Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream Read online

  You must recognize that you alone are the source of all the conditions and situations in your life. You must recognize that whatever your world looks like right now, you alone have caused it to look that way. The state of your health, your finances, your personal relationships, your professional life—all of it is your doing, yours and no one else’s.1

  Lest this sentiment sound like a psychotic delusion, the blurbs on the cover of the book announce that it is shared, or at least has been endorsed, by Norman Vincent Peale and Mark Victor Hansen, coauthor of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. More troublingly, from a personal standpoint, there is also a blurb from a senior vice president of PaineWebber (now UBS), the company that handles my Keogh plan. I can only hope that its employees retain some dim sense that the market is not entirely an emanation of their interior lives.

  Reading along, I discover how it is that our thoughts and desires mold the world around us. “Things attract other things,” meaning that there is a kind of gravitational force connecting our thoughts to their real-world fulfillments. “Whenever you think something, the thought immediately attracts its physical equivalent.” Thus, for example, the thought of $3 million can be relied on to exert a powerful attractive force on whatever currency may be lying around, and this force actually increases in strength as the dollar bills get closer. How can this be? By way of explanation, Hernacki enlists some physics in the form of the law of gravitational attraction:

  F = GM1M2/R2

  Here, the M’s are the masses of the two attracting objects; G is the gravitational constant, and R is the distance between them. Obviously, as R —say, the distance between you and the money—gets smaller, F, the force attracting the money, gets radically larger. Confused? Hernacki is reassuring.

  Now, I congratulate you if you were able to follow that discussion and understand the mathematics of this phenomenon. But if you didn’t understand a word of it, don’t worry. All you have to do is think the thought. Simply by saying the word, you put the law of attraction into motion. The rest is taken care of, automatically and with accelerating acceleration.2

  Appallingly, he has even screwed up the purloined physics here: the acceleration is not accelerating; only the motion accelerates. But what am I nitpicking for? No dollars are flying into my pockets at any detectable speed.

  I move on from Hernacki’s physics of wish fulfillment to Before You Think Another Thought by Bruce I. Doyle III, which, Amazon.com informs me, is popular with Hernacki’s readers. In this slender book, we no longer find gravity connecting thoughts to their real-life equivalents, which is somewhat reassuring, since thoughts of course have no mass (meaning that Hernacki’s F is always and inevitably zero).3 In Doyle’s scheme, thoughts fulfill themselves without help from any intervening force, and they can do this because each “thoughtform” is really “a minute wave of energy . . . operat[ing] faster than the speed of light.” Fortunately for us, “the mission of each thoughtform is to fulfill the intent of the thought,” and it does so “by attracting similar thoughtforms to help it fulfill itself.” How do you make your dreams come true? Simply by beaming them out from your mind. “Scientifically,” Doyle asserts—and it is hard to think of a setting in which that adverb has been more flagrantly abused—“one might say that focusing your attention on the energy field of consciousness, which contains the waves of all possibilities, creates the particles (events and materializations) that you experience as your reality.”4

  Among other things, these books explain the importance of the “winning attitude” I have been urged to adopt: a positive attitude “attracts” or “fulfills,” depending on which author’s weird science you go with, positive results, with little or no action on your part required. Herein, too, lies the answer to the question I once posed to Kimberly: would it be enough to just fake a winning attitude? No way, according to Doyle:

  People who just pretend to have a positive attitude may be more acceptable, but they will still attract according to how they are really vibrating—the energy they are emanating will attract their circumstances.5

  The obvious liberal rejoinders come to mind: What about the child whose home is hit by a bomb? Did she have some bomb-shaped thoughtform that brought ruin down on her head? And did my boot-camp mates cause the layoffs that drove them out of their jobs by “vibrating” at a layoff-related frequency? It seems inexcusably cruel to tell people who have reached some kind of personal nadir that their problem is entirely of their own making. I find my thoughtforms massing for an attack on Hernacki, Doyle, and Knowles—pummeling them, knocking them to the ground, all the while accusing them of unconsciously bringing this assault on themselves. Because how else could anything happen to these fellows, except through their own will and desire?

  But from the point of view of the economic “winners”—those who occupy powerful and high-paying jobs—the view that one’s fate depends entirely on oneself must be remarkably convenient. It explains the winners’ success in the most flattering terms while invalidating the complaints of the losers. Patrick’s clients, for example, came to the boot camp prepared to blame their predicament on the economy, or the real estate market, or the inhuman corporate demands on their time. But these culprits were summarily dismissed in favor of alleged individual failings: depression, hesitation, lack of focus. It’s not the world that needs changing, is the message, it’s you. No need, then, to band together to work for a saner economy or a more human-friendly corporate environment, or to band together at all. As one of my fellow campers put it, we are our own enemies.

  But it’s all too easy for me to sneer at the EST-minded gurus. When I get past my revulsion, the boot-camp experience and subsequent reading have one clear lesson for me in my role as a job seeker, and that is that I may not be doing enough. If I don’t find a job, and that is the goal I set for myself, it may in fact be my own fault. I resolve to try harder, do more, put those thoughtforms to work! I need to get out more, network more, and network with people who have more to offer me than the unhappy crew assembled by Knowles.

  SEARCHING FOR NETWORKING opportunities closer to home—and hopefully closer to the people who do the actual hiring—I come across a conveniently timed ExecuNet meeting in Richmond, designed to help retool executives “in transition.” When I call to inquire, I am asked about my salary expectations, and this time, in a surge of positive thinking, I say $100,000. But that turns out to be half as much as what you need to get into the Richmond confab; for pikers like me, there’s another meeting in Washington. The cost is a mere $35, plus the $150 I’ve already spent to become an ExecuNet member and receive its monthly newsletter—a small price to pay, I guess, to network with a superior class of people. I am advised to bring forty copies of my résumé and to dress in business clothes. But when I get to Washington, the latter instruction is overruled by the weather: given that it’s freezing cold with icy patches on the sidewalks and a five-block walk between the Metro station and my hotel, I go in slacks and sneakers, though the upper body is, I think, respectably put together.

  Ah, sweet luxury! The get-together takes place in an upper-middle-type hotel, at least $100 a night beyond the Hampton Inn, in a spacious conference room where an entire buffet awaits us: fruit and cheese, egg rolls, satay sticks, coffee, and soda. All we are missing, one of my fellow job seekers observes, is the wine. Before the program begins, we have half an hour to network, which is easy enough to do since there are only five—not the promised forty—other people present, and there’s no way for anyone to escape my overtures. Paul, a deadly pale, thirtyish fellow, tells me that he is still reeling from a conversation he had with his boss last week, who warned him of a coming wave of layoffs and that he, Paul, was likely to be let go, if only because he is paid more than anyone else in the department. His title is impressive—director of business development—and he must earn over $100,000 to be here. But success, in his case, has had a perverse effect.

  I also approach Donald, who unnerves me by starting with, “I kn
ow I’ve seen you somewhere before!” Before he can recall that the previous sighting must have been on TV, someone intervenes to tease Donald about his “dumb pickup line.” A laid-off sales and marketing VP with a wife and three children to support, Donald confides that he’s been through “some very wild emotional mood swings. I’ve gotten defocused, kind of hiding from my reality.” But he seems to have absorbed the EST-like ideology of the job seekers’ world, reporting, “Now I’m totally past any sort of victim mentality, which is so dysfunctional.”

  When we are seated comfortably around the table, Ron, our leader for the evening, introduces himself. He identifies himself as a “serial entrepreneur” who has launched all sorts of small companies providing business services. The high point of his career seems to have been the years he spent at the RNC (Republican National Committee), though he assures us, “I don’t go around with a big R on my chest,” perhaps on the off chance that there might be a Democrat present. I don’t hold that against him, but if I had to “design,” as Kimberly might put it, an RNC operative, Ron would be it. He has the burnished skin of a man who can afford regular facials, and a collar so tight that his face puffs out alarmingly from the neck. As he speaks, his eyes slither warily from one of us to another, reminding me of the Time Warner executives I once lunched with years ago, who seemed poised at all times between arrogance and deference, nervously calculating which to project. A line from a Robert Lowell poem comes to mind: “a savage servility/slides by on grease.”

  “There are four ways to find a job,” Ron is explaining: “networking, networking, networking, and networking.” As for posting your résumé on job boards like Monster.com—don’t bother, if only because you’ll want to send a customized résumé for each job you apply for. I can only wonder what “customizing” involves and how much it borders on fraud. Tim, the sandy-haired man on my right, who has carried Ron’s tight-collar theme to what looks like a painful extreme, chimes in to testify that in thirty years as a VP of HR, he never posted a job advertisement on a board. Donald observes that the boards are for “your fifty-K people and below.” Apparently, in the exalted circle I have entered here, all jobs are attained through personal contacts.

  Continuing his introduction, Ron reveals that he does not actually work for ExecuNet, but for some other firm called McCarthy and Company, which is in possession of 300 highlevel networking contacts. The purpose of this evening’s program is to teach us how to make use of such contacts, should we be inspired to pay McCarthy for the right to pursue them.

  But any sense of having arrived at some place of comfortable superiority evaporates with a comment from Neal, a fortyish former media manager with an Australian accent and unruly blond hair. Sounding like a thousand blues songs, he says, “I wake up and say, ‘Oh God, another morning’ . . . I have no focus.” Focus, I am beginning to realize, is a code word for an emotional rather than a cognitive state; to lose it is to be not just confused or distracted but seriously depressed. Patrick would have come to life at Neal’s admission of despair—digging into him to find the buried depression, challenging him to confront, of course, Neal.

  Ron, however, is impervious to desperation; the secret of focus, he says, is “to make the search process like going into the office, whether that means going to the library, to a friend’s house, or to our [McCarthy’s] office.” Furthermore, you have to have someone to “keep you accountable,” meaning a surrogate boss-figure. “We’re used to having bosses, being responsive to someone, so you’ve got to create the same dynamic.”

  Neal appears unmollified by this advice, which of course I recognize from the Forty-Plus meeting: turn your job search into a job, and not just a freelance-type job. You have to structure it hierarchically, complete with someone playing the role of boss, preferably a paid coach like Ron. Thus the one great advantage of unemployment—the freedom to do as you please, to get up when you want, wear what you want, and let your mind drift here and there—is foreclosed. Just when you finally have a chance to be fully autonomous and possibly creative, for a few months anyway, you have to invent a little drama in which you are still toiling away for the man. The arrangement brings to mind Erich Fromm’s best-seller of the fifties, Escape from Freedom, which was an attempt to understand the appeal of fascism. What clearer sign of an aversion to freedom than actually paying someone to play the role of your boss?

  Ron opens the session up for questions, and Donald asks whether he should mention a recent illness, which cost him three months of work, to prospective employers. Ron’s advice: “Turn [the illness] into a sound bite that could be positive for you.” Emboldened by Donald, I ask, “What if you’ve lost time due to homemaking and raising children?” Ron replies:

  The challenge is to be a beggar with a great story. If that story doesn’t land you [get you a job], you’ve probably got a values mismatch. Turn it into a compelling story.

  A beggar? Well, perhaps that does sum up the status of motherhood in our society. I glance at the one other woman at the table, whose résumé describes her as having spent much of the last decade bringing the idea of “competition” to Latin America for some New York-based bank, but her eyes dart back anxiously to Ron. I must be the only one here who didn’t understand that homemaking is such an unusual experience as to require an entertaining explanation. How would I begin my “compelling story”? I met this guy, see, and, uh . . .

  Ron goes on to the meat of the evening, though given his metaphors, the main course sounds more like dessert. Recruiters, he counsels, are like the job boards on the Internet—something to be avoided. Ron’s “significant other” is a recruiter, and he knows “they won’t do much for you unless you can do something for them”—which sends me off into irrelevant fantasies on the subject of Ron’s love life. Things are looking up in the job market, he continues, but this will at first cause more competition, as people seek to leave the less-than-desirable “interim jobs” they have found, which is “another reason you’ve got to be the banana split.” All this is delivered in a low-key, noninvasive tone unlike that of any of my previous coaches—just a casual sharing of information among equals. Here’s an idea: Write to executives who are profiled in business publications and tell them what their company needs at this stage, which is, of course, you. Tell them how you’re going to “add value” to their firm. “Stand out. You’ve got to get into that banana split area.”

  Maybe we are in the banana split area already, because sometimes things get too slippery even for Ron. On the subject of the “Five Achilles’ Heels of a Career Search,” one of which is “lack of focus,” he launches into a meandering metaphor about being at a train station and deciding you might not want to get on the same train again. Or you might want to check out where the other trains are going, or you might get on your usual train and get off at another stop. Turning to values, he tells us, “Most successful candidates get in touch with their values.” But what are values? “Values aren’t the same as morals. Greed can be a value.” Perhaps as a disclaimer, he tells us, “Males are not very good with the vision stuff.”

  But there’s all sorts of useful information here too, which I struggle to commit to my notebook. Ask people to give you their contacts, and when they do, write them thank-you notes by hand, on nice stationery. Get a fountain pen; ballpoint won’t do. If you can’t get a real interview, at least ask for a twenty-minute “contact interview” aimed at prying contacts out of people. Wear a suit and tie or the female equivalent at all times, even on weekends, and Ron seems to give me a warning glance here; the sneakers have been noted. Network everywhere. One fellow “landed” thanks to networking at a 7-Eleven on a Saturday morning; luckily he had been fully suited up at the time.

  During a brief break devoted to restrooms and refilling our plates, Paul catches me in the corridor and tells me his story again, only in this version it was just yesterday, not a week ago, when the boss warned him of the impending layoffs. I don’t think he’s lying; I think that the boss’s baleful sp
eech has simply filled up Paul’s brain and is occupying all the available time slots in memory. He will get to tell the story yet again, since our final hour is devoted to giving three-minute “commercials”—a sort of long version of the “elevator speeches” Kimberly and Joanne recommended. I listen in awe as my fellow seekers rise from their seats to summarize careers spent managing multimillion-dollar accounts, launching new products and technologies, reviving dying enterprises. Not only am I wearing sneakers, but I seem to have passed through the world without leaving a dent.

  This time I am somewhat prepared, though I haven’t memorized my speech and am counting on the presence of an audience to awaken the impulse to entertain. I say that PR and event planning are very closely connected for me: my events make news, and my press conferences are events. As for speechwriting, I don’t mean to boast, but frankly I’ve found that events go better if I write the major speeches. By prior decision, I hint at successes that cannot be fully divulged due to confidentiality agreements: as a PR person currently doing a lot of work with celebrities, I say, I specialize in the hard cases where there are drinking problems or anger management issues. The drinking-problem idea had come up when Kimberly asked me to put my career in something called “PAR” (Problem/Action/Results) form. Once, on a book tour, my media escort had shared some dish about a certain well-known cookbook author who was inseparable from his fifth of vodka, and what a struggle it was to enforce coherency throughout a long day of back-to-back interviews. Kimberly felt this “problem” was unsuitable for a résumé, but it was the only one I could come up with. I pause to let my audience picture me deftly herding a series of drunk and disorderly celebrities, and conclude that I have always handled these cases with discretion, imagination, and cunning.