The Strange Truth of the Elevator Pitch

A Paper for Philosophy

Ninety seconds. The theoretical time allotted for a moment shared with another person in an elevator. An interaction that defines your impression despite its brevity. An elevator pitch—what an intriguing concept. A speech that lasted just a minute and a half might have been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. How could I possibly compress the immensity of a life into such a small space? More difficult still, how does one “sell” oneself at all? Supply and demand may dictate the sale of the pen, but a person's character proves more ambiguous. Is one’s story and place in the world limited to what they can say in ninety seconds? Do I even have a story to tell? Perhaps my entire existence is analogous to this mere pitch. 

I stared at the blank paper with a correspondingly blank mind. My first attempts tried to mold me into someone more employable, but those always fell short. On paper, the lines looked professional; spoken aloud, they felt hollow, as if I were auditioning for a role that wasn’t mine. Ninety seconds, which initially felt too short, now felt much too long. By narrating my experience drafting an elevator pitch, I will depict how writing becomes an act of self-construction that reflects Camus’s notion of the absurd—the demand to create meaning despite its limits—and Barthes’s claim about the “death of the author,” which reveals how our self-narratives escape our control once shared with others. 

Drafting my pitch felt less like summarizing a resume than grappling with the absurd. The desperate search for meaning where it might not inherently exist, embedded in this process, defined the infamous contradiction, where our desire for transparency meets the universe’s indifference. As Camus explains, the absurd is born from “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart” (Camus 15). Pursuing this in the mere form of drafting a pitch, I came to realize, was a striking example of life in the grander scheme, which is similarly a perpetual quest for purpose. In reflection, it seemed every “Tell me about yourself” I had encountered in the past meant a confrontation with this absurd notion. In many aspects of my life, I have wondered if I really was the only person who did not know how to answer this loaded inquiry, who took this as a grueling interrogation rather than a harmless question. Was everyone else faking certainty, or was this ambiguity all my own? 

Each attempt at answering the question of who I am never quite satisfies, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder, I repeat this task to define myself in a cyclical revision process. Camus explains that “the workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd” (Camus 45). Drafting my elevator pitch mirrored this rhythm with each draft, each retelling, each attempt to define myself inevitably unfinished, yet always necessary. The absurd lay not in finishing the task, but endlessly beginning it again. Telling my narrative and extracting value from it is an endeavor I must continue to pursue in emergent forms for the rest of my life—each draft inevitably unfinished, yet always necessary.

It seemed every time I arrived at an idea and tried to put words to who I am, I was met with a cascade of new questions. The pitch became a miniature of existence, where meaning is never guaranteed but must still be pursued, the clash between our longing for clarity and the “profound indifference” of the universe (Camus 4). This thought led me to consider the absurdity of college itself, the betweenness of it all. Here, I feel the “stage sets collapse” often (Camus 10): weeks of mechanized routines followed by the restless desire for any distraction that might interrupt the weariness that grows. Yet the “weariness” Camus describes is not solely fatigue; it is a special kind of exhaustion that, while tiring, also “inaugurates the impulse of consciousness” (Camus 10). It is in this awakening that we glimpse the absurd most clearly. We are all Sisyphus pushing his boulder, but, despite futility, we still tell the story, and I still write the pitch. 

If Camus revealed the absurdity of writing my pitch, Barthes revealed its loss of control once spoken aloud. Sharing my carefully chosen ninety seconds with others felt simultaneously vulnerable as it did impersonal. By offering this imperfect spiel, my words, once released, were no longer mine, rather belonged to the listeners who interpreted them as they pleased. As Barthes writes, “writing constantly posits meaning, but always in order to evaporate it” (Barthes 54). What I intended to express dissolved the moment it left my mouth, reshaped by the judges’ ears, expectations, and judgment. “The birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author” and here I was bearing a work and abandoning it all at once (Barthes 55). In this way, my pitch was no longer my story, but theirs. My words became fragments for them to arrange, and this realization affirmed Barthes’s claim that the author’s voice is not “sovereign,” the text lives through its readers (Barthes 51). The elevator pitch thus became a symbol not only of authorship but also of mortality: just as our lives will one day outlast us in the memories of others, our words, once written or spoken, are no longer ours to possess. Although this realization is disorienting in its lack of control, it is also liberating in its permanence.

Together, Camus and Barthes elucidate the strange truth of the elevator pitch and of writing more generally. Camus reminds me why I return to the task again and again, notwithstanding its emptiness. We are condemned to create meaning, even when it feels barren. Barthes prompts me to consider what happens when my meaning enters the world and is no longer mine to hold. Each version of “myself” I write is absurd in its incompleteness, yet necessary, and each is reborn in the hands of others who will read me differently than I intended. I’d like to accept this absurdity and be comforted that telling my story can and should be an iterative process in which I have personal agency and then surrender it. For life is finite, but these pieces could be infinite. So I’ll continue to work toward sufficiently filling the ninety seconds I get, because after all, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus 46).

With Love,

El