I try to avoid LinkedIn and always have done, but this year as a part of my professional duties, I’m there for a while as the new year kicks off and it’s positively disturbing to see.
Armies of well-groomed, wooden professionals in “family photos” in which they’re surrounded by props that only look like children, somehow never with a spouse. They’re sharing their hard-won wisdom on how to properly live life and make resolutions for the new year, which as you might imagine on a platform like LinkedIn is another way of saying they’re unwittingly indicting themselves to an ugly degree.
Where else can you see middle-aged men and women sharing with you that “what’s worked so well for their family” is to review the “performance targets” and “execution strategy” they’d set as a family for the previous year, find “quantitative measures” for how they’ve “overperformed” or “underperformed,” then perform a “gap analysis” to understand the “shortfall” and “iterate on the strategy” for this year, along with “frameworks” for establishing “new family KPIs and performance targets for the quarters ahead.”
They’re so proud.
They’re so alienated, inhuman, and devoid of souls. Their furniture, of course, is elegant—and very sanitary, I have no doubt. I’m sure they’ve tipped their housekeepers well, and paid sufficient lip service to regretting the retrograde masses in the rural areas of flyover states.
Facebook and Instagram and TwitterX are terrible, but at least on those platforms you get to see people, even if primarily their dark sides. How long ago did these people on LinkedIn die? How long before their tormented children die a similar death? Impossible to say.
Terrifying.