Last week of May 2025
I did something audacious. Not audacious in the LinkedIn sense — not a humble brag dressed up as vulnerability. Actually audacious. I published a three-post series on LinkedIn criticizing LinkedIn. Nobody does that. They do it on r/LinkedInLunatics, safely anonymous, far from the platform’s reach. I did it on the platform itself, under my real name, in French — my third language in which I’m most fluent, not the English I perform professionalism in.
I called it my “ras-le-bol” trilogy. Translation: “I’m fed up with it”.
And then everything went exactly as I feared. Not in the way I expected — the posts didn’t bomb professionally, nobody called me out, no recruiter sent me an angry message. It went wrong inside me. The anxiety, the paranoia, the exposure. That’s the part I didn’t see coming.
I watched my trilogy that I spent DAYS crafting word by word die in real time.
Why I snapped
I’ve been fighting with LinkedIn for years. Not just the platform — the whole premise of it. As someone who doesn’t fit the profile it was built for (not a white male, not from a prestigious university, not sitting on a network of well-connected alumni), I’ve watched it become increasingly hostile to people like me. I’ve done everything right, technically. Carefully crafted profile. All the supposed best practice boxes ticked. Minimal engagement. Fewer opportunities.
The breaking point came when I hit yet another guide on “using LinkedIn like a pro.” The same recycled nonsense:
- Become a thought leader by creating original content.
- Build your brand by posting regularly to “add value”.
- Network aggressively by messaging alumni and industry professionals.
- Use AI to craft “compelling messages” to strangers.
- Maintain 500+ connections to appear credible.
And I just thought: why? Why should my professional worth be measured by my ability to perform on social media? Why should I exhaust what little energy I have — while unemployed — creating free content to feed an algorithm that already filters me out based on my name, my face, and where I’m from?
The trilogy
So I wrote three posts, one per Thursday, in French. Here’s what each one was about:
- Post 1: How LinkedIn forces you to adopt the exact codes you criticize — turning professional networking into pure performative theater.
- Post 2: The mental health toll of constant comparison and the pressure to appear perpetually productive and inspired.
- Post 3: Survivorship bias — how LinkedIn pretends we all start from the same place while systematically ignoring privilege, discrimination, and the structural barriers that make “just put yourself out there” genuinely insulting advice for some of us
You can read the full trilogy here.
The deafening silence
Post 1: 215 impressions. Zero reactions. Zero comments.
The very next post in my feed was someone announcing they’d been part of a delegation at some international youth summit. After 14 hours: 28 reactions, a comment, a repost.
I’m not bitter about that specific person. But the contrast was clarifying. LinkedIn rewards the performance of success. It punishes anything that looks like doubt, dissent, or an honest account of what job searching actually feels like.
The anxiety I didn’t expect
Hours before the first post went live, I felt something I wasn’t prepared for. Not nervousness about stepping out of my comfort zone — I expected that. It was more specific. I was terrified of being hated. More than I already felt I was.
Because this wasn’t just professional criticism. It was giving voice to the part of me I’d spent years silencing on that platform — the part that sees through the facade and refuses to pretend it doesn’t.
After posting, that feeling curdled into something worse. Every unanswered email felt connected to it. Every ignored application. The paranoid thoughts showed up right on schedule: did I just mark myself as unemployable? Are recruiters seeing this and filing me under “difficult”?
I didn’t feel liberated. I felt exposed in all the wrong ways.
I deleted it
Two days after the third post, I deleted the whole trilogy.
The silence wasn’t just disappointing — it confirmed everything I’d written. LinkedIn doesn’t tolerate dissent. A billion users so thoroughly conditioned to maintain the facade that even naming the problem out loud feels dangerous. I was fighting a system I was completely dependent on for my professional survival. As someone actively job searching, I couldn’t afford to be the platform’s gadfly. The stakes were too real.
But I won’t let the trilogy disappear as if it never existed. The words are still true. The criticism still stands. That’s why it lives in a Google Doc now, and why I’m writing about it here — in my own space, where I don’t need anyone’s algorithm to let me speak.
What I actually learned
LinkedIn is toxic, discriminatory, and exhausting. It reduces professional worth to social media performance and forces people to become brands instead of humans. It performs meritocracy while systematically disadvantaging anyone who doesn’t fit its very narrow definition of who deserves to be seen.
I knew all of this before I posted. I was right.
Being right doesn’t pay the bills.
So I’m back. Playing a game I hate, on a platform that doesn’t value me, because the alternative — professional invisibility — is worse. And that’s probably the most damning thing I could say about LinkedIn: that knowing exactly what it is changes nothing about having to use it.
Featured image courtesy of Pexels.