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Careers can surprise you.
What were your first seven jobs? A simple question, but it dominated Twitter over the weekend. Turns out people love talking about themselves, cracking jokes, and discussing the current state of labor under capitalism. Who knew?
The #First7Jobs meme started with this earnest tweet from singer Marian Call:
And quickly picked up enough momentum to turn into a full-fledged hashtag game. As you might expect, jokers had a field day with it:
Most people answered seriously, though, and the results were revealing on a couple of levels.
Successful people’s answers reminded us that every once in a while, someone goes from washing dishes to being an astronaut. Or that a kid running a slushee machine can one day be Lin-Manuel Miranda.
But that’s a rare career trajectory, especially for younger people.
The other revealing thing about #First7Jobs is that very few people—even those relatively new to the workforce—reported having fewer than seven. Getting and keeping a job for life, then collecting a pension and retiring, is a thing of the past. If young people want pay increases, they have to change jobs.
So #First7Jobs turned out to be more than just another chain-letter survey —the kind that used to get passed around LiveJournal, but now get passed around Facebook. It’s simultaneously a reminder that success is still (kind of) possible (in rare cases), a commentary on the economic struggle most people are going through, and a new joke format to play with.
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