LinkedIn Is Weird. Maybe Weirder Than You Think.

There’s a special kind of horror you feel when you realize you have been doomscrolling LinkedIn for half an hour, watching grown adults humblebrag about "lessons learned" from their toddler’s meltdown or announcing a lateral job move like they just cured polio.

It’s weird. It is deeply weird.

And what is worse, it is not accidentally weird. It is engineered weirdness.

LinkedIn is this strange Frankenstein monster where you are supposed to act like an ambitious robot while also baring your soul just enough to seem "authentic." Not too much, though. God forbid you actually seem unstable. You need the perfect mix. Just broken enough to be relatable, but successful enough that no one thinks you are a liability.

The worst part? We all know this, and we still play along.

You do not post a win without slipping in a "deep gratitude" paragraph to make it socially acceptable. You do not post a failure without weaponizing it into a leadership lesson. Even if it is your cat dying, somehow you spin it into a masterclass on resilience and empathy. That is the game. Smile for the camera, soldier.

People dunk on LinkedIn all the time, but not nearly enough for the right reasons. It is not just cringey. It is not just over-the-top. It is a weird social experiment that shows how fragile the old idea of "professionalism" actually was.

We used to think professionalism was clear-cut. You wore the right clothes. You spoke the right way. You had a crisp resume, a firm handshake, a polished LinkedIn page with no typos and maybe a humble nod to your Toastmasters membership.

Now? Professionalism is a moving target. It is a trust fall into the abyss. One minute you are supposed to be serious and poised, and the next minute you are supposed to get real about how losing your fantasy football league taught you "essential lessons in team dynamics."

And sure, you can scoff at it. You can sit there rolling your eyes thinking, this is why society is doomed. But here is the uncomfortable part. Some of this weirdness is real.

People are tired. Tired of pretending their lives are tidy upward graphs. Tired of scrubbing their personalities clean for the approval of people they do not even respect. Tired of carrying around two versions of themselves. The LinkedIn version and the real version.

That exhaustion leaks out. It seeps into posts where people overshare. Or get weirdly emotional about a job offer. Or post a selfie in their car talking about their "grindset." It is messy. It is undignified. It is also... kind of honest.

The old "professional" world was never pure anyway. It was just better at hiding its weirdness behind closed doors. Martini lunches. Nepotism. Secret firings. Now the weirdness is out in the open where everyone can gawk at it, judge it, or quietly hit "like" and pretend they are above it.

So yeah, LinkedIn is a circus. It is a desperate, attention-hungry, sometimes painfully earnest, sometimes hilariously fake parade. But it is also a mirror. If LinkedIn looks broken, it is only because we are broken. The platform just gives us the stage to act it out in public.

Is that bad? Depends on your appetite for chaos.

But it sure as hell is not boring.

And maybe, just maybe, being a little weird online is the most professional thing you can do right now. Not because it is perfect, but because it is real. And real beats perfect every time.