Words and Thoughts: LinkedInandRightBackOut
Hello again, alleged readers. I recently visited a website called LinkedIn. Wow. Nope. Have you ever been to www.linkedin.com? If not, don’t go there. If you have, I’m sorry and I hope you’re doing alright.
I was tricked, scammed even, into visiting that hellish place. I was on the Facebook there trying to figure out what the helicopter was doing, and I stumbled headlong into a post by a high school friend. But it wasn’t a Facebook post, it was a link, on Facebook, to a post on LinkedIn, that had been cross posted to Instagram, about their dog, or so I thought.
I click on the post, and it brings me over to this unholy wasteland that I quickly learned that LinkedIn is. From what I can tell, LinkedIn is like a website that’s about roleplaying as an office worker, in a horrible office, where you only get paid for yelling about things that sound like work, but aren’t actually work. And I know what you’re thinking: “Stav, at work you almost exclusively yell about things that aren’t work”. And while this is true, that’s not what LinkedIn is, I don’t think.
Instead, it’s like people are having a competition to see whose non-work-related yelling can sound the most like work, without being work. When I’m at work, I yell about why my coworkers are placing treats in mousetraps… not work, but absolutely something to yell about. My high school friend on LinkedIn on the other hand? This post about their dog was actually a full page treatise on how motivated they are to hit sales quotas this year after having an existential crisis, and subsequent personal paradigm shifting revelation, when they accidentally ended up in the dog food aisle of a Walmart they were visiting while on a mission trip to help left-handed kids find scissors or God.
What’s worse were the comments on the post. I eagerly clicked into them expecting the vox populi to dispense swift justice and satisfyingly messy retribution. What I found instead was a padded room simultaneously serving as an unhinged sycophantic echo chamber and a thunder dome of winner take all bloodsport one-upmanship.
“So brave! Like the time I got my foot caught in the garbage disposal trying to help my 107 year old war hero pilot grandmother with 54 air to air kills to her name paint her kitchen ceiling a color that reminded me of the logo of a client I hadn’t followed up with in a while, and then I followed up and closed a 14-figure deal a week later while the doctors struggled to save my foot. #MBA #Grind4E”
“That’s so true! This reminds me of the time I was an early adopter of Microsoft Excel and that experience led me to always be on the lookout for opportunities to angel-invest in startups founded by Azorean orphans. I have a proven track record of 10% returns across my VC portfolio. Comment Visionary to get a private message on how to buy my podcast!”
No one has time for literally any of that. Especially when trying to figure out what the helicopter is doing!
