We open LinkedIn for a practical reason. A job post. A message. A quick check on someone’s background before a call. Maybe a little career inspiration.
And then we scroll. Someone just got promoted. Someone is “thrilled to announce.” Someone is building in public. Someone has a clean lesson wrapped in a neat story. Someone else is quietly panicking while reading all of it.
That mix is the point.
We are living in the social media era, and LinkedIn is part of it. For many of us, it sits inside identity in a very specific way. Not “who we are” in general, but who we are in the work world. The part of life that pays rent, shapes status, and so often becomes a shortcut for self worth.
So we do not need to demonize LinkedIn. We can keep it, use it, even like it, and still be honest about what it nudges in us.
Before LinkedIn, our professional world was smaller on purpose
Think about how career life used to work.
Most of us had a handful of professional circles. Coworkers, a local industry group, classmates, maybe a mentor, maybe a few friends in the same field. Our reputation moved slowly. It was mostly built through repeated interactions, not constant broadcasting. We could change our minds and try again without announcing it to a crowd.
And the audience was limited. Not because people were wiser back then, but because the infrastructure was different.
LinkedIn flips that. It turns professional life into something that can be continuously visible and continuously optimised. It also adds the two ingredients that change human behavior fast: public presentation and social feedback.
Marshall McLuhan’s line fits here: “The medium is the message.” The format shapes the person using it, even when the content feels harmless.
The quiet psychological costs we keep bumping into
Career comparison becomes the default setting.
On Instagram, comparison often lands on bodies and lifestyle. On LinkedIn, it lands on titles, companies, funding rounds, awards, productivity, and the whole “trajectory” thing. It is still upward comparison, just dressed in professional clothing. Even when we know it is curated, our nervous system still reacts.
Imposter feelings get fed by constant self monitoring.
There is research suggesting professional social networking can heighten self focused attention, which can trigger imposter thoughts and heavier moods for some people. It makes sense in real life too. When the platform keeps asking, “How do we look professionally right now?” it is easy for our brain to answer, “Not enough.”
Technostress sneaks in as background noise.
LinkedIn can create a low level pressure to stay current, respond fast, maintain a profile, keep the story coherent, and be reachable. Even when we are not actively job hunting, the platform can make career feel like something we should always be tending, like a garden we never get to leave.
Authenticity gets expensive.
A professional platform trains us toward impression management, the careful shaping of how we appear. That is not automatically fake. It is just selective. But when the incentives reward polish and confidence, the messy parts of real work life get pushed out. Doubt, confusion, slow learning, boring effort, all the normal human stuff.
Relationships can become slightly more instrumental.
LinkedIn is literally built around opportunity. That is not immoral, it is the purpose. But it can shift how we relate to people. We can start seeing others as leads, networks, audiences, referrals, or stepping stones. Even when we do not want to think like that, the environment quietly encourages it.
Sherry Turkle has a line that keeps resurfacing in these conversations: “We expect more from technology and less from each other.” On a career platform, that can show up as expecting more clarity, more certainty, more constant availability, and less of the human mess that real relationships carry.
The philosophical angle: our career becomes a story we have to keep selling
Storytelling is not a side thing on LinkedIn. It is the main currency.
Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” LinkedIn turns that into a public habit. We are not only living a career, we are also narrating it. We shape it into a timeline, a brand, a message, a “why.”
And the platform rewards a specific kind of story. Simple arc. Clear villain. Clear lesson. Confident takeaway. The kind of narrative that fits a feed and performs well.
That can be useful. It can also distort reality.
Real careers are rarely clean stories. They are zigzags, compromises, boring seasons, setbacks we do not want to name, and wins that involved luck plus help plus timing. When the dominant storytelling format is “I learned X, now I teach X,” it is easy for us to feel like we are falling behind if our own life does not fit a neat post.
So the drawback is not “people are lying.” The drawback is that the platform makes us practice a kind of storytelling that can flatten the truth of work.
Critical thinking: what counts as evidence on LinkedIn?
Critical thinking is not only about spotting misinformation. It is also about noticing what looks credible because it is packaged professionally.
Carl Sagan’s line is helpful here: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
On LinkedIn, “claims” often look like:
- “This one habit changed my career.”
- “Here is the hiring truth nobody tells you.”
- “This is the only way to lead.”
- “This is what successful people do.”
Some of these posts are helpful. Some are survivorship bias in a nice outfit. Some are marketing. Some are simplified lessons from complex situations.
The platform can make weak evidence feel strong because the presentation is strong. Titles, confident tone, polished storytelling, social proof, a lot of engagement. Those are not the same as truth. They are signals, and signals can mislead.
So the thinking challenge on LinkedIn is subtle. It is not “are people good or bad.” It is “what is the platform rewarding, and what does that do to what gets said?”
Empathy: professional life is personal life, even when the feed forgets it
Empathy gets tricky on a professional platform because we mostly see outcomes, not context.
We see promotions, layoffs, pivots, wins, announcements. We rarely see the anxiety before the announcement, the grief behind the layoff post, the years of trying, the invisible support system, the health issues, the immigration stress, the caregiving, the rejection streaks.
Simone Weil wrote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” LinkedIn is not built for sustained attention. It is built for quick scanning, quick judgments, quick reactions. That can make it easier to forget that a person’s career is not just a profile. It is a whole life.
And when we get trained into fast professional judgments, empathy can quietly thin out. We can become less patient. More comparative. More cynical. More likely to reduce people to their role and their status.
Again, not doom. Just a human reaction to an environment.
If we had to name one core drawback
If we compress it into one sentence, it might be this:
LinkedIn can slowly push us toward treating our career as a public performance, instead of a lived experience that we sometimes share.
That shift touches self worth, attention, relationships, honesty, and even how we tell the story of our own life.
And we can still keep the platform. We can still use it to find opportunities, learn, and stay connected. We can just hold a clearer picture of the tradeoffs while we do.
