LinkedIn Syndrome

Professionalism means a dead man walking.

American job interviews are meaningless affairs. Resumes are less than. More noise than signal, these shoddy litmus tests aim to assess competencies, but more accurately track how willingly you’ll shed your dignity.

Will you now change your diction? Use the neutered corporate vocabulary? How much will you suck off your hateful ex-employer to demonstrate that you “play nice?” Can you feign excitement for yet another job that siphons your will to live? How much pretend are you gonna play here? How much of yourself do you intend to erase to make yourself look like a “viable candidate?”

We primp, and preen, and fuss over our resumes, and we worry and agonize over our interviews, forgetting that ultimately, no one wants us to say anything. With exception of technical jobs (which have technical screening processes that I would still regard as dubious), the interviewing process best assesses someone’s performance of a lingua franca. Nothing more, and maybe less.

“Tell me about yourself.”

When I’m inebriated—which is frequently—I am violently temperamental. Liquor really makes it hard to disguise that I really hate most people. Besides that, I like to watch the game. Oh, and I’m a UPenn alum.

“Why do you want to work for this company?”

I don’t. I have bills, dipshit.

"Are you a hard worker?”

No. I will almost immediately grow to resent the time I spend at this company and will “steal” hours because I ultimately see you as my deepest enemy.

“What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?”

My greatest strength is I can find Percocet in any city. My greatest weakness is I can find Percocet in any city.

“Tell me about this gap in your resume.”

I did things I actually liked. For instance, not having some blood-sucking middle-manager attempt to track my every move to appease the people making the real money.

“How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10?”

I’ll refrain from self-judgement out of an abundance of concern for bias. But I’ll rate you a weak 4. Consider a nose job and a speech therapist.

“Why should we hire you?”

I don’t know. Isn’t the whole point of your position to figure out the answer to this question? Why did they hire you?

Who the hell is going to answer these questions honestly? Everybody understands the boundaries of these questions. You can’t discern anything from the answers that you’ll get half of the time because they aren’t serious answers. It’s not that they aren’t true. It’s that they aren’t even untrue. The answers that people give are just “professional” word salad. Meaningless schlock, to be generated infinitely by all future applicants.

This defines the ethos of the American work culture. Bleach your image beyond any human recognition, adorn it with useless titles, and become a drone that rattles off meaningless shit that sounds business-y. Do that well enough, and nothing else matters.

It’s the American way.

The dream of social media was to connect everyone’s lives together across all geographies. This was, for all the shortcomings involved, a success. Unfortunately, your employer is part of “everybody.”

Your employer wants you to be “professional.” No politics, uncomfortable emotions, opinions, disparaging remarks about the company, or any action or statement otherwise deleterious to the smooth function of the company. Professionalism is more or less the same thing as being bland, and (if you aren’t hired for an executive position) toothless. The effect is to whitewash you into the most perfect corporate call-girl. Since they’re paying you for your time, it’s fair and makes sense.

You have a job to do.

But suppose the demands for this neutered and faded behavior were to extend beyond paid hours. Suppose they wanted to control your image outside of the office. So long as doing a Google search of your name isn’t off limits, you’d best fear your own tongue. Who are you allowed to be? What are you guys allowed to do? When do you stop acting? Where does your life start, and their business reputation begin?

How do you live?

Relocation

So long as the market works, the family is encouraged to dissolve. Where Mom would help with groceries, you have Instacart. Where Dad would drive you to the airport, you have Uber. Where the promotion is, your family is not.

From the start of (so-called) adulthood in the US, you are encouraged to cast away family ties, so much so that it is considered a failure of character and an arresting of development to remain reliant on your parents. This doesn’t ever much remit, and in some sense, we are conditioned to feel proud of how much distance we can place between ourselves and our kin. We call it “independence” and “autonomy,” even knowing full well that we are all dependent on others.

We’re expected to take the promotion, aren’t we? Irrespective of the personal costs that inevitably come to erode the soul, no one expects a rejection of a pay raise. We saw our earnings projections in undergrad, and apparently, this is the cost of making our education “worthwhile.” We’re not supposed to defend our humanity. That would be poor market liquidity. Inefficient. Stupid. Lazy. Maybe even evil. Truly, it is a shame that you have to move away from all your loved ones again, but truly, it is the best thing to do. So you’ll do it again. And again. And once more for good measure.

How many times can you wipe your contact list before you stop being a person altogether? Sure, we have your resume, LinkedIn profile, place of residence, and employment history, but so what? Does that encapsulate you?

I should hope not.

But I know these people exist. I meet them all the time. Caged in a prison of professional ties, labor market search engines, and non-salary employment incentives, so many of these professional identities have forgotten themselves completely. On all sides, the workaholic surrounds themselves with the disingenuous, circumstantial engagement of the “colleague,” receiving manipulative doublespeak from effective strangers, at all angles, and at all times.

After yet another long day of this, the worker retires to their sparsely furnished apartment. Finding themselves no more alone than they were at work, they at least have escaped the auspices of surveillance. But to what end? What of their barren interiority would they have left to offer? They have no more personal ties to enervate for capital’s hunger. Two cities ago, they left their hobbies behind in the move. All they have is their emptiness, the market, and the false-self they constructed to satisfy it.

They’re LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Syndrome

In the LinkedIn afflicted patient, somewhere—underneath the parasitizing of their body—lies the real person. They exist in pseudocoma. Still alive, but ultimately so beneath the surface that you would never know. Never embodied in their “own” action, the patient’s corporeal form lives no life that could speak of them. The only people the patient knows receive the mask, so the patient has largely forgotten what they look like without it.

The world only asks things of the patient’s mask, and entombed by their own stolen body, the real person is dragged along for the ride. Incentivized only by the funhouse mirrors of their sometimes collaborative, sometimes competitive, but always fake co-workers, the patient has lost the breadcrumb trail that would lead them back to their personhood.

No one around them can remember who the patient really was because they never actually met the guy. All that remains is a will to please and an ever-quieting friction in the way of that task. What we once called a humanity is now just an inconvenience. And so, the telos of professionalism is a dead man walking.

Try to settle with that.