What’s with the dead people posts on LinkedIn?
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There was a time on LinkedIn where I couldn’t seem to open the app without seeing a sob story about someone’s dead relative on my feed. This phenomenon would involve a photo of the recently deceased person (sometimes their literal corpse — I’m not joking) along with some spiel about ‘keeping it real’ and being vulnerable online. They would often use the opportunity to also thank their boss or company for being so supportive.
Nothing like the death of a loved one to really show you what’s important in life, right? And apparently that’s slobbering all over the corporate hole.
But how vulnerable is too vulnerable? A dead relative is okay clearly, but where do we stand on photos of a particularly virulent toe fungus? Or a funny-looking lump on one’s ballsack? And if I see someone’s lumpy ballsack on Linkedin am I still obligated to reply “So brave — thanks for sharing”?
LinkedIn fashions, much like nausea, comes in waves. Using dead relatives to farm interactions is just one sickening undulation in this truly depthless ocean of shit.
Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players” — this feels particularly true in the age of social media. But if Linkedin is a stage, it’s at the world’s shittiest community theater and the show is a sad pantomime for adults with the least likable cast you’ve ever encountered.
But while the people stepping into the spotlight are embarrassing, the audience should bear some weight of shame as well. They bought a ticket, sat in the front row, and clapped when prompted. They too are actors in this bizarre performance.
So who is the real audience, then?
This act is all for the benefit of an amorphous entity I’m going to describe as “A Company”.
There are values we, as a society, have ascribed to A Company. We know that it likes professionalism. Hard work. Productivity, goals and checklists. People who come early and leave late. We also know that A Company doesn’t approve of crude humor or swearing. It certainly wouldn’t like that you did heaps of pills on Saturday and spent Sunday anxious on the couch. It’s indifferent if you’re happy, but it recognises that there’s social capital in the appearance happiness.
But here’s the punchline: it doesn’t exist. At best it’s an ill-defined social construct which has little bearing in the modern workplace. But Capitalism has done such a job on some of us that we mould our behaviour into pleasing corporatised shapes anyway. People scrape off their edges, repackage intimate family moments, and spend time performatively being nice for the implicit approval of an entity which will never like their posts because it doesn’t have eyes to see or fingers to click a mouse.
A company isn’t the one to hire you, a person is. That person will also have a complicated inner world with their own feelings about work and life. Unless it’s a lizard person from Human Resources, that is. In which case their inner world is simply hoping no one realises they’re wearing a skin suit. Lizard people notwithstanding, the more you embrace your humanity, the better you and your working life will become.
I’m not saying don’t use Linkedin. By all means, do your little productivity hacks and Monday Inspiration. I’ve certainly written a few articles on there. But please, just be a normal fucking human.
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