LinkedIn Is Ridiculous. Use It Anyway.
- 22 hours ago
- 8 min read
On professional mirrors, AI slop, and the difficult art of remaining human in public.
LinkedIn has become very easy to mock.
Some of that mockery is fully earned. Open the platform on any given morning and you may find a solemn reflection on leadership inspired by a delayed cappuccino, a heroic account of personal resilience written suspiciously like a bank’s annual report, or a comment section where seventeen people congratulate someone for demonstrating “authentic vulnerability” after admitting they once felt nervous before a meeting.
Then there is the newer plague: default generative AI prose. Smooth, obedient, vaguely uplifting, and dead behind the eyes. It has the texture of hotel conference carpeting. Everyone is “thrilled,” “humbled,” “excited to announce,” and “deeply grateful.” Apparently no one is ever simply pleased, mildly relieved, or financially obligated.
The rise of the LinkedInLunatics genre is hardly mysterious. The platform produces parody faster than parody can process it. LinkedIn did not invent vanity, of course. It merely gave vanity a banner image, a content calendar, and a premium subscription.
And yet, I want to offer a slightly uncomfortable defence of LinkedIn.
Not an enthusiastic defence. Let us not get carried away. But a defence nonetheless.
Because beneath the cringe, the forced inspiration, the AI-polished sincerity, and the executive selfies taken from an angle known only to airport lounges, LinkedIn still performs a serious function. It remains one of the few public spaces where the professional labour market can see itself. Not perfectly. Not nobly. Sometimes not even safely. But enough to function.
Because work is not only about skills and contracts. It is also about visibility. People need to be found. Careers need to be legible. Accomplishments need some kind of public record. New entrants need access to networks. Experienced professionals need a way to signal direction without sending 700 individual emails that begin, “I hope this finds you well,” which, as we all know, is how civilization slowly collapses.
LinkedIn is strange because the labour market is strange. It is awkward because professional self-presentation is awkward. It is artificial because professional life has always required a degree of performance. The platform simply makes that performance searchable, shareable, and occasionally unbearable.
In an earlier piece, The Cult of Constant Uplift, I wrote about the exhausting demand to remain relentlessly positive in professional spaces. The smiling mask. The mandatory gratitude. The insistence that every setback is a gift, every crisis is a lesson, and every layoff is somehow an invitation to “step into your next chapter.” It is a theology of uplift with better fonts.
I still think that cult deserves criticism.
But its opposite deserves criticism too.
The sneer has become its own brand. The anti-LinkedIn posture now has its own rituals, its own superiority, its own predictable grammar. The guru says, “Everything is a blessing.” The cynic says, “Everything is fake.” Both save time by refusing thought.
Constant uplift is dishonest because it refuses tragedy. Constant cynicism is dishonest because it refuses possibility.
That is the narrow passage worth walking.
LinkedIn sits directly in that passage. It is ridiculous, yes. It is useful, yes. It encourages performance, yes. It also gives people a place to narrate professional identity outside the closed rooms of old-boy networks, alumni circles, inherited privilege, and quiet patronage. Those older systems were often less embarrassing than LinkedIn because they were less visible. Their dignity came from being harder to inspect.
The modern platform is messier. It lets the consultant, the job seeker, the banker, the graduate, the coach, the analyst, the laid-off employee, the founder, the academic, and the mid-career professional all stand in the same digital corridor, adjusting their jackets and hoping to be noticed by someone useful. It is not always beautiful. Neither is a job fair. Yet both exist for reasons more serious than aesthetic pleasure.
This is where my thinking around The Age of Narcissus enters the room.
I have been circling a broader problem there: what happens when reflection begins to compete with reality. LinkedIn is one of the smaller but more familiar theatres where this confusion plays out. It is not the grand cathedral of narcissism. It is more like the office lobby: glass walls, motivational signage, and everyone quietly checking whether they are being seen correctly.
The platform is a mirror-system. People do not merely show what they have done. They show what they believe must be shown in order to remain visible.
The young professional does not post about resilience only because she has become vain. She may be trying to survive in a market that rewards narrative. The executive does not write about purpose only because he has lost contact with ordinary speech, though that remains a possibility. He may be signalling alignment with the language of institutional legitimacy. The consultant does not publish thought pieces only because he enjoys hearing himself think in public, though we must leave room for the evidence. He may be demonstrating competence in a market where invisible expertise is often treated as non-existent expertise.
The mirror distorts. But it also reflects pressure.
This is why pure mockery misses the deeper point. LinkedIn is cringe because the mechanisms of professional survival have become visible. Self-promotion, gratitude displays, career narration, networking, signalling, personal positioning, public learning, and status anxiety all used to happen too. LinkedIn placed them in a feed between a promotion announcement and a poll asking whether leadership requires empathy.
We laugh because it is absurd.
We also laugh because we recognize the transaction.
Most of us are not above the performance. We simply hope to perform with better taste.
The arrival of generative AI has made this more difficult. It has not destroyed professional voice. It has diluted it. The danger of AI-generated LinkedIn writing is not that it sounds stupid. The danger is that it sounds competent in exactly the same way, everywhere.
A great deal of AI prose is polished mediocrity. It makes no spelling mistakes, takes no risks, offends no one, reveals nothing, and lands with the emotional force of an HR compliance module. It is fluent enough to pass, empty enough to scale, and cheerful enough to be suspicious.
This creates a new problem for professional identity. If everyone uses the same machinery to sound impressive, everyone becomes harder to distinguish. We enter a market where human beings increasingly present themselves through language optimized to erase the traces of a human being.
A résumé can be standardized. A profile can be optimized. A post can be improved. But a voice cannot be outsourced without cost. Eventually, the polished surface begins to replace the person behind it. The reflection becomes cleaner as the reality becomes thinner.
That is the narcissistic trap. Not vanity in the old, simple sense. Something colder. A system in which the reflected self becomes the managed self, and the managed self slowly forgets where the original was kept.
LinkedIn rewards that trap. It rewards frequency, affect, clarity, legibility, positivity, and performance. It prefers the clean signal. It does not know what to do with hesitation, contradiction, moral seriousness, or the kind of thought that requires a second paragraph before becoming useful. Algorithms are not known for their patience. If they were, they would probably be unemployed.
Yet withdrawal is not wisdom.
There is a romantic temptation to say, “I do not participate in that circus.” It sounds dignified. Sometimes it is. More often, it is simply another performance, directed at a smaller audience. Silence can be principled. It can also be fear wearing a better coat.
In the current labour market, visibility has consequences. The person who never appears in public may still be excellent, but excellence without trace is difficult to discover. This is especially true for those outside inherited networks. LinkedIn may be artificial, but it can also lower certain barriers. A thoughtful post can reach beyond one’s immediate circle. A career transition can become visible. A skill can be demonstrated. A connection can be made without waiting for someone’s uncle to play golf with someone’s managing director.
That is not nothing.
So the real question is not whether LinkedIn is authentic. No platform is authentic by itself. The question is whether we can use an artificial medium without becoming artificial ourselves.
I think we can, but only with discipline.
The first discipline is to stop treating “personal brand” as cosmetic packaging. The phrase has become tired, and in many cases deservedly so. It evokes rented wisdom, neutral-coloured backdrops, and someone explaining authenticity from a strategy deck.
A better phrase is public authorship.
Personal brand asks, “How do I appear?”Public authorship asks, “What am I willing to stand behind repeatedly?”
That difference changes the posture.
Public authorship does not require constant posting. It does not require theatrical vulnerability. It does not require converting every professional inconvenience into a parable about leadership. A person may have a difficult week without extracting five lessons from it for strangers. This remains legal in most provinces.
Public authorship means leaving a coherent trace. It means showing your work, naming your interests, sharing your thinking, acknowledging others, offering useful observations, and allowing your professional identity to accumulate over time. It is quieter than branding. It is also more durable.
The second discipline is to resist both flattery and contempt.
Flattery says the platform is a stage and you must perform. Contempt says the platform is beneath you and you must withdraw. Both grant LinkedIn too much power. The adult position is less dramatic: use the tool, understand its incentives, refuse its worst habits, and leave when your attention begins to curdle.
The third discipline is voice.
This is becoming the real differentiator. In a world of generative sameness, a recognizable human voice becomes a form of evidence. Not a loud voice. Not a quirky voice manufactured for engagement. A real one. One with judgement, restraint, humour, memory, scars, and a few sentences no machine would write because they are too specific, too inconvenient, or too alive.
The great irony is that LinkedIn may become more valuable precisely because so much of it is becoming generic. When the feed fills with AI-polished sameness, actual thought stands out. Not instantly, perhaps. Not virally. But to the right reader, which is often the only reader who matters.
That is another sickness of the platform: it tempts us to confuse audience size with significance. A post seen by 30,000 distracted people may matter less than a paragraph read carefully by one serious person. The labour market does not move only through mass attention. It also moves through weak ties, quiet recognition, delayed memory, and the strange moment when someone says, “I have been reading your posts for a while.”
Anyone who has received that sentence knows it carries more weight than a hundred empty likes.
So yes, mock LinkedIn. Mock the generic AI posts. Mock the executive melodramas. Mock the leadership lessons from airline boarding zones. Mock the forced uplift and the solemn selfies and the posts that begin with “I was today years old when I realized…” even though the author appears to be a vice-president of something.
Mockery has its place. It keeps language honest. It punctures inflation. It reminds us that not every announcement is historic and not every webinar is transformative.
But after the laughter, return to the harder question.
What kind of professional presence is worth having?
For me, the answer lies somewhere between performance and disappearance. Show your work. Do not narrate every breath. Share accomplishments. Do not turn them into scripture. Be generous. Do not become syrupy. Be critical. Do not become sour. Use humour. Avoid becoming the office cynic with Wi-Fi.
Above all, find your own voice before the platform lends you one.
LinkedIn is a mirror. Like all mirrors, it can flatter, distort, and trap the vain. It can irritate the serious and reward the shameless. It can turn professional life into a pageant of polished reflections, where everyone is visible and very few are seen.
Yet a mirror can also help us appear in public with some coherence.
The task is not to smash it. Nor to kneel before it. The task is to know when we are looking at a reflection, when we are looking at a market, and when, occasionally, we are still looking at a human being.