There was a time when LinkedIn felt simple. You updated your job title, connected with colleagues, and occasionally pretended to care about someone earning a certification in Excel. Those were days!
Now it feels like a strange mix of a job board, a reality show, a motivational seminar, and a mild psychological experiment.
The hardest part is not even the ghosting anymore. It is the uncertainty. You apply for a role, tailor your résumé, rehearse answers in your head, and quietly begin imagining a different life. Then nothing happens. Sometimes, because someone else got the job. Sometimes, because there was never a job to begin with.
That part stings more than people admit. LinkedIn also became strangely performative.
Everyone is “thrilled”, “humbled”, or apparently waking up at 4 AM to “dominate the day” while posting photos that look suspiciously like rejection coping mechanisms.
And then there are people using LinkedIn to settle old scores. A platform built for networking slowly becomes a public diary of grudges, passive-aggressive monologues, and career self-sabotage. The tragic part is that recruiters often watch passively as candidates burn their own credibility in high definition.
Some people also use LinkedIn like Instagram. Others treat it like a dating app where “great insights” somehow becomes “hey, let’s grab coffee sometime.”
Meanwhile, people who genuinely need help sit there refreshing their inbox like passengers waiting for a delayed train announcement that never comes.
The strange thing is, LinkedIn still works… just not in the way people think.
One genuine referral, one honest conversation, and more importantly, one person remembering your name at the right time.
Everything else is mostly noise. I think that’s the lesson the modern workplace keeps teaching people over and over again: not every platform built around opportunity is actually designed to protect hope.
And if you spend too much time staring at the algorithm for validation, eventually you stop hearing yourself think.
So these days, I try to treat LinkedIn the same way you treat a crowded railway station. Get in, find your platform, and leave before someone tries to sell you a leadership course or calls you a thought leader for discovering basic human decency.
#linkedInreality #jobsearch #careerreflections #professionallife #hiringculture #modernwork #careergrowth
I’ve had jobs, but they slowly turned into career interests based on curiosity and wanting to solve bigger problems. Somewhere along the way I became a bit of a jack-of-all-trades-ish person. I think the shift happens when you stop just completing tasks and start solving bigger problems, building systems, and creating impact.