Rat race

Columnist Leanne Soff started using LinkedIn. She soon experienced that it does more damage to your self-esteem than Instagram.

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Social media makes us insecure, according to science. I always thought I wasn’t very susceptible to this phenomenon. Thanks to its algorithms, my Facebook has basically been reduced to a feed of cute cat videos.  

I know in my heart of hearts that joining Instagram would most definitely turn me into that person that spends fifteen minutes styling and photographing food before eating the cold remainders, so I decided against it. And so, I never find myself longing to take some influencer’s place on a white, sandy beach or a private jet, or whatever it is that kids do these days. I genuinely thought I had risen above all these angsty teen insecurities.

But recently, I have come to a shocking realization. I too have fallen victim to these insecurities. The only difference is that they express themselves through an entirely different medium: LinkedIn.

For those of you who haven’t discovered LinkedIn yet: bless you. It is supposed to be a businessy-facebook that helps you create a professional network, making it easier to connect to the right people that might help your career forward. But if, like me, you are someone in their early twenties close to rounding up their studies and starting their professional career, it becomes a terrifying reminder of all the things you have yet to achieve.

It’s not that I’m unhappy with where I’m at in my life, quite the opposite. But somehow, LinkedIn creeps up on you in a fashion similar to all those insta-influencers. Except it doesn’t make you wonder why you’re not as skinny as they are, but rather why you haven’t combined an internship at a prestigious multinational with a chairmanship of a large political student organization, as well as a pristine academic career.

I know that I don’t actually want any of these things. I really don’t think I would be happy joining a conference on bio-engineering or working at a super intense law-firm. And my rational side knows that I am right to follow my own interests and that I will surely find a perfectly fine job myself in due time. But there seems to be a small, petty, aggressively competitive side inside of me that wishes that everyone would just be slightly worse off than I am. A part that doesn’t believe in following dreams or doing what you love, only in beating others at this imaginary rat race.

So much for self-love and pride.

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