For me they normally happen, these career crises, often, actually, on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to set,
我经常对事业感到恐慌,周日下午,晚霞洒满天空,
and the gap between my hopes for myself and the reality of my life starts to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow.
理想和现实的差距是这样残酷,令我沮丧的只想抱头痛哭。
I'm mentioning all this -- I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem;
我提出这件事是因为我认为不只有我这么感觉,
you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises,
你可能不这么认为,但我感觉我们活在一个充满事业恐慌的时代,
by moments when what we thought we knew -- about our lives, about our careers
就在我们认为我们已经理解我们的人生和事业时,
comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality.
真实便来恐吓我们。
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living.
现在或许比以前更容易过上好生活。
It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
但却比以前更难保持冷静,或不为事业感到焦虑。
I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers.
今天我想要检视我们对事业感到焦虑的一些原因。
Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we're weeping softly into our pillows.
为何我们会变成事业焦虑的囚徒,不时抱头痛哭。
One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs.
折磨人的因素之一是我们身边的那些势利鬼。
In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad.
对那些来访牛津大学的外国友人我有一个坏消息。
There's a real problem with snobbery,
这里的人都很势利,
because sometimes people from outside the U.K. imagine that snobbery is a distinctively U.K. phenomenon, fixated on country houses and titles.
有时候英国以外的人会想象势利是英国人特有的个性,来自那些乡间别墅和头衔爵位。
The bad news is that's not true. Snobbery is a global phenomenon; we are a global organization, this is a global phenomenon.
坏消息是,并不只是这样。势利是一个全球性的问题,我们是个全球性的组织,这是个全球性的问题。
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you,
势利是什么?势利是以一小部分的你
and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
来判别你的全部价值。那就是势利。