WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT LINKEDIN: TOXIC POSITIVITY & MENTAL HEALTH THREATS ON THE WORLD’S LARGEST PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL NETWORK
As the usership of LinkedIn grows and its presence is felt more and more in our daily lives, it’s time we start to question our relationship with the world’s largest social network for professionals. With more than 740 million members and 55 million brands and registered companies calling it home, according to LinkedIn’s latest stat sheet for 2021, its reach and influence is massive. Considering the role LinkedIn plays in employment, business, and as a social network full of contemporaries and supposed opportunities, we all know that we should be on it, but how much thought have we put into the toll our interactions with LinkedIn have on our mental health and conception of self?
When something becomes so ubiquitous that we all have a go-to joke or anecdote about it, it becomes a trope. Tropes are great because they’re based around a reference point we all get. There’s a commonality that’s easily accessible to everyone. We know the format, we know the source material, and, though the feedlines might chop and change, we still laugh in anticipation because the punchline is always the same. Social content on LinkedIn has become a trope. Here’s one I bet you’ve heard before:
I was booked in for an interview the other day. Big job, fresh start, exciting. After three years working a dead-end job, I was really in need of a change.
On the way there, I saw a dog on the street that looked lost and injured. Naturally I had to stop and help. The poor thing was starving and thirsty, so I went into a nearby shop and got him some food and water. He ate and drank happily. After a few minutes he was looking a lot better and went off on his way again.
Unfortunately, this diversion made me late for my interview. The lady at reception wasn’t impressed. She told me that I need to be better at timekeeping and that my interview slot was already gone.
The next morning I got a call from the owner of the company I was supposed to be interviewing for. He asked if I could come in again today. I told him that I could of course.
Guys, you won’t believe it. When I finally got to the office, who was sitting there waiting to interview me? IT. WAS. THE. DOG.! Just goes to show, you never know where a little kindness will get you. #Blessed.
While it’s funny to laugh at these posts, because they are well observed gags in their own right based on the very real facetious content a lot of us see on LinkedIn every day, we need to be acutely aware of the dangers the source material for these gags pose.
Toxic positivity: a dog fight.
I came across a new kind of post on LinkedIn the other day that sparked this whole journey of introspection off for me. A kind of post that adhered to the established trope in every way but seemed to take it to a whole new level. I’m going to keep the name of the author private (for reasons you’ll soon understand) – in the same way I’ll keep the names of many of the people I’ll discuss in this article private – but needless to say, it comes from exactly the kind of ‘Influencing Thought Leader’ you’re guessing it does.
The post focused on a video that looked as if it was ripped directly from Instagram. It had a poorly-shopped caption in a grey box at the top that read in all caps, “Don’t run away from your fears! Run towards them and face them!”, followed by two flexing muscle emojis. The caption the author himself wrote read, “Never lose faith in Yourself & Never lose Hope, keep on Moving Forward.”
The content of the video, for me at least, wasn’t something that would make one want to run out and face their fears. It seemed to be footage taken on a CCTV camera. The camera was pointed towards a dimly lit laneway at the rear gates of some attached homes with a few motorcycles parked idly about. It was clearly night-time and the only people in the shot were two small children, a boy and a girl who couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. As the pair reached the part of the laneway closest to the camera, three dogs sprang into view, clearly spooked and unhappy about the children’s presence. There was no sound in the video, but barking and growling was heavily implied.
Immediately the girl turned and ran in the direction she’d come from. The dogs didn’t follow her because, unlike her, the boy froze momentarily. He stood still in front of the dogs for a couple of seconds, tried to make himself look bigger as his brain caught up to the situation he found himself in, and then turned to run. As he did, a fourth dog ran in from an offshoot of the laneway behind him. Surrounded by dogs now, he stood still for another couple of seconds, visibly panicking, before the coin reading ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ spinning through the air in his unconscious landed decidedly on ‘fight’. At this point, the boy waved his arms towards the dogs as if to throw punches at them. This startled the dogs enough for them to break the circle they’d been creating around him long enough for the boy to turn and move towards the girl – by then at the top of the laneway looking on.
Now, the issue I’m concerned with here isn’t the content of the video. It goes without saying that this isn’t the sort of video we should be sharing on social networks of any kind, let alone a professionally-orientated one. The dogs were scared, the children were scared, it was a difficult watch, and I’m thankful it ended without anyone (human or animal) getting hurt. The issue I’m concerned with is the reaction to the video.
Within one week of being posted to LinkedIn, this person’s video and attached caption garnered 6,500 likes, 340k views, and 550 comments. Despite the thousands of ‘like’, ‘celebrate’, ‘support’, ‘love’, ‘insightful’, and ‘curious’ reactions to the post, it was the comments that were the most concerning.
Of the 550 comments, can you guess how many reacted negatively to seeing two scared children being harassed by dogs in a dark laneway at night? Two. And one wasn’t even that sure about his feelings. LinkedIn members were near unanimous in their appreciation and approval of the video and the motivational message the poster wanted to convey.
“Thanks for posting. This is very inspiring.”
“This is brilliant.”
“Brilliant message.”
“The occurrence in this video is incredibly great.”
“Video clip is amazing.”
“Great message, thank you for sharing my friend.”
“A wonderful analogy to compliment your message of self-belief and continual growth even in trying times!”
“This is a wonderful video.”
“Nice representation with facts.” (Facts?)
“Some people are just born courageous and others not!”
“Wonderful context and I appreciate this, thank you.”
“Wonderful video. Just perfect to drive your wisdom, message, and advice home.”
“This is a great example of why the progressive left can’t and should not emasculate men.” (I’m not even touching that one.)
What is happening on LinkedIn that people are en masse showing such blanket, blind positivity towards a vague, only barely related motivational tagline above a clearly shocking video? Why are we overlooking real human struggles in our rush to congratulate ourselves over the application of worthless platitudes? Because this is the environment LinkedIn, or at the very least the users of LinkedIn, have fostered – very much in keeping with the relentlessly can-do-will-do attitude of the contemporary professional work environment.
Toxic positivity occurs when we hold too hard to the belief that we constantly need to be optimistic and look for the best in every situation. It’s the belief that all negativity is bad and has no place in the mind or the workplace. Positivity is a helpful tool in keeping staff motivated and tuned in to their work. It’s a helpful tool in everyday life in keeping a healthy and balanced mindset, but it reaches critical mass and becomes toxic when it starts to exert pressure on us, make us feel excluded or unworthy, or brings out negative feelings within us that we wouldn’t otherwise experience with such intensity.
As a social platform by its very nature plugged in to work and corporate culture, LinkedIn is a breeding ground for toxic positivity. CEOs build their brands with thought leadership posts and videos, project managers congratulate team members on performance for others to see and aspire to, and those of us looking for new opportunities push ourselves out there within our networks as much as possible by extolling our accomplishments and talents and celebrating the accomplishments and talents of others. With so much emphasis on positivity and congratulations, there simply isn’t room for negativity. Any inkling of negativity comes with the risk of damaging our reputation within our circle or industry in the same way that simply saying ‘no’ in our workplace can mark us as uncooperative and inflexible.
This is how we end up in a situation where we can only react positively to a video like the one in question, where positivity is the dominant cultural ideology and questioning or negativity are harmful to our status and relationships with others.
If you wanted to be reductive, you could call it peer pressure. We stand to lose more by not applauding the two seconds of thought someone put into sharing something ridiculous than by using critical reasoning and asking, “Wait a second, why are those children alone in a laneway at night? Where are their parents? And who actually took the time to cut this clip from the CCTV footage and post it online? Did they put the same effort into checking if the children were okay?”
Sometimes there doesn’t need to be a teachable moment. Sometimes the right thing to do when you’re a five-year-old boy in a scary dark laneway at night is to run away screaming. It genuinely is admirable that this boy stood his ground and allowed his friend or sister to get away, but somewhere within all the toxic positive bravado we need to remember that it is not a five-year-old’s job to fight dogs and sometimes a responsible person needs to step in to help.
The question we need to ask ourselves is: “When feelings of negativity are not allowed in popular discourse, what happens to people who are feeling negative?”
Katie is doing great.
Countless academic studies and corporate research papers have shown that social media at large has a negative impact on mental health. Twitter is a cesspool of culture war casualties and political beratement. Facebook constantly reminds us that we are single and haven’t gotten a foot on the property ladder yet while all our childhood friends post pictures of manicured nails hovering over glistening engagement rings and keys in the front doors of cosy new homes in the suburbs. Instagram confronts us with heavily edited pictures of models and influencers with toned bodies and blemish-free skin we couldn’t hope to achieve if we never touched a burger again. Everywhere online we are accosted by trolls that just want to make us feel bad about ourselves, regardless of whether or not what they’re saying is true or makes any sense at all. When was the last time anyone included LinkedIn in that conversation?
Considering the massive role LinkedIn plays in employment and business, and by correlation the role the concept of a successful career plays within our conception of identity and self-worth, it’s time we start really looking hard at the impact it may be having on us.
For many, those in the 18-30 age bracket especially, LinkedIn can be an all too real source of distress, impacting the way we view and asses our self-image and our place in the world. It provides a veritable playground for many of the triggers of crises in self-doubt and identity to run wild:
Comparison with peers, contemporaries, and respected figures within our industry, age group, area of interest, or social circle
Realisation of self and curation of identity
Fulfilment of goals and career trajectory
Performance and evaluation of status, identity, and achievements in an open forum
These are things we struggle to even think or talk about with trusted friends and family, yet on LinkedIn we confront them every time we log in.
This is a very different battle to the ones we experience on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. When it comes to social platforms like those, we’ve become far more media savvy. We understand the images and content people post are hyperreal representations of their own personal reality, not of reality itself. We know our exes aren’t always on exciting yacht trips with their new partners, we know the flawless model has spent hours working hard to make their complexion appear that way, we know our friend with the great band probably also has a really difficult day job that pays for the shows they do and the records they make that make us wish we were doing something creative too. I’m not sure we apply that same critical thinking when it comes to LinkedIn.
Why is it harder to pinpoint curation of identity on LinkedIn? Hard to say. Maybe we take our careers more seriously than the ‘fun’ side we show on Instagram. Maybe we’re afraid of being caught out in an embellishment and we imagine the consequences of that to be too much to think of. Maybe it’s ingrained in us to take business-oriented content far more at face value than we would a polished selfie with a plate of kale in a fancy restaurant.
Toxic feelings creep in when we fail to acknowledge that all content is curated. It is, in a very real way, an ad.
What is LinkedIn really about? Businesses post ads for other businesses or consumers to see. Salespeople curate targeted content to attract leads. Influencers post scripted videos or (very often ghost written) articles to establish their image as an authority on a subject in the hopes that they’ll build a profitable following. Regular folks like you and me post our CVs and accomplishments to show employers that we are competent, engaged, and hopefully more worthy of their consideration for promotion or hiring than the next person they look at. Every one of us is engaged in advertising and little white lies to help us project whatever message we’re hoping to communicate at that particular time, the exact same as we do on any other social platform.
I’m going to spin into a short digression for a moment to share with you the story of a person and a post that doesn’t conform with the LinkedIn content formula. Let me tell you about Katie (Katie is not her real name).
Katie is an Asian-American working in tech, very successfully. She is also, it seems, something of a high-achiever, even from a very young age. Katie started university at the age of only 16. By the age of 20 she had not one but two bachelor’s degrees under her belt. By 23 she had completed law school. This is how she started her post on LinkedIn. Not too surprising, a lot of posts start that way. But what Katie went on to explain is that to many looking at her or her profile it would appear as though she “had it all”, that her journey was easy and her trajectory was a clear shot, and that she was no longer entirely comfortable with that narrative.
Katie explained that along her journey there were struggles with depression, suicidal ideation, and multiple failed exams that led to very real difficulties surrounding achievement and identity that those taking her social image at face value would not see. Essentially, that by glossing over the negative to focus on the positive, one would not be telling or understanding her story correctly.
What was Katie’s post about? The inspiration she got from American gymnast Simone Biles’ discourse around her controversial withdrawal from the Tokyo Olympics, citing mental health issues. And what was Simone Biles’ message following that withdrawal all about? That despite being perhaps the most respected athlete in her field, despite being the clear favourite to win having won four gold medals at the previous Games in Rio, and despite everyone around her wanting her to be positive and stick with it, sometimes the best thing to do is to say ‘no’. Sometimes embracing what might seem like a negative right now is really how we keep going to fight another day.
These are not your average LinkedIn messages. If you were to break down the standard motivational clickbait LinkedIn post into a reproducible formula, it would look like this: Outcome x (Adversity + Platitude) = Social Capital.
If you use that formula to build and post content steadily, whether about yourself or others, odds are high you’re going to get a lot of traction after a while. It integrates well into the platform’s positive-first ethos and gives people room to congratulate you on your accomplishment or motivational thought – just like our friend with his dog attack video. Neat and tidy.
What realist embracers of negativity like Katie and Simone Biles are suggesting is something far more daring altogether. Perhaps for something like that we need a new formula. Something like: Outcome – Openness Around a Struggle or Negative = A conversation we really need to be having.
What do the experts say?
It might be surprising to hear this – especially given the amount of research funding and effort that goes into understanding social media impact and behaviour from schools of business and marketing, humanities and social sciences, or other human resources-related bodies – but very little research, if any at all, has gone into the impact LinkedIn in particular has on our mental wellbeing. Or, if there has, I’ve been fairly unsuccessful in finding it.
Any research that has gone into LinkedIn has all been directed towards how behaviour patterns and engagement can be leveraged for the betterment of corporate practice and processes. For example Jamie Guillory and Jeffery T. Hancock’s research into how likely a person is to lie on their LinkedIn page relative to a traditional offline CV. Or Bryce A Palar’s doctoral dissertation on the influence of LinkedIn on reputation, in which ‘reputation’ is defined as “collective judgements about a person’s ability to deliver value or quality over time”.
Do you see the pattern? Popular conversation is built around how LinkedIn can be a positive resource for recruitment and personal branding and how a candidate’s value can be determined effectively, not on the impact those factors have on those being evaluated. Though, if we were to look for assumptions between the lines in these two articles at least, they would be that people lie on LinkedIn and people on LinkedIn are using the platform to proliferate a curated online persona.
If you were to do a quick Google on who actually is talking about the impact of LinkedIn on mental health, you’d find it’s mostly bloggers and writers on magazine sites posting articles (of which I’ll share a few at the bottom of this article) about how long-term interaction with LinkedIn has made them feel personally.
Why aren’t we talking about impact constant exposure to toxically positive and pointedly curated content has on us in a professional environment?
Even Reddit has a thread with users opening up about how LinkedIn makes them feel, and finding a genuinely supportive community on a general Reddit thread is as rare as hen’s teeth.
“First they came for the socialists, but I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist.”
Largely we don’t speak up about the kinds of feelings we have in these scenarios because of social identity theory dynamics, the concept of in-group and out-group culture or ‘us and them’. Allow me another digression here to give you a working example of in-group and out-group politics in action.
I’m currently looking for accommodation in a new city. It’s hard because there’s a housing crisis in the city at the moment meaning thousands of families, couples, single people, and students are all competing to fill the small number of rooms, houses, and apartments available. To help with the search, I joined a renters group on Facebook where landlords and would-be tenants all gather to discuss what’s available or maybe team up to find a shared place together.
Recently, one renter, an international student, posted in the group about how he felt a lot of the places he’d been applying to had been discriminating against him because of his race. Almost immediately, at least a dozen Irish people jumped in to criticise him for this. They exclaimed that they’re Irish and they’re having just as hard a time finding a place to live as he is, so clearly his feelings are foolish, incorrect, blame shifting, and attention seeking. They didn’t ask him why he felt that way, they didn’t ask him if he had any evidence to back his statement up, they just shut it down. The dominant group ideology became that racism in house hunting in Ireland simply wasn’t possible because Irish people couldn’t find homes either – despite these commenters being white and Irish and having no idea what it’s like to be neither white nor Irish and in the same situation.
The reason I bring this up as an example is because my immediate reaction in reading this was to call out this unfair behaviour towards this international student’s experience. To leave a comment something akin to: “Just because you can’t find a home doesn’t mean landlords aren’t judging this person because of the colour of his skin. Both of these things can happen simultaneously and independently of each other.” But I didn’t. I paused and faltered. I faltered because I realised that maybe my next landlord was in this group and would see my comment. And maybe that landlord is one of the ones who wouldn’t accept this international student because of his race and, upon seeing my comment, wouldn’t accept me either as a result of criticising this behaviour.
I showed (cowardice, yes, but) prime in-group behaviour here, not by contributing to the dominant narrative but by not doing anything to countermand it. Looking back on this, my reaction disappoints me because not only would I like to think I’m not the kind of person who would leave this behaviour unchecked, I would like to believe I wouldn’t be the kind of person who would pay rent to a racist landlord in the first place. But my self-preservation instinct kicked in and I shied away.
What has this got to do with the dominant cultural ideology on LinkedIn? What has it got to do with the culture of toxic positivity? It’s got a lot to do with it because it’s the exact same in-group out-group phenomenon.
We don’t call out fatuously positive and hollow posts for being a waste of time and a damage to our mindset because we don’t want to be seen as the ones being negative in the positively-curated professional environment. We don’t want to be the ones saying, “Idiot! Those dogs are going to hurt that boy!” We don’t want to do this because somewhere in our minds we believe that exhibiting that behaviour will other us in the eyes of the vocal majority and result in negative consequences for us or our career in the long run. Maybe our bucking of the status quo within our network blocks us from that promotion or raise we’ve deserved for a long time but haven’t gotten. Maybe the person we’re interviewing with next week sees it and develops an impression of us as troublesome and not a ‘team player’. Without even thinking, we internalise the dominant cultural ideology and make the snap decision that it’s better to just play along in the hopes of maintaining a positive image and clean reputation.
What’s strange in all this is that we don’t apply this same self-preservation default state to other social media platforms. We talk openly about the need for body positivity on Instagram and how the constant content flow from models and fitness influencers can be triggering for people with eating disorders or issues around their physical appearance. We talk about how damaging the cultural, societal, and political discourse on Twitter can be and openly post about how we’re taking a ‘Twitter detox’ to rebuild our immunity to it. Yet with LinkedIn, it’s a stony radio silence.
With so little chatter going on around LinkedIn and how it makes us feel, I decided to get the conversation going within my own social media circle. And no, I didn’t ask LinkedIn. I wanted honesty.
Crowdsourcing negativity.
The call I put out was simple: “Have you found LinkedIn to negatively impact your mental health/wellbeing in a significant way?” I chose Instagram as the platform for this because the Stories function allows users to submit answers directly, avoiding the need to post any information or feelings publicly which might otherwise spoil the data or disincentivise people from being open and honest. The results? There is something rotten in the state of LinkedIn.
50% of responders confirmed that they had indeed experienced negative feelings at the hands of their LinkedIn feed within the last year. 25% had experienced no negative feelings resulting from the professional platform. The remaining 25% held no opinion. Almost all of the comments from those who had experienced negative feelings revolved around the issues of authenticity and performance of identity, representation, and toxic positivity.
Of the responders to the open call, those most commonly experiencing negative emotions through their LinkedIn interactions fell within the 18-30 age group, followed closely by those working in the arts. This is perhaps no surprise as a commonality between both these groups is a high level of professional competition in the search for meaningful or lasting employment and a high level of sociocultural competition stemming from the fact that their networks and connections are more likely to be comprised of peers, contemporaries, and influencers with whom these users may be evaluating themselves against.
One responder, a business development specialist at a global tech company, spoke about the kinds of content he saw many of his colleagues posting on LinkedIn after mass layoffs at his company’s Irish office in 2020. He noted how many of his former colleagues felt obliged within their network to post positive and grateful content regarding their redundancies, touting the great opportunities and experiences they received from the global tech company that opted to end their employment en masse at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – despite many incentives from the Irish government to help businesses retain staff throughout the crisis. If these staff members didn’t feel the pressure to conform to the dominant positive ideology and be ‘team players’, would they still have posted such positive comments about their former employer?
Another responder, a marketing and design professional, spoke about the pressure she felt to display her employment history publicly, citing it as invasive and shocking especially in light of how hesitant people can be in posting personal information on other social sites. She noted also how, for her, participation on LinkedIn felt like an extension of her duties to her employer, implying a level of self-censorship and barrier to authentic performance of identity that she wouldn’t feel elsewhere online.
Others in the negative camp spoke about the lack of quality in the posts appearing on their feed. They described how ineffective many of the so-called ‘motivational’ posts they were seeing were, often simply being performative acts of virtue signalling without any real value or social consequence for the reader. The most common responses among these responders revolved around how frustrating the constant barrage of positivity and faux motivation was, to the point that it felt as though many within their feeds were far more concerned with developing a cult of personality than actually contributing to a conversation. One responder went as far as to dub these kinds of interactions as relegating LinkedIn to being more akin to ‘Bebo for adults’ than a genuine social network for professionals.
Those who had overall more positive experiences with LinkedIn were less vehement in their comments, tending to see it as a more harmless alternative to other social networks or a good place to find a new professional connection or industry-related article. These responders fell exclusively into the 30+ category, though it should be noted not all within that demographic fell into the LinkedIn-positive category. Many acknowledged that they could see how some could feel alienated by their individual LinkedIn feeds, but that they did not experience those feelings themselves.
One particularly interesting insight, coming from a former marketing professional in the LinkedIn-positive camp, may have provided a broad-strokes solution for the LinkedIn issue at large. This responder spoke about how her main focus on LinkedIn curation isn’t on her own profile or the types of content she posts, but on the types of content she allows onto her feed.
She spoke about how she tries to keep her network strictly professional, following mainly companies she’s interested in and often culling personal social connections that aren’t relevant to the kinds of content she wants to see on LinkedIn. She explained that this helped actively create a buffer against the toxic positive and socioculturally competitive content that would usually appear on our feeds and made for an overall more focused flow of relevant posts.
Perhaps this is the way forward for navigating the LinkedIn experience in a mentally healthy manner. Cull what is potentially harmful or irrelevant and follow only what might be of benefit or interest. Constantly evaluate and update permissions for the sources of information that we allow onto our feeds. After all, do we really need to follow our childhood friends on LinkedIn if they aren’t working within our industry? We’ve got so many other social networks for that. Maybe we can give them a respectful miss and stay in touch on Instagram instead.
All the world’s a stage, but especially LinkedIn.
All social content is posted by users with an intention in mind – good, bad, or indifferent. As an act, posting and curating content is performative. It’s a projection of what we want the world to think of us. It isn’t inherently a competitive act, but it will invariably spark feelings of competition or cause other users to evaluate themselves against the content they see.
Most of the time we can write these feelings off because most social media is white noise. We might feel jealous of our second cousin’s ex-girlfriend’s cocktail night in Hawaii but after five minutes we forget all about it because it doesn’t really have any impact on who we are and what our value is as a person. In this way, while social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram may inspire transient competitive feelings, they are not by design competitive. The problem with LinkedIn is that we can’t say the same thing of it.
LinkedIn, by its very design, is competitive. As one of my responders pointed out, our profiles aren’t marked as complete until we post our entire employment and education history. Instagram doesn’t demand tributes in the form of pet pics and lunch selfies. LinkedIn does. And then employers or contemporaries use that information to decide whether or not we have value or a worthy reputation (as Palar pointed out) within our industry or circle. This is why LinkedIn is dangerous for our mental health. Because it is a constant, public, almost mandatory hub for us to be evaluated against our contemporaries.
One of the most basic and invaluable mantras anyone can ever give you, and a foundation of mindful thinking, is the phrase “I am better than nobody and nobody is better than me.” LinkedIn does not approve this message. It encourages us to post our every accomplishment and then expects us to not feel insecure when those accomplishments don’t weigh up against the accomplishments of others.
Comparisons like this play directly on our conception of identity and self-esteem. When comparisons come up short, we feel isolated. When we feel isolated, comparisons compound even harder because we internally other ourselves in the face of our peers. We start to think of ourselves as what we aren’t, instead of what we are.
We internalise the success narratives of people like Katie who have three degrees and a thriving career by the age of 25 without being exposed to the hardships she faced along the way and how those hardships might mirror our own. LinkedIn encourages us to assess our own self-worth in light of others, as Shannon Palus and Heather Schwedel point out in their Slate.com article ‘LinkedIn Is Actually the Best Social Network for Self-Loathing’:
“Here is a short list of things that have made us envious on LinkedIn […]: People who are younger than us but have cooler jobs than us. People who are older than us but got an amazing job when they were younger than us. People who seem to get promoted every single year. Anyone who seemed to get a real office job almost immediately out of college. Anyone who got a specific job that we applied for and didn’t get. People who did years in one career and then switched, without any kind of gap. People who have a large résumé gap but successful careers nonetheless. People who live in warmer places than we do. People who have real headshots and actually look good in them. People who work at any startup that uses a millennial-pink palette. People with jobs that would impress our relatives who never go online. People with jobs that involve nature. Anyone who has the title “Creative Director” or “Curator.” We could go on, but we’ll stop there for your sake.”
Am I wrong in saying that’s an awful lot more insecurity than we should be getting from a glorified CV dump? When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is a stream of consistent success stories that don’t mirror your own and toxically positive yet hollow motivational platitudes with countless sycophantic commenters, everything looks like a threat to your sense of self.
Finding conclusions and solutions.
In the face of toxic positivity and the mental barrage of LinkedIn content, there really is no clear solution. The problem doesn’t lie with LinkedIn itself, but in the way we as users engage with LinkedIn, and for that reason the formula is very unlikely to change.
Businesses need to post about progress to drive leads. Jobseekers need to post about their skills because they want to find a job. People need to celebrate their accomplishments because, well, people need to celebrate their accomplishments. And rightly so.
Despite all this, I can’t help but feel we need to create a little more room for negativity on the world’s largest professional social network. Partly because we need to be more open and honest about failure and struggle in the professional environment, but also because sometimes being positive for the sake of being positive is just fatuous and does more harm than good.
More than anything, we need to be conscious of our behaviours on LinkedIn and our reactions to the content we see on it. When a system is unlikely to change, the best thing we can do is adapt how we experience and engage with it. With that in mind, here’s a few helpful tips for when you’re feeling that toxic positivity fatigue creeping in:
Log off when you need to
Only visit when necessary
Keep your account active but delete the app from your phone
Avoid the news feed and focus only on your own profile, messages, or applications
If you only need an account to have a presence or online CV, create the account, update it, and forget all about it
Post about the bad as well as the good
Don’t sweep your trials under the rug in the telling of your own success story
Equally, don’t over-romanticise your trials, maybe someone else is going through the same thing and they don’t need that being made light of
Think before you post, ask yourself how your content might impact others
Curate your feed, not just your posts – delete those toxic connections if you feel like it, you don’t need them
Remember the nature of the medium, all content is curated
Identify the nature of your negative reactions and ask yourself if they are rational, helpful, or necessary
Put effort into genuinely celebrating the successes of others and their hard work paying off without tying it to whatever situation you might be in yourself right now
Foster and engage in genuine interactions, don’t celebrate posts for clout alone
In the interest of not spinning this into a sales opportunity, there is no call to action here. Thanks for reading. Go out and pet a dog. Look into a mirror and tell yourself your successes are enough for now. Get a coffee or play a game with a friend. Go feed some ducks. Take care of yourself and, for the love of God, log out of LinkedIn!
Shoutouts and further reading
As mentioned at the top of this article, here are some great blogs and articles from others online talking about the impact of LinkedIn on mental health and wellbeing:
https://www.lbbonline.com/news/linkedin-depression-is-it-a-thing
www.youthkiawaaz.com/2021/06/linkedin-fatigue-terrible-impact-on-mental-health/amp/
https://medium.com/@cortneygloriacoulanges/youre-not-off-the-hook-linkedin-fb930fa200b6
https://urge.org/linkedout-why-professional-social-media-makes-us-hate-ourselves/
https://powernappy.wordpress.com/2019/08/19/why-linkedin-can-make-you-depressed/
https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/linkedin-stalking-self-loathing-social-media-envy.html
Let’s be social
Further reading
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RT @raleighreports: Man arrested on suspicion of murdering woman in Limerick apartment https://t.co/zqkhsfvFUi via @limerickpost -
I’ve heard it called many things, but ‘wild toileting’ is a new one in me.
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RT @limerickpost: Death of woman in Limerick apartment is now a murder case - https://t.co/jbyp0UAELf https://t.co/6W3eK4JMfh
