My friends,
Often at work I find myself bored, and almost on instinct I start scrolling the cursed LinkedIn. I don't know why. I never learn. And more often than not, the first thing I see is some post from a random I've never even met (yet somehow "connected"?) along the lines of:
"A client requested an urgent meeting. We delivered. I didn't just attend the meeting. I became the meeting."
Dozens had reacted. Someone had written "This! 👏" underneath. You would think the man had won the Nobel. He is a marketing executive. What could he possibly have said in that meeting to convince himself he had "become the meeting"?
I kept scrolling, the way you pick at a scab. It did not improve.
"Humbled and honoured to share…"”Delighted to share…"
"Extremely pleased to announce…"
”There's something special about…"
Let that sink in."
Excited to be building the next chapter of my career at…"
I’ve been thinking about this all week and I can't shake it…"
Deadass honest to God I copied every one of those straight from LinkedIn.And honest to God bro look at this shit I'm copying straight from the website:
"55°C trains for Britain? The headline sounds almost absurd. The systems logic does not."
WHAT AM I READING.
Then you find the man explaining, across eleven separate lines each given its own lonely paragraph, how being rejected by forty-seven companies had quietly forged him into the leader he was always meant to be, the whole confession crowned with an AI-generated photo of a sunrise over some generic corporate skyline.
A recruiter informing me that my network is my net worth.
The dinosaur posting AI-generated slop about how AI can be used "in your everyday life."
Every third post opening on a single word, alone, for weight.
Growth.
Grateful.
Resilience.
And what drives me crazy is that every single fucking post is written in the exact same tone, the exact same voice, the exact same style. It is its own genre now. It is LinkedIn Slop. Let me be fair. LinkedIn was insufferable long before the Claudes and the ChatGPTs and the Perplexities arrived, far before we could even conceive of these machines.
There has always been a certain kind of man who will sit at a real desk and decide, freely and of sound mind, to inform four thousand strangers that he is "beyond thrilled."
But it was the man and not the machine.
He wrote it, he meant it, and so he owned the shame of it.
Now all the man does is tell the machine he got promoted. The machine hands him back a tidy paragraph on the quiet lessons of perseverance, finished with the em dash (which I now refuse to use, solely because people will assume I write with AI), and he posts it without reading it twice.
Then eleven other machines, prodded by eleven other people, arrive in the comments to congratulate him. "So well deserved." "🔥." Not one human being is present at any point in the entire exchange. It is the machine congratulating the machine.
And to conclude with my point, LinkedIn as a concept should be banned in the Middle East. We, or most of us in this community, believe in the evil eye (I don't know about you but I am not taking my chances sorry).
So how can we, as a community, also use LinkedIn? It simply does not make sense. Especially the fuckers who announce they got the job before the work visa is even approved. I say this because, as I write this, I remember being in my third year at uni, when a friend a year above me was hired for a job, and he posted about it not just on LinkedIn BUT ON INSTAGRAM TOO, and a week later he was told he was ineligible for the role in the first place.
Listen, I swear to you, his ex hit him with the evilest of evil eyes.
There is no other explanation for the whole thing collapsing like that. I promise you.
We should go back to shutting up. I come from a family that takes its superstitions seriously, and honestly, we all need to shut the fuck up. My grandmother would sooner drown than tell her own sister how much my father makes. To this day she runs the strictest privacy policy known to man.
So who the fuck am I to broadcast my promotion to my so-called connections!
As the random LinkedIn thought leader founder executive marketeer consultant would put it: "We didn't escape the evil eye. We built it a dashboard."
Click the picture to return home.