LinkedIn is a nut I’ve never been able to crack. And yet… I’m a writer on an active job search. With that comes a certain level of performance that I’m not sure I’m built for. I like a good meander. I demand nuance. I like to say the raw thing out loud, which has its benefits when it comes to creative satisfaction but can feel achingly vulnerable on a corporate platform.
There’s always been this built-in tension to merging professional life with social media: content lives or dies based on authenticity, and the corporate world… does not. Some of us are just not good at playing along, and feel the tension keenly.
I posted something yesterday and then deleted it hours later when I couldn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about my LinkedIn graveyard, made up of ghosts of interviews-past and former colleagues whose good-fortunes and/or ambitions have led them far beyond the reaches of my career potential, reading my thoughts1. I had the same thing happen a couple weeks ago and a lot after my last layoff (I’ve started marking time with layoffs and bouts of unemployment). This very post contains stuff I also posted and deleted2.
It’s always been hard for me to be myself there, but that used to be a reflection of the working world in general. LinkedIn made sense for a while because it was mirroring a corporate culture that valued certain black-and-white tenets of professionalism3. And the tension worked because we all previously agreed to perform professionalism for a steady paycheck.
Now we’re living in the gray in-between. Volatile politics, economic instability, and our personal identities bleed into every part of our lives, and it’s impossible to pretend otherwise4. Layoffs are just one part of much larger systemic issues; we have no idea how quickly AI will absorb a tipping-point amount of jobs; and we certainly can’t immediately editorialize how hard these work experiences are hitting us into a neat little package because we are IN it. And it is messy, messy stuff.
LinkedIn just wasn’t made to meet the messy moment. I see posts vacillate at a break-neck speed between overly polished, AI-generated pieces that feel stuck in a different world and ones that reflect people at a breaking point, yelling [honestly, desperately] into the void. (And never the twain shall meet—except for constantly, one after another, on all of our feeds.)
Our professional loyalty has long been required but one-sided, and now we’re experiencing the social contracts failing us at scale5. How long do we keep buying into the professionalism myth, that if we present ourselves as a perfect corporate package that we’ll be rewarded with long, meaningful careers? (Especially those of us whom the myth mainly served to suppress?)
It feels like we are6 meant to swallow a lot of hurt and anger and keep pretending so we can remain hireable7. I certainly don’t have the answers but I do think it’s time we start imagining how to better integrate work + self8 to build individual purpose and community aid during all this social upheaval.
In the meantime, I’m working on saying what I want to say and letting it live and breathe in the open air, allowing time and space for the mess to take shape rather than forcing it into cheery nothingness, in the hopes that those who will get me will meet me here.
/yelling into void
It feels very “looking for love in all the wrong places.” I crave support and community, but boy, is it not on LinkedIn.
If you’re one of my 6 loyal readers, you’re not having deja vu—you may have read snippets of this before. My blog posts across time are a modern palimpsest.
Tenets that disadvantaged a whole bunch of us for a variety of reasons but we had to follow nonetheless. That’s a whole other post.
And whomst does it benefit to keep pretending anyway?! We’re trying to get heads out of the sand, not the other way around. That’s a whole other post too.
”Perhaps by design?” she asked innocently.
Read: We are I am
Irony undercurrent alert: I obviously say all this as I try to walk the very, very thin line myself.
Severance coded, IYKYK