LinkedIn Is A F*cked Up Circus — Flee.
Expertise Inflation Crisis and The Theater Of The Absurd Where Everyone Is Super-Awesome
”I’m humbled and honored to announce that I’ve reached peak LinkedIn insanity. “
#blessed #disrupting #thoughtleadership #coffeewhiletyping
There’s a special circle of hell, and it’s your LinkedIn feed at 8:07 AM on a Monday.
Between sips of rapidly cooling coffee, you’re witnessing what can only be described as the digital equivalent of a corporate acid trip: Your former intern — the one who couldn’t figure out how to unjam the printer — is now apparently a “Chief Visionary Evangelist of Synergistic Disruption.”
Their latest opus? A 2,000-word manifesto on how their morning struggle with tangled AirPod cables revealed the secrets of leading through adversity.
Definitely used ChatGPT to write that manifesto.
I see that about three hundred people have already commented “This! 🙌”
Welcome to the professional metaverse, where every mundane life hiccup is algorithmically transformed into a quasi-TED talk, and personal brands are more carefully curated than museum exhibitions.
Even knowing that this platform stinks to high heaven, we still use it.
Professional LARPing
Remember when LinkedIn was just digital résumés and awkward profile photos?
Those were simpler times.
Now it’s evolved into history’s most elaborate multiplayer role-playing game, where everyone’s character is an “entrepreneurial polymath thought leader” with a side hustle in executive coaching.
It’s like Instagram met TED Talks and had a baby raised by a motivational poster.
As a battle-scarred and recovering marketer who’s watched this platform morph from a professional networking site to a digital Burning Man for business casual, I can’t help but marvel at the shit show into corporate performance art.
We’ve created a parallel universe where:
- Entry-level analysts are “Data Ninjas”
- That guy who ordered too much printer paper is the “Director of Resource Optimization”
- Suddenly, deep experience in AI-everything
- Your college roommate who just discovered Canva is now a “Brand Experience Architect”
Lead Generation & AI Love
Oh, sweet summer child, you thought LinkedIn was about networking?
That’s adorable.
Let me pull back the curtain on marketing’s worst-kept secret: LinkedIn has become the all-you-can-eat buffet of lead generation, where growth marketers (“lead generation engineers”) perform daily carpet-bombing runs with the precision of a drunk frat bro wielding a Super Soaker.
We’ve turned it into a dystopian data farm where your professional identity is less about your career and more about your lead score.
Every click, like, and “Thoughts?” comment gets scraped, scored, and fed into the hungry maw of our marketing automation beasts.
That random connection request from a “Revenue Ninja”?
That’s actually a spray-and-pray operation run by one of the hired digital agencies armed with a set of LinkedIn automation tools and a quota to hit before lunch.
The modern LinkedIn outreach playbook reads like a bad AI attempting to simulate human connection:
“Hi {FIRST_NAME}! 👋 I noticed you recently {BREATHED OXYGEN} and thought you might be interested in our revolutionary solution that leverages {BUZZWORD SOUP} to disrupt the paradigm of {INDUSTRY YOU BARELY WORK IN}. Our proprietary framework has helped companies like {NAMES SCRAPED FROM FORTUNE 500 LIST} achieve up to {MADE-UP PERCENTAGE}% improvement in their {METRICS WE DEFINITELY DIDN’T INVENT}.
Would love to hop on a quick 15-minute call to explore synergies! Here’s my Calendly link that I’ll follow up on exactly 3 times in the next 4 days…”
We’ve got tools that can send thousands of these digital love letters daily, each one masquerading as a personal touch from a real human who definitely didn’t just copy-paste your name from a ZoomInfo export.
The platform has become such a lead-gen feeding frenzy that we’re now using automation tools to dodge other people’s automation tools. It’s like a game of Marco Polo played by robots pretending to be consultants.
And the worst part? It works just enough to keep the madness going. That one response in a hundred makes every growth hacker with a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account think they’re master marketing mavens.
We’re all trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma of professional spam: either join the automation arms race or watch your competitors harvest all the “hand-raised leads” (industry speak for “people who made the mistake of accepting our connection requests”).
Algorithm’s Comedy Club
LinkedIn’s algorithm has become the world’s most sophisticated comedy writer, though unintentionally.
It rewards posts that follow a precise formula:
1. Start with manufactured vulnerability (“I failed so hard, my failure had failure babies…”)
2. Add a dash of corporate zen (“That’s when my cat’s litterbox taught me about agile methodology…”)
3. Throw in a random CEO name-drop (“As Elon Musk’s barista’s cousin once told me…”)
4. End with inspiration porn (“And that’s how I disrupted the paradigm of breathing. Thoughts?”)
Bonus points if you include a poorly staged “candid” photo of yourself staring pensively out a window, presumably contemplating the synergistic possibilities of horizontal growth hacking.
Hunger Games
May the odds of not being pitched be ever in your favor!
LinkedIn has transformed into a dystopian marketplace where accepting a connection request is like signing up for time-share presentations in perpetuity.
Your inbox becomes a gladiatorial arena where automated messages battle for your attention:
“Hi {FIRST_NAME},
I noticed you {BREATHE OXYGEN} and thought you might be interested in our revolutionary solution that disrupts the paradigm of {EXISTING INDUSTRY} through blockchain-enabled AI mindfulness…”
We’re experiencing what economists might call “expertise hyperinflation,” where the currency of professional titles has become more devalued than a crypto startup’s promises.
Today’s LinkedIn is a platform where:
- Having a Zoom account makes you a “Digital Transformation Specialist”
- Creating a TikTok once qualifies you as a “Multi-Platform Media Mogul”
- Successfully ordering office supplies earns you “Supply Chain Innovation Expert” status
- Watching one Gary Vee video transforms you into a “Serial Entrepreneur”
Pardon the interruption. Take a moment to follow me for actionable advice and insights to navigate this uncertain world.
Touch Grass, Not Algorithms
Okay I’ve disemboweled LinkedIn, but fear not, there are better ways to showcase your professional value without joining the LinkedIn circus:
Medium/Substack: Where Thoughts Can Be Longer Than a Fortune Cookie.
Actually, develop your ideas beyond “I saw a squirrel today and it taught me about disruptive innovation.” Wild concept, I know.
GitHub: Show Your Work, Not Your Selfies
Let your code/projects speak louder than your “hustle harder” posts. Bonus: No one on GitHub cares what you learned from your morning routine.
Industry-Specific Platforms: Find Your Real Tribe
Behance, Stack Overflow, ResearchGate — places where expertise isn’t measured in motivational quotes per minute.
Look, we don’t need to completely abandon LinkedIn — it’s still the world’s largest professional network, even if it sometimes feels like a Black Mirror episode written by a management consultant.
But perhaps we can:
- Post actual achievements without pretending they came from a moment of profound spiritual awakening
- Share industry insights without claiming they were revealed by our morning coffee
- Network without treating every connection like a potential convert to our personal brand religion
Beyond the Professional Metaverse
In the end, LinkedIn’s evolution from a professional network to the digital theater would be hilarious if it weren’t so telling about our collective professional insecurities.
We’ve created a platform where authenticity is scripted, vulnerability is weaponized, and success is measured in engagement rather than actual impact.
But here’s a radical thought: What if we treated our professional lives less like a performance and more like, well, our professional lives?
Revolutionary, I know.
Your actual work speaks louder than any number of viral posts about what your succulent taught you about servant leadership.
P.S. If this article resonated with you, please don’t connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ve already exceeded my quota of inspirational storytellers for this fiscal quarter.
Can anyone recommend a new channel to replace this “professional” circus?
