I sometimes wonder.. I am caught in a situation where I need to be active on LinkedIn. I thought I’d never have to. I swore I’d never do it, but then I changed caréer path and I’m more or less required to have a profile there. So now I have sold a part of my soul by signing on to that fake, brag-infested, putrid hell-hole of a website.

I mean, it has its use, I’m sure. It’s nice to easily find contact information about companies that you would like to work for, and likewise an easy way for them to look you up too. But it’s the posts man. All of them skirt that edge of being fucking inappropriate. Every post is deceptive humblebrag:

“Hey all, check this out, for 300 days straight, I have posted about my activity here on LinkedIn. And while it has been a lot of hard work for sure, it was not harder than when I helped build this school for malnourished children in Rwanda. All in all, I got to say it’s been a productive year filled with much of my dedicated hard work (Which is awesome and great in every way, as is every experience I always have). PS, I helped an old lady cross a road yesterday, AND gave a homeless person a cookie (vegan of course).”

And it gets 400 likes immediately.

I guess you sort of have to sell a part of your soul to get a job you want. But do you really need to overdo it? At what point are you going from a pragmatic “I probably need to do this..” to a fullblown psychosis where you are just longing to flush your soul down the toilet by producing garbage that would make most people puke if you declared it in a room full of strangers (which is what you are doing).

I think we all have to be careful. Everything we say and do online probably gets recorded and stored forever, probably even this website. Do you really want your great-great-grandchildren looking back a hundred years from now, and going “Jesus christ, that old fart was fake as fuck, check this out! He once posted about letting someone merge in traffic ahead of him, said it was a nice opportunity to show empathy and how it inspired him to post on LinkedIn and that he is grateful for the journey.”

I would way rather my great-great-grandchildren find out the full extent of my 30 years of online porn browsing. How I in the 90s obediently waited for jpg to finally load just enough for you to see nipples on a screen while using a 56k modem, to a couple of decades later when you find yourself in that post-nut clarity after watching some shit you know you should not have been watching. Like watching some chick engage in stuff she probably shouldn’t engage in, but you watch it anyway because she’s kinda cute, and in any case you’re bored. And then when the clip ends and the screen goes black and you sit there, seeing yourself reflected back in the darkness of the monitor. That’s death.

And then you do it all over again for a decade more. LOL.

I would way rather they see that shit. THAT was a journey, in which you can find the toil of the human experience. The need for ever increasing novelty, just to soothe the existential dread that comes with having incarnated a human body here on earth.

Nothing to hide about it really. But probably nothing to brag about either when you think of it. If I were a better man, I would post about it on my linkedin-profile. But since I’m not, I won’t.

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Filed under: Riffs - @ December 17, 2025 1:40 pm