Post 25 of a 30-day challenge
I don’t enjoy LinkedIn and its status games. Like the humblebrag and cringey toxic positivity posts which just come off as insincere and vain. No, thanks. When Elon Musk announced he was buying Twitter, everyone expected him to trash it (too early to say where this is right now), and asked why he didn’t buy LinkedIn instead, which more and more people despise. LinkedIn is corporate Facebook.
Reasons why I’m not on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is designed to put your résumé up front. People want to connect with you to see how your résumé looks, and therefore how you measure against their subjective yardstick. My résumé is great, thank you for asking, and that’s not the point. It both grates and depresses me, to see how people can be reduced to the sum total of the brands on their résumé.
You’re expected to fit your personality into their standard format. This is why I direct people to my personal website instead, which is richer and more flexible in my ability to present myself. I understand why people don’t do this because it requires time and money to maintain. But the ROI is so worth it for me.
Deactivating LinkedIn was an experiment in whether or not I could still find work. The answer was, yes. My network provided enough work to keep me financially sustained and satisfied. My approach seems to work fine in Singapore, a small market. There are only so many freelance product people in Singapore, it’s a very small pool. I don’t know if I could get away with this in a larger country. LinkedIn requires you to play the game of putting out regular “thought pieces” and validate everyone else’s posts (things I won’t do) to eventually be noticed. Turns out that I didn’t need to do it anyway.
I don’t need it to (re)connect with people. When I was active on LinkedIn, I would connect with people I met once at some event, intending to follow up. Neither they, nor I, ever did. And I would eventually remove the connection. My rule was, if I can’t remember where I met you, or if I wouldn’t recognise you if I encountered you again, I’d remove you. And I ended up removing so many people, accumulated over the years. To me, the problem was this: you meet new people and say, “Hey let’s connect on LinkedIn!” and in your mind, you’ve already connected, and therefore don’t need to follow up unless there’s some urgency. I find this to be a superficial way of connecting. Now, if I met you and clicked with you, I’d invite you to meet for a 1-1 over coffee, for a genuine connection. If I needed to find a connection (“hey do you know X or someone who can do Y”) then I’d just ask my network. This has never posed a problem.
I enjoy my relative anonymity, I find it luxurious. I am unbothered by meaningless status games accompanied by anxiety and inadequacy. I have never felt FOMO, only JOMO. Research shows that social media negatively affects your mental health, and I’m surprised that nobody’s published similar research about LinkedIn yet.
I do wonder if I’ll return to LinkedIn. Maybe, if there was a good reason.
Ready for an experiment?
If you feel the same distaste with LinkedIn, it’s time for an experiment. Deactivate LinkedIn for 21 days and see if and how your life changes. If there’s no change, extend it for another 21 days, and check how you feel again. When you do eventually log in to LinkedIn again, notice how your mind and body react.
Thanks for sharing very valid points. I agree with all all them and loved especially point 4. In my line of work doing recruitment, I must say LI is a very useful tool. A way to find talent without paying job boards and databases for accessing them. Even though LI charges recruiters on value added on tools, the reach is wide enough for people to explore the professional world in a easy to understand way. Having that said there are plenty of thought and industry leaders and talent that shun Social media like Linkedin and need to be found elsewhere. I even have the hunch, that the real jewels out there do not bother with marketing themselves on sites like Linkedin. Kudos to your discovery path and openly putting those truths out there for everyone to reflect. Love it!
Maybe in your own way you have outgrown Linkedin? I am guessing it's a place for other people to start. As we go through the 'grinder' we begin to wonder if linkedin makes much of a difference depending on our particular journey (as you alluded to there are other factors). I think its good that for now this isn't a place you need to be. Would you - when / if you decide to go here - need to hire staff, would Linkedin be a place you would return to? You sound like you know the pitfalls of judging on social media, can gems still be found - after all you were one of them once. Thought provoking, thanks for sharing.