How LinkedIn Causes Anxiety
You know how after a weekend spent on Facebook or Instagram, you get slightly nauseous because you’re just done with looking at how successful your friends are.
Seriously. Someone’s got a job in New York. Someone is on a honeymoon in Paris. Someone is building a school in Botswana. And here you are, lying on your sofa and eating your third bag of chips.
Well, guess what — someone built an entire social network for people to appear more successful than they are, and there are 575 million people on it. You already have a profile too. It’s called LinkedIn.
Yep, now you can find out exactly how much the dumbest kid from grade 6 ended up studying and how she’s using her PhD to implement marketing solutions to a company worth $10 billion.
Isn’t that great?
Looking at your peers’ CV is an instant recipe for feeling inadequate. But it’s an “indispensable tool” you must have on your phone at all times.
How delightful.
I’m not saying you should delete LinkedIn.
But you probably should. At least the app.
LinkedIn is great for people who want to be in “the network”. It is a useful tool in job-seeking too. If you use it right, it will take you places.
But if you don’t, it will take you dark places. Like the dungeon of envy and anxiety in your brain. The place where “Is anything I’ve done worthwhile?” questions arise.
Everyone knows the way to protect your self-esteem is to stop comparing yourself to others (because no one else is living your life). However, if you see your colleague’s achievements listed down, you might start wondering whether you’ll be able to beat them to the promotion.
In fact, if you spend $20/month on LinkedIn Premium, you can find out exactly all the ways you don’t match up to other people who have applied for a job.
Do you really need this? Life is stressful enough without being aware of the competition at all times.
Of course, you need to find a job.
But if you are looking to switch after a year and just want to regularly “check the opportunities” on LinkedIn, it might do more harm than good.
I am a planner. I like to know what I’m going to do next. So I used to do exactly this. Every week, I’d check what jobs I could apply for. I didn’t intend to start for another 12 months.
I found two kinds of jobs — those that were out of my reach/interest, and those that were achievable.
The former made me feel pessimistic about my options. The latter made me feel frustrated because the opportunity would be gone by the time I got back to work. There was no way to win.
I would spend a stressful two hours on the platform, then a stressful two days wondering if there was any meaning to existence and if building a career was really necessary.
Hence comes my wisdom — Finding a job is satisfying. Passively looking for a job is not.
In conclusion…
I get that LinkedIn, unlike other social media, is necessary for making the big contacts and finding work.
All I’m saying is that if, after an hour on LinkedIn, you can hear bits of your self-confidence shattering, close it. Especially if you’re not looking for a job.
