The Platform Where Everyone Is Thriving

I saw a LinkedIn post last week from a guy I used to work with. His profile photo is him in a blazer, arms crossed, standing in front of a glass building. The post said he was thrilled to announce a new opportunity and grateful for the incredible journey that led him here. Ninety-two people liked it. Fourteen people commented congratulations with exclamation points. I happen to know, because he told me over drinks three months ago, that he was laid off without warning, spent two months applying to jobs that never responded, cried on the phone to his mother about whether he had wasted his thirties, and ate cereal for dinner more times than he wants to admit. The incredible journey was him refreshing his inbox at three in the morning in his underwear, wondering if he should go back to school. This is not an attack on him. This is an attack on the platform that made him feel like he had to translate his worst professional experience into a narrative of gratitude and growth before anyone would take him seriously again.

The Performance of Professional Wellness

LinkedIn is the only social media platform where the performance is not beauty or coolness or wealth. The performance is professional wellness. Everyone is energized by challenges. Everyone is passionate about synergy. Everyone is honoring the mentors who shaped them. Nobody is mentioning the bathroom stall they locked themselves in before the quarterly review, the panic attack in the parking garage, the marriage that started deteriorating the same week they got the promotion. The Survey Center on American Life released data in 2021 showing that Americans have fewer close friendships than at any point in the past three decades. Cigna's 2024 loneliness index reported that the loneliest demographic in America is working-age adults, the exact population performing relentless professional optimism online. We are curating our lives for an audience while the actual life behind the curation is falling apart. I posted on LinkedIn once, about two years ago. A genuine post about how hard the job search had been, about the rejection and self-doubt and the weird shame of being unemployed in a culture that treats your job title as your identity. It got almost no engagement. A friend messaged me privately and said, that was really brave, but you might want to take it down. I asked why. She said, it does not look good.

The Cereal-for-Dinner Demographic

The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness found that workplace environments are the primary social ecosystem for most American adults, and that when those environments prioritize performance over authenticity, the health consequences mirror those of chronic social isolation. We are building professional spaces that actively punish honesty and then wondering why everyone is burned out. Here is what I want to see on LinkedIn. I want to see the post that says, I got fired and I do not know what to do next. I want to see the one that says, I have been at this company for six years and I still do not feel like I belong. I want the cereal-for-dinner confession. The cried-on-Tuesday acknowledgment. Not because suffering is content, but because the relentless performance of thriving is making everyone who is not thriving feel like they are the only ones. They are not the only ones. The data is very clear on this. Most people are struggling. Most people are lonely. Most people have eaten cereal standing over the kitchen sink at an hour that would embarrass them. And the platform that is supposed to connect professionals is instead building a stage where nobody is allowed to be a person. I have not posted on LinkedIn since. Not because I am above it. Because I do not know how to be honest there without it feeling like a career risk. And the fact that honesty is a career risk is, I think, the whole problem.