One, an exile from the business school, shared that one of his first assignments had been to develop a thirty-second elevator pitch for himself. As he distilled himself down to his most marketable qualities, he told his classmates, “I felt my soul leave my body.” They all seemed to know how he felt—these were the early days of pandemic Zoom classes, and they filled their little boxes with heart emojis.

SEED: This could fuel an essay on the psychological cost of personal branding culture, especially the absurdity of the thirty-second elevator pitch as a professional ritual. XREF: Connects to broader critiques of hustle culture and the quantified self, and to literature on the commodification of identity under late capitalism.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 181