Hi! I’m back, and this week, I’m returning to work after being away for seven months. Today’s essay is a reflection on what it felt like to be a person on (in?) the 2024 job market, and therefore a person on 2024’s 💼 LinkedIn. 💼
When I was twenty-two, I moved to New York City with an internship in the art department at Penguin Books. The internship was two days a week and paid $8/hour—not even kind of enough to pay rent in the East Village and stock my freezer with dinner (Eggo waffles). So I took an internship for the remaining three days with a headhunter, where I got paid $20/hour to troll LinkedIn and send promising candidate profiles to my boss, who was retained by healthcare technology startups to source and close executive-level positions.
Though LinkedIn launched in the early aughts, as a college graduate in 2011, I’d never really used it—except to create an awkwardly-empty profile as encouraged by the career services professional I met with during the spring of my senior year, to prove to my parents that I was “doing something about my future.” But after spending at least 24 of my waking hours per week imagining obscure configurations of search criteria and scanning endless profiles, I became pretty familiar with the LinkedIn universe.
Though I quickly pivoted out of “executive search” after doing it full-time for that first year after college, my LinkedIn savvy has been a trusted pal ever since. Whenever I’ve set out to land a new job or just get curious about the people behind an organization that grabs my attention, I slip seamlessly back into my supreme LinkedIn stalking prowess, building full org charts and sussing out corporate dynamics before I’ve even made contact with anyone at the company. *Brushes off shoulders*
Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but guys: I know my way around LinkedIn. So when I started job-searching this winter, I felt comforted by the fact I’d still be able to navigate the joint. But what I found there felt like an entirely different place from when I’d last visited. I felt like Kate McKinnon post-alien encounter; da fuq was this place? It felt confessional, vulnerable, deeply depressing, and … highly addictive. It was making me queasy.
As soon as I said Yes to the Dress (ie, accepted a new job) in February, I deleted that shit from my phone 4ever* (*until I needed it again to stalk my new coworkers). But I couldn’t stop wondering why LinkedIn feels like a strange country on Planet Internet right now—and I’ve noticed a handful of zeitgeisty dynamics that, upon collision with one another, might be responsible.
it’s me, hi, I’m the problem an independent business owner, it’s me
Does anyone else feel like our collective obsession with building a personal brand is reaching a fever pitch? One of the first things I noticed while strolling down LinkedIn Boulevard1: people seemed to be “announcing” themselves left and right.
We’re all familiar with the concept of the personal brand, and LinkedIn gets credit for being one of the first places on the Internet where peacocking our professional identities is actually kinda appropriate.2 And despite how cringey the concept feels, building a personal brand has been table stakes for years, particularly for the self-employed. But the sheer volume of self-branding posts—“My coaching biz is live!” “Reach out for expert support on all things go-to-market!” “I’ve gone fractional!”—had me dizzy.
Given the current economic precarity colluding with our cultural glorification of entrepreneurship, it’s not shocking that a desire to “be your own boss” has accelerated exponentially in recent years. But it seems that even people with corporate jobs feel the need to self-brand. To be able to work for themselves one day, maybe? To accelerate their climb up the corporate ladder today? To prove to their employers that they’re drinking the Kool-Aid, and therefore protect their jobs in a climate that’s rife with layoffs?
All respectable reasons, TBH—we all gotta get that paper. But I also think that this growing omnipresence of personal branding is stressing us the F out! Evidence: last week, Alison Roman penned an essay admitting to her own exhaustion from the constant pressure to self-brand, obsessively, forever. I know that most of us don’t have the luxury of Roman’s professional success to give up self-branding entirely (and in this climate, neither does she!). But I think she’s onto something here:
“While people love to say everyone is “a brand” these days, I would just like to remind everyone that no, they aren’t. They’re humans, people, individuals, and we shouldn’t feel so much pressure to behave as if that’s not true.”
LinkedIn felt, to me, like a constant drip of people self-merchandising; people who were, whether blatantly or more inconspicuously, selling “human resources.” The same way Alison doesn’t want to constantly be a brand, maybe we shouldn’t have to unrelentingly consume them, either?
a new home for the Internet confessional
People weren’t turning to LinkedIn just to self-brand, though. If you’ve strolled the Boulevard3 recently, you’ve probably also noticed that the feed has become a journal of sorts; a place to write, to spill, to confess. A kind of low-stakes (dare I say) … blog.
Here’s a working theory: in a culture that’s over-saturated with sanitized self-promotion (see: above), we’re all craving some authenticity, some vulnerability, some realness. Vulnerability requires context, which, on the Internet, often translates to length. But long-form writing doesn’t have an obvious home on traditional social media anymore; Facebook is for conspiracy theorists, Twitter is for anger, Instagram and TikTok are ruled by video, not words. So LinkedIn has become a spillover home for “long-form posts.”
These posts range from career-relevant to career-extraneous: a mini-essay on the challenge of being a working parent, or a birthday reflection with personal wins and losses sprinkled throughout. They’ve become a way to publicly experiment with our evolving relationship to work and its supporting cultural narratives: who am I at work? What “can” I say here? What do I want to say? How vulnerable can I be?
I’m a long-form girlie, so I like this type of writing! And I’m particularly interested in the tension that I saw emerging: between the part of us that feels an almost survivalist need to self-brand, and the part that knows that our survival also depends on reminding one another, our employers, and ourselves that we are, in fact, human beings.
But the sudden explosion of these highly-personal missives on LinkedIn, encountered when my brain was focused on job-searching? It felt like whiplash.
doom-scrolling, but make it business
My final realization about LinkedIn in 2024? It’s still social media, even if it’s disguised in a working professional’s clothes.
Every social media platform offers scrollers its own insidious fantasy: Instagram allows us to imagine the always-clean countertops in the remodeled kitchen we definitely don’t have, and TikTok is so good at collapsing time that it lets us pretend that we, too, can make enviable homemade bagels in just a few easy steps. Sites that are less social and more utility are guilty, too; Zillow lets us concoct an entirely new life inside a house we can’t afford, and when we run out of things to scroll there, even Venmo lets us live in a fleeting alternate universe where everyone is paying each other for espresso martinis and having a great night.
LinkedIn, I quickly learned, offers its own kind of addictive scrolling escape: imagining ourselves in newer, better, or, yeah, worse, career trajectories. Even if you haven’t found yourself deep in the rabbit hole of the site’s job postings, exposure to the feed alone is enough to insert yourself into others’ professional successes and failures: “I’m thrilled to announce …”, “It’s bittersweet to share …”
The result is an emotional rollercoaster, swinging from a hungry optimism about the salary you could be making to a sickening gratitude toward the job you haven’t yet lost.
We like to think that platforms like LinkedIn are just technology, just algorithms. But they’re a reflection of the people that use them: us, our desires, our anxieties, our fears. If the game really is to make us more “productive and successful,” I’m not convinced that looking constantly into a trick mirror of the careers we could be having, the lives we could be living, good versions and bad, is going to get us there.
so how do we deal?
I deleted LinkedIn after accepting a job partially in jest, a flippant “I don’t need you anymore, heard?” But the truth is that I felt (and still feel!) a little mad at LinkedIn for its new, uncomfortable vibe. Job-searching is hard enough; why did the site I needed to do it have to give me a gd existential stomach ache, too?
The temptation to bring as much of our offline selves into our online spaces, particularly professional ones, is especially strong right now—whether that means crafting just one more self-promoting post or humanizing tidbit, or (in my case) reading just one more job description. It’s a classic psychological sleight of hand: our brains are telling us we’re being productive; it’s survival of the fittest most online, baby! But I think we can afford to reserve a bit more of ourselves for the real world.
Rather than scrolling a LinkedIn that’s aswirl with the haze of our collective career angst, I’d rather be talking, over a cocktail, about how it feels to be a person with a job in today’s bizarre and challenging market, about all the ways our careers are disappointing us and the ways they’re giving us meaning and fulfillment. About what our next big goals are, and how we can help each other get there.
If we can redirect more of our Career Feelings™️ away from LinkedIn and into reality, maybe we can find ourselves back in 2011 LinkedIn, the one that felt like walking around a weird convention center, a name tag with our job titles affixed dorkily to the shirts we obvi forgot to iron, looking for someone to sit next to. A place that was great for connecting jobs to people and people to jobs. That LinkedIn was a bit stiff, a bit awkward, and that was … good.
Thanks for reading! Whether you’re amidst a career transition like meeee or not at all, send me thoughts on the shape of your relationship to work right now, or LinkedIn, or anything, really. Or come to Denver and we’ll get into it over this watermelon basil gimlet.
I’ll be back next time with a round of provisions to kick off summer in the Northern Hemi. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek of my fresh summer SON, Bowen Hart Danahy 🌞
🌊, Becca
What if we started just replacing sCRolling with sTRolling? Feels like a metaphor I can get behind
A quick look at the history of the term “personal brand” reveals why: the idea was first referenced in a 1997 essay by Tom Peters titled "The Brand Called You,” which suggested that people should apply branding principles to themselves, treating their careers as a brand that needs to be strategically marketed. LinkedIn entered the scene five years later, becoming the perfect place to do so.
Ugh k the metaphor is losing steam
I’m honored to comment on this post.
Yes!! Beautiful reflection “We like to think that platforms like LinkedIn are just technology, just algorithms. But they’re a reflection of the people that use them: us, our desires, our anxieties, our fears. If the game really is to make us more “productive and successful,” I’m not convinced that looking constantly into a trick mirror of the careers we could be having, the lives we could be living, good versions and bad, is going to get us there”