with U .K. Research and Innovation.
The whole world of science funding is moving
away from bean counting. Why is this such a game
changer? It sounds subtle, but it feels big.
It's huge because it fundamentally changes how
we value things like soft skills and specialized
training, even in the hard sciences. Let me give
you an example. Please. In a traditional list
-based CV, let's say you spent three years mentoring
underprivileged high school students in a science
lab. That might just be one line item. It says,
Mentor STEM Outreach Program 2021 -2024. It looks
exactly the same as someone who just showed up
once a year for a photo op. Right. The list just
flattens the experience completely. It strips
it of all meaning. Exactly. But in a narrative
format, you can explain the impact of that mentorship.
You can say, I mentored three students from underrepresented
backgrounds. I developed a specific training
protocol for them. And they have now all gone
on to pursue science degrees at university with
one winning a national scholarship. Wow. That's
a totally different story. It's a different world.
You can explain how your own unique background
influences the kind of research questions you
ask. It humanizes the researcher. It moves from
just what have you done, which is the list to
who are you and why does it matter, which is
the narrative. It allows for a much more holistic
view of a course of life. It's almost like the
original definition of curriculum vitae is finally
coming true after all these years. It's becoming
a biography again, not just a receipt of your
academic transactions. That's a beautiful way
to put it. It's becoming a biography. But of
course, the CV is just the entry ticket, right?
Once you hand it over, whether it's a narrative
or a 69 -page list, you then enter the actual
workplace. And this brings us to segment five.
the vocabulary of the modern workplace this was
my favorite part of the source material it's
like we're moving from the document itself to
the world of work that that document grants you
access to the c also and classifications sections
in the source provided this incredible taxonomy
of modern employment that is frankly it's a little
terrifying but also incredibly enlightening It
reads like a dictionary of modern despair with
a few glimmers of gold thrown in. Let's start
with the dark side because the source lists some
terms that just perfectly define the modern struggle.
First up, bore out. Yes, we all know burnout.
Burnout is high -octane stress. It's too much
work, too much pressure, it's adrenaline overload,
and it's followed by complete collapse. Right.
Bore -out is the polar opposite, but it's just
as damaging. How so? It sounds almost relaxing
to be bored at work. It's not. It's being so
under -challenged, so profoundly bored, that
it causes its own kind of stress, lethargy, and
even depression. It's the awful feeling of knowing
you have potential, knowing you have skills,
but you are stuck in a role where you do absolutely
nothing of value. It's that feeling of just staring
at the clock, watching the minutes tick by, and
knowing that your skills and your brain are just
rotting away. Exactly. It's an attack on your
self -worth. Yeah. It forces you to ask, if I'm
doing nothing of value all day, am I valuable?
And it often leads directly to another term on
the list, presenteeism. Prisontism. OK, so that's
being at work, but not really being there. Is
that right? Correct. It's the act of being physically
present at your desk, you know, showing your
face, but not actually functioning. Maybe you're
sick and you should be home. Maybe you're distracted
by a family issue or maybe you're just suffering
from intense bore out. But you are there physically
adding zero value just to keep your seat warm.
Because the culture demands it. If I can't see
you at your desk, you must not be working. Exactly.
It's a total failure of management. It prioritizes
the appearance of work over the actual output
of work. Which, of course, feeds into the dread.
Which brings us to the next term, the source
lists. The Sunday Scaries. A very modern term
for a very age -old feeling. It's that specific
sense of dread that you experience on a Sunday
afternoon or evening right before the work week
starts again. I think every single person has
felt that. The sun starts to go down on Sunday
and your stomach just drops. It's the anticipation
of the loss of freedom. It's the knowledge that
the cycle is about to begin again. And maybe
you have the Sunday scaries because you know
you're going back to a toxic workplace. The source
actually lists some specific toxic behaviors.
My favorite, or I guess my least favorite, was
kiss up, kick down. Oh, that is a very specific
and a very nasty personality type. It's the classic
middle manager who is just incredibly charming
and obsequious to their superiors. Kissing up.
Yes. They bring the boss coffee. They laugh at
all their jokes. They are abusive and tyrannical
to their own subordinates. They're kicking down.
It's the worst kind of co -worker because if
you try to complain to the boss, the boss just
says, what are you talking about? Steve is great.
He's my right hand man. Exactly. The toxicity
is completely hidden from above and it's directed
entirely below. And the fact that this behavior
has its own specific category in the C also list
suggests it is far, far too common in corporate
structures. It must be. And it might be related
to two other really heavy terms that were listed,
narcissism in the workplace and psychopathy in
the workplace. Whoa. Yeah, those are heavy clinical
terms to just be thrown around in an article
about employment. They are, but it's telling
that they're there. It's very telling, but they
are relevant. Because corporate structures, unfortunately,
can sometimes reward those traits. The ability
to charm up and kick down, a lack of empathy,
a laser focus on personal gain. Those can get
you promoted. at least in the short term. So
the source listing them as see -all -store categories
suggests there's a significant amount of literature
out there connecting these personality disorders
to organizational structures. And to what we
often call success. That is genuinely terrifying.
So the system might actually be selecting for
psychopaths. In some hyper -competitive, results
-at -any -cost environments. It's certainly a
well -documented risk. And if you are stuck under
one of those people doing work that feels completely
meaningless, you might have what the source calls
a bullshit job. This is a concept that was popularized
by the anthropologist David Graeber. A bullshit
job is a job that is so pointless, so utterly
unnecessary, that even the person doing it feels
deep down that it shouldn't exist. It's different
from just a bad job, right? A hard job. Oh, completely
different. A bad job like cleaning sewers or
collecting garbage or being a nurse is necessary.
It's hard work. It might be unpleasant. But if
those people stop doing it, society collapses.
Those are vital jobs. A bullshit job is, you
know, ticking boxes on forms that will never
be read, compiling reports that go straight into
the digital shredder. It's being a corporate
lawyer whose only real job is to create work
for another corporate lawyer. It must create
this deep sense of existential despair. I am
wasting the only life I have. Exactly. Humans
have a fundamental need to feel useful. Bullshit
jobs are a direct assault on that need. Now contrast
that with the McJob. The McJob. A term that was
popularized by the author Douglas Coupland and
then really cemented by McDonald's, much to their
annoyance. I'm sure. It refers to low pay, low
prestige, low prospect work. But unlike the bullshit
job, the McJobe is usually doing something real.
You're serving food. You're doing actual labor.
That's true. But it's characterized by the lack
of a future. It's a dead end. It's viewed by
society as a temporary station, not as a career.
It lacks dignity. Okay, now let's look at the
other end of the spectrum. The people who are
definitely not working McJobs. The golden terms.
Ah, yes. The exit strategies of the elite. First,
we have the golden handshake. That's it. A very
generous severance package. It's essentially,
we want you to leave, so here's a giant pile
of money to go away quietly and not sue us. Must
be nice. Here's a million dollars. Please stop
coming to work. Right. And then you have the
golden parachute. Which is even better, I assume.
It's more specific. That is protection for executives.
Yeah. Usually the top level C -suite during a
merger or a dismissal. If the company gets bought
out and they're fired, or if they run the company
into the ground and get pushed out by the board.
They still get paid. They deploy the golden parachute
and they float gently down to safety on a cushion
of millions and millions of dollars. While all
the workers below them might be facing mass layoffs.
Or facing life as part of the precariat. This
is a really important socioeconomic concept,
the source highlighted, precariat. I feel like
this is a term we are going to hear more and
more in the coming years. I think so, too. It's
a portmanteau. It blends precarious and proletariat.
It describes a new and growing social class of
people who are living with deeply unstable employment.
Think gig workers, zero -hour contracts, temporary
staff. So this is not the traditional working
class with unions and pensions and job security.
No. They have no security. They have no predictability.
They often don't know if they're going to have
work next week. They're always one missed paycheck
away from disaster. They live in a constant state
of precariousness. Which leads, I think, to the
final dark term on the list, wage slavery. A
very provocative term, but one with... deep historical
roots in labor movements. It describes the condition
where a person's livelihood depends entirely
on wages, usually immediate wages, drawing parallels
to a lack of genuine freedom. The argument being,
if you cannot afford to stop working for even
a day without risking starvation or addiction,
are you truly free? It's a heavy question. It
challenges the whole notion of what we call free
labor. It does. And it all circles back to this
one document, doesn't it? The CV. Yeah. The resume.
It's the tool we use to try to escape the precariat,
to avoid the McJobe, to hopefully one day find
a golden handshake, or at the very least, just
avoid the Sunday scaries. It is the currency
of this entire brutal ecosystem. It's the ticket
you hope will get you out of the hole. Or at
least we hope it is. We have covered a lot of
ground today. We started with the Latin roots,
the curriculum vitae, the course of life. We
debated the pronunciation. Is it Vitae or is
it Weetai? We did. And we navigated the geography
of the Great Atlantic Divide. The short, punchy
U .S. resume versus the sprawling global CV.
The six second scan versus the 69 page archive.
We learned about the grammar trap of curricula
vitae. Don't do it, folks. Just say CVs. It's
easier for everyone. Please. And we saw the potential
future in the Canadian Narrative CV, this big
shift from just lists to actual stories. And
finally, we explored the... Well, the terrifying
vocabulary of the modern workplace from bore
out and bullshit jobs all the way up to golden
parachutes. It really highlights that this piece
of paper or this PDF file on your computer is
just an entry ticket. It gets you into this incredibly
complex ecosystem of gold collars, pink collars,
gig workers and knowledge workers. It does. And
it really forces us to ask, what are we actually
presenting to the world with this document? What
story are we telling? Which brings us to our
final thought. The source mentioned two other
interesting see -also terms that we didn't quite
get to, resume fraud and video resumes. Both
are rising trends. One is about deception. The
other is about performance. So as we move toward
these narrative formats and as we start using
video to apply for jobs, you know, TikTok resumes
are a real thing now. Are we actually moving
closer to the truth of who a candidate is or
are we just getting better at rewarding the best
storytellers? That is the fundamental danger,
isn't it? A list of facts like on the old CV
is hard to spin. You either won the award or
you didn't. You either published the paper or
you didn't. A narrative. That's pure spin. That's
rhetoric. So we might be moving from an era of
who did the most work to a new era of who tells
the best story about their work. Which is a valuable
skill in itself, don't get me wrong, but it's
maybe not the number one skill we want to prioritize
when we're hiring, say, a brain surgeon. Exactly.
And if the plural of curriculum is curricula,
meaning courses, maybe we're focusing too much
on the course, the list, the race, the steps
we've taken. And in this new narrative world,
we're still losing sight of the vitae. The life.
The actual life behind the document. The human
being. That is what matters. Something to think
about the next time you have to update that file
on your computer. Thanks for listening to The
Deep Dive. See you next time.