Linked Out & Anxious

Un-delighted & not thrilled

I used to love Twitter. 2019 academic Twitter was fun. There were memes and jokes, and if you were perpetually online it was a place to hang out with other perpetually online people and share your perpetually online people references and lingo. 2019 Twitter was also good for work: people shared job ads, and things they had written, and it was a place where I felt like I (at the time a PhD student) could reach out to people who were more senior (and more cool) and just chat. Not necessarily about work. Or I guess, not exclusively about work. Twitter at the time was also political, in the sense that people tweeted about politics, and discussed politics and expressed some sort of politics. I don’t mean to look at 2019 Twitter with rose-coloured glasses. It could also be intense, it could be chaotic, and if you (like me) lack a filter and a hand-break, then it could also lead to impulsively tweeting things you wished you could take back. It also had its moments of ‘delighted to announce’ and ‘thrilled to share’, but these were dispersed amongst memes and jokes and so easier to stomach. And then it was bought by a billionaire megalomaniac and went up in flames of misinformation and fascism. Since then, there was the Mastodon era and the year of Bluesky; work instagrams became a thing for a while (and thankfully seem to be on their way out); and we currently seem to be in a LinkedIn epoch (may god help us all).

I hate LinkedIn. It’s like the worst part of academic twitter had a baby with Cheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. It’s all success stories: of new jobs and new articles, and terrific workshops and lovely conferences and fantastic grants, and jesus christ, every time I log in, I need a Xanax.

Maybe it’s because I am just not an easily delighted person (at least not by work), and my reaction to something I’ve written being out is that of mild panic mixed with paralysing fear and a healthy dose of insecurity. My reaction to getting a job is usually relief mixed with impostor syndrome; and I have a tendency to panic so much whenever I am awarded any kind of funding that I either sob uncontrollably or vomit (yes, really). Don’t get me wrong, I do feel joy when these (good) things happen, but it’s a complicated kind of joy that holds within it all of the anxiety and anticipation of what happens next; it is relief, and letting go of fear of not having a place to live, or money to pay bills, or having to leave the country. ‘Delight’, to me, sounds like pure joy, and well, my joy tends to be the murky, bitter kind. There is also the fact that academic publishing and recruitment and funding are so slow, that by the time something is enough of a sure thing to share, most of my emotional responses have plateaued, and what I mostly feel is exhaustion (I am also chronically anaemic, which does not help).

And just to be clear, this is not a diss against people who feel delighted or thrilled—good for you—it is about the fact that I find that emotional response unreleatable. It’s me, not you.

But, it is also LinkedIn, and the fact that joining an ecosystem means being (to an extent) bound by its logic and its rules. Or to put it in terms that critical lawyers will understand: no social network is endlessly indeterminate, each has its structures which limit the kinds of content we can post and have it be legible. And the structure of LinkedIn is that it’s a career networking website, despite the fact that people also now seem to use it to share personal milestones and photos. And the thing about a career networking website is that, a bit like a career-dating-app, it wants a sanitised version of who we are, of what we do. It wants the highlights, the good bits; a work equivalent of a Hinge profile with photos from a trip to Japan, a half marathon and a wedding when you had your makeup professionally done. The best, most successful, most fun version of you, for public consumption. It does not want the scary messy bits: it does not want to know about the anxieties and the failures, about the rejections. It’s all highs, all the time, and no lows, never lows.

Terrific workshops at which you did not get discouraging feedback; lovely conferences at which you were not overwhelmed by social anxiety; talks that went great and after which you did not spend the next 24 hours replaying every sentence you said on a loop inside your brain trying to figure out if it actually made sense.

I find the level of success and confidence on LinkedIn dizzying, and the absence of self-doubt, or discomfort, or anxiety deeply unrelatable. I assume it’s there—after all I am not a uniquely neurotic or anxious person, even if I do excel at it—but it is buried deep, hidden. And this makes sense. No one wants their future employer to know everyone in the room thought their paper was horrible; or that they have a bad fear of public speaking; or that actually, that article that just came out has some pretty significant flaws that couldn’t be ironed out in time for job applications, promotions or grant deadlines. In a world where we have to demonstrate how extraordinary-exceptional-brilliant we are just to get a job, it makes sense that a network aimed at career progression and advancement is not full of self-doubt and deprecation.

And yet, while I get why it is the way it is, I still feel a deep discomfort engaging with it. Perhaps it is the present moment I am in, full of uncertainty and worry, and so posting highlights seems disingenuous and inauthentic; perhaps it is just my personality (no filter, no hand-break); perhaps it is the fact that I’m not sure I see the point: if we all know it’s a curated highlight reel trying to sell something, akin to a beauty influencer’s skincare routine, then we all know it’s not entirely real? And yet we maintain the pretence, of success and smooth sailing and delight and triumph. Joy packaged for colleagues and future employers.

I have tried to avoid it, but it seems to be the place where people hear about things, and share things, and congratulate each other on things, and so increasingly (like marriage for Bridgerton siblings) it seems unavoidable. And I don’t think LinkedIn will, with time, become similar to 2019 Twitter. That is just not what it was built for. No one is going to be sharing memes on LinkedIn when the next Henry Kissinger or billionaire or Royal dies. But perhaps there are ways to make it a bit more human: to acknowledge that each job gotten required tens of applications and rejections; to nod to the fact that getting a publication out is (for most of us, most of the time) a thorny, winding road; to talk about the pit in one’s belly that is perpetually present while waiting. Because here is the thing: I think most of us are actually struggling, with the world being on fire as it is, changing under us in a blink; with academia being what it is, increasingly marketised and precarious. Most of us are not smooth sailing, if for no other reason than for the fact that we are in very choppy waters.