The Eighth Circle of Hell is LinkedIn
:)
Last March, I stood in line for a rooftop party that required a LinkedIn profile to RVSP. That sentence, that one I just wrote? It shouldn’t exist. I shouldn’t have had to go through that experience during SXSW, but the drinks were free and some people don’t have any other reason to gather besides the illusion of productivity, so there I was. I sent the RSVP link to my friends, one of whom said,
“What the hell is LinkedIn?”
God. Inject that into my veins. An existence in which LinkedIn, the signpost that points to the end of beauty and humanity and all praised by Our Lord and Savior Mary Oliver, doesn’t take up any brain space. I’ve never been so jealous of someone.
I hate LinkedIn.
But I still have a profile, so I shared it with our friends in line and we all got into the party, where, unfortunately, the beers were brewed at El*n M*sk’s weird compound. I had gin and tonics.
Unnecessary Evil
Listen, I know the answer to my problem. I literally just signed out of LinkedIn in between writing these two sentences. I’m sure I joined LinkedIn in college, didn’t touch it for years, and then hopped back on to update my profile as I started (then restarted) ghostwriting. I will say, it’s not even the third-best source for referrals and jobs, but it is a social networking site, and my brain is still rot. (Maybe in the second half of the year, I’ll recommit to the no-social-media promises I made in the first half of the year.)
Logging onto LinkedIn is morning breath from hell: stale. Go right now. (Or after you finish reading this.) I guarantee you’ll see one post about how you can spot AI-generated writing by looking for em dashes. Then, you’ll see another post about how em dashes are a natural part of writing (true), begging and pleading those ignorant of punctuation to please, please, consider the (admittedly, dumb) adverb overuse that is the true signal of AI-generated writing.
And it’s been like this for months.
We.
Get.
It.
Who is this content for? If people are just discovering what an em dash is in the Year of Our Lord and Savior Mary Oliver 2025, they have no business attempting to “influence” people about writing and its future.
And don’t get me started on the weirdos who kneel at the altar of AI, praising the ways that we can reduce any and all chance of having a single critical thought so that we can make computer go ding-ding-ding and words go write-write-write. What are you getting from scraping your knees for ChatGPT? A full mouth, but no brain. Do you think Sam Altman is going to give you the ruffle of your hair and the gold sticker you didn’t get as a child? Jesus Christ.
Go outside!
Have a critical thought!
Take a breath!
(That last one was for me.)
LinkedIn has always been a cesspool for people who don’t have a “third place” and would list home as their second place. Every real (but mostly clunkily imagined) scenario is awkwardly tied to a lesson in how to be a great cog in the machine. And there are no boundaries on what tragedy can be used for LinkedIn fodder.
How often can this happen? We still don’t have the full story on the AirIndia crash, yet the first example I found on the LinkedInLunatics subreddit featured a photo of one of the families who died said crash. (Including children!) The post tagged Boeing, for some reason, and reminded people on LinkedIn that “everything you build…hangs by a thread.” I’ll link the post here, but it was honestly a little too dark for me to post the whole photo.
This post did not pop up on my LinkedIn, so I did not comment how disgusting it is to use a dead family’s selfie to boost your own LinkedIn. (And for what? I’m assuming this person already has a job.) I have shamed people on LinkedIn before for posting photos of dead clients without their family’s permission to brag about the generosity they extended to those clients’ families.
What Are We Doing?
I can pretend that I’m some hero fighting for human decency and dignity when I rail against lunatics on LinkedIn, but I’m just another angry person whacking the moles of people who are not thinking before they post. This is not limited to LinkedIn—I have all but deleted my Facebook and I don’t even touch X/Threads/Bluesky—but I think what feels most offensive about these lunatics is that LinkedIn was supposed to be a professional networking site. Job searching should be boring. Influencers should not have any role in connecting HR recruiters with folks hoping that one of their resumes will actually be viewed by a person and not incinerated by the judgment of AI scanners, or whatever. (I don’t actually know how recruitment works.)
There are very few places where people actually adhere to the basic rules of etiquette and human decency. People talk very loudly at concerts. Parents let their children play on their iPad on full volume on public transportation. Nancy Mace has a job. Many people have reduced themselves to impulsive, convenience freaks, trading critical thinking and waiting one gosh darn second for results, results, results, solution, solution, solution, black and white, black and white, black and white, judgment, judgment, final judgment. LinkedIn is just one dirty cesspool of that reality, so maybe I’m being a little harsh on it.
I’ll think about it over a coffee and bird-noticing.
