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Here at Oxford, we talk a big game about consequences. Oxford students are perhaps more familiar than any other student body with the major challenges that define our world. In seminars, we learn to think critically, question inherited systems, and strive for a better world. In the Unionʼs debate hall, weighty questions are addressed by world-renowned experts, from heads of state to intellectual giants. Our university even houses institutes dedicated to global poverty and the governance of AI. Oxford is, after all, the birthplace of “effective altruism”. In theory, we are fluent in the language of global problems.

A career is 80,000 hours of decisions about where your energy goes. It is not just about building a résumé, it is about determining what your one working life will add up to. Choosing whether those hours are spent maximizing comfort or contributing to problems that shape the century is not a neutral choice. It is, in practice, the most consequential ethical decision most people will ever face.

 "I know of no more disagreeable sensation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at." — George Orwell

When Delforce emerged from the facility that night, he sat in his car for twenty minutes before he could drive. His hands were shaking. The smell was embedded in his clothes, his hair, his skin. He would shower three times when he got home and still smell it. But more than the physical residue, what stayed with him was the realization: he had just filmed a single shed on a single farm in a single country, and there were tens of thousands of identical buildings around the world, running twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.