Professional irritations

I normally do not use LinkedIn that much, but during my holiday I had plenty of time to scroll through the site without a particular purpose. What an endless stream of self-promotion and pseudo wisdom.

LinkedIn was once intended to be a professional platform, but now it is more like a digital circus where everyone is a clown, an entrepreneur, and a self-proclaimed ‘agile guru’. LinkedIn is broken. Dead. Run over by a Tesla belonging to someone that has ‘impact’ in their introductory sentence. It has become the professional version of Facebook. Even Aunt Karen who believes that vaccinations have nano chips and calls herself the CEO of a consultancy firm that consists of exactly one person.

Everyone is amazing, but at the same time ‘humbled’ to receive an award that nobody has actually heard of. And above all, everyone is ‘happy to share’. You are probably very happy to do so, but the real reason that you put something on LinkedIn is that it is simply the thing to do. And so I too still ‘share’. If you don’t do so, you do not exist. And, let’s be honest, if you don’t post anything, nobody reads about your work.

You can’t imagine how many ‘professional’ killjoys seem to have no shame anymore

But do you know what really is the case? Almost nobody reads it. Most people don’t click on your paper. They give you a thumbs up because they once saw you at a conference, or because you responded to their ‘new job!’ post. Nobody will sit down in the evening and willingly read your or my policy report. It is just an illusion. And we all play along.

In the meantime, the platform is drenched in middle management poetry and leadership stories that start with ‘I was queueing up at the supermarket …’ and end with a scene in which everyone in the supermarket claps and a lesson in strategic thinking. But it goes beyond this kind of vanity. What really gets me is the open intolerance that you see more and more often. Last week the GroenLinks-PvdA political party published its candidate list. You can’t imagine how many ‘professional’ killjoys seem to have no shame anymore, think that racism is an opinion, and that climate change is a leftwing hobby. Since when is ‘writing under one’s own name’ a green light for open racism?

I’ve really had enough. Enough of the people who have a revolutionary idea with every cup of coffee. Enough of the people who turn a flat bicycle wheel into a metaphor for resilience – ‘sometimes you have to stop to move forward’. Sigh. And absolutely enough of ‘colleague’ academics who steal a graph from someone else’s paper, add an AI summary underneath, and then take the credit for it. Mind = Blown!

Maybe it’s good that my holiday is over. At least now I have less time to read how someone turned their air fryer or visit to the Efteling attraction park into a deep personal leadership event.