I finally updated my LinkedIn and it feels like an empty chore

Updating my profile after three years of silence

I spent last Sunday staring at my LinkedIn profile. It was sitting there, a digital tombstone of my past self. The last time I actually touched it was probably three years ago when I was desperate for any job that would pay the bills. I saw some news headlines about big tech executives leaving companies like Robinhood or moving to startups, and all of them were sourced from these hyper-detailed LinkedIn updates. It made me feel like I was invisible. I mean, here I am, just trying to keep my head above water, and everyone else is curating their professional life like it’s a high-stakes exhibition. I sat down with a coffee that went cold in twenty minutes and just started typing. It feels weirdly performative, right? Trying to turn three years of mediocre office tasks into ‘strategic milestones.’

The weird pressure of professional networking

There is this expectation that you need to be constantly ‘optimizing’ your presence. I noticed a few people I worked with at my old company moved to roles in places like CS Wind or various venture capital firms. Their profiles look so clean. Everything is bulleted. They talk about ‘operational efficiency’ and ‘market expansion’ while I am struggling to explain that I spent six months just trying to fix a recurring bug in our internal booking system that cost us about 5,000 dollars a month in lost efficiency. You look at those polished profiles and wonder if they actually did all that work or if they just have a really good way of writing about it. I feel like I’m not playing the game correctly, but I also don’t know if I want to.

Watching everyone play the tech layoff shuffle

It’s fascinating and exhausting to watch the industry news flow through the feed. One day you read about a COO leaving a firm because crypto volume dropped, and the next day it’s about AI tools being used by employees in ways the companies didn’t anticipate. I keep seeing these updates where someone posts a long, flowery paragraph about how much they loved their ‘journey’ at a company they were clearly fired from. It’s all so fake. I tried to write something similar but deleted it after five minutes. I don’t have a ‘journey.’ I have a job that I need to keep, and I have a career that feels like it’s drifting in whatever direction the wind blows. My girlfriend was looking for advice recently because she’s tired of her current role, and I honestly didn’t know what to tell her other than ‘fix your resume and look at LinkedIn,’ which felt like giving someone a piece of junk as a gift.

The reality of being a mid-level employee

I’m not a high-flying executive jumping between NVIDIA and some fancy autonomous vehicle startup. I’m just someone trying to figure out if my skills are still relevant. I checked the search terms for my role and noticed that a lot of recruiters are looking for people with specific overseas experience or a track record of scaling operations in Europe. I have neither of those. I have five years of experience in a local market, which apparently makes me ‘stagnant’ in the eyes of some algorithms. It’s annoying. I put in the work, I showed up, I did the tasks, but when you look at how these roles are advertised on LinkedIn, it feels like I’m missing the secret password to even be considered.

Lingering doubts about the whole platform

Is any of this actually worth the time? I spent two hours trying to figure out how to phrase my last project. I wanted it to sound professional but not arrogant. I ended up just listing the tasks as they were, which probably looks boring. By the time I hit save, I didn’t feel more ’employable’ or ‘connected.’ I just felt tired. I looked at the ‘people you may know’ section and saw a few managers who ignored my emails last year. I didn’t click connect. I just closed the tab. I’ll probably check back in a few days to see if the profile updates show up in the feed, but I’m really not expecting anything to change. It’s just another digital box I had to check off, and I’m still not sure if it helps or just adds another layer of noise to the day.