You should not have to perform enthusiasm forty times a week

"Why do you want to work here?"

You learned this company existed forty minutes ago. It does something adjacent to what you do. The role looks reasonable and the salary is within range. That is the honest answer, and it is a perfectly respectable one.

You cannot write it. So you look at their about page, find the word they use about themselves, and produce three sentences of enthusiasm for a mission you first encountered while the kettle boiled. Then you do it again for the next one.

Why it grates

It asks you to be slightly dishonest, in a small way, repeatedly. Not lying exactly. Manufacturing a feeling you do not have yet and might reasonably develop later. Most people are not comfortable doing that, and doing it forty times does not build a callus so much as a low-grade weariness.

It is asymmetric in a way that is hard to ignore. You are asked for a considered, personalised answer. The response, most of the time, is nothing at all. Not a no. Nothing. The effort was required, the acknowledgement was optional.

And it puts you in a posture. There is a particular voice the process asks for: eager, grateful, uncomplicatedly positive. It is not how a competent adult talks about their work, and spending weeks in it does something to how you see yourself. People describe feeling smaller by week six, and they usually blame themselves rather than the posture they have been holding.

It is not you

Worth saying plainly, because the private version of this thought is usually "other people find this fine, so what is wrong with me".

Other people do not find it fine. They are just not talking about it, because complaining about applying for jobs sounds like complaining about having to work, and nobody wants to sound entitled while asking for a job. So everyone assumes they are the only one who finds it mildly humiliating.

You are not insufficiently hungry. You noticed something accurate about a process that asks for emotional labour at volume and returns silence.

What helps

Name it properly. "This part is tedious and slightly demeaning, and I am doing it anyway because it works" is a more durable stance than pretending to enjoy it. Honesty about the cost makes it cheaper to bear.

Write to a fact, not a feeling. "I want this role because it is the work I am good at and want to keep doing" is true, respectable, and available every time without any acting.

Do not let it set your self-image. The version of you in these boxes is a compressed, slightly performed one. It is not an assessment.

Reduce the repetitions. The damage is cumulative. Four is fine. Forty is what wears people down.

Where ApplyPipe fits

We built this partly because the repetition is the part that should never have been a human's job. ApplyPipe writes each application from the history you gave us once and sends it, so you are not personally generating enthusiasm forty times a week for companies you are still forming a view about.

It does not invent feelings or claims. It uses what you told us, phrased for the role. When something needs a real answer only you can give, it waits for you, which is the correct number of times to be asked: a few, and only when it matters.

The judgement about who is worth talking to stays yours. That was always the part worth your attention.

The short version

The process asks you to perform enthusiasm at volume into a void, and finding that wearing is an accurate reading rather than a weakness. Write to facts instead of feelings, keep it out of your self-image, and cut the number of repetitions, because it is the repetition that does the damage.