Recently, I came across an Instagram post making fun of people on LinkedIn. It called them “LinkedIn Psychopaths.” I laughed, but wondered if I fit some of these descriptions.
There was the 4 AM CEO, whose morning routine supposedly made them successful but left little time for family. The Humble Bragger, always humbled and honored by another achievement. And the Inspirational Storyteller, who turns a child learning to ride a bicycle into a lesson in leadership, resilience and stakeholder management.
Then there are the Agree Merchants, agreeing with almost everything. The Corporate Evangelists, celebrating every company announcement even when their private opinions tell another story. Sometimes it feels as if they never existed before joining that company.
And the LinkedIn Influencers, advertising their follower counts, alongside Personal Branding Gurus who constantly remind us how authentic they are.
For a moment, I considered stopping my posts. Instead, I decided to write one about it 😄 And here we are. We live in a world where many of us aren’t sure what we are doing or becoming. We keep re-skilling, reinventing ourselves, building personal brands and trying to stay relevant. Maybe we should also re-skill ourselves in what it means to be human.
Do we use LinkedIn to connect, or partly to feel important? To be seen, heard and acknowledged?
Outside LinkedIn, we are known by people who have experienced more than our posts. Here, we offer selected versions of ourselves, showing some things and hiding others. The algorithm uses us, and we try using it.
We make wonderful connections online. But friendship goes beyond likes, impressions and engagement metrics. The people close to us don’t need an audience to connect. It is becoming harder to tell what is real and what is fake online. Perhaps we all contribute to that confusion.
Think of the people we encounter in everyday life. The stranger who smiles, the person who says excuse me, the colleagues we argue with, the friends we laugh and fight with. The people we walk with, have lunch with. The person who cuts us in traffic. We experience their imperfections and contradictions, not just what they choose to display. That is is our life.
On social media, we encounter edited versions of people, including ourselves. Not the whole human being. In a way social media is a party where everyone arrives as a lesser (but inflated) version of themselves. And not everything in life needs to become content.
Including this realization, which I have just turned into a LinkedIn post. I’m not particularly proud of that either. I am not my post, And I want to be better than it 🙏
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