joshua chamberlain

I hate social media. For many, many reasons. I think by this point, most of us do.

But of every social network though, I think LinkedIn is the most hilarious.

Because let’s be honest — it’s useless.

I built a LinkedIn page in college. I was told I had to. It’s where employers were looking for potential hires. It’s where you could showcase your work experience and have your resume on display. It’s where you could build a network that would launch your career and help you navigate the professional world.

None of that turned out to be true.

I’ve applied for countless jobs via LinkedIn. Never once had an interview.

I’ve cultivated a robust network of professional colleagues on LinkedIn. I haven’t seen most of these people in years, if I’ve even ever met them face-to-face.

I’ve compiled my work accomplishments into a neat list of bullet points on LinkedIn. None of these bullet points capture my genuine working experience or my the skills I use every day.

With every social media site, we’re all wearing different masks. Always. But I find LinkedIn so hilarious because it’s the mask at its most refined. Its most groomed. Its most professional.

I reached a decision recently.

Fuck it.

I’d rather not pretend. Instead, I’d rather shine a light on the pretending. Mock it. Make fun of it. Strip it of its power.

Of course, an argument could be made I’ve merely adopted a different kind of pretending. And that argument isn’t unfounded. But honestly, I don’t care.

With all these things in mind, I recently revised the “about me” section of my LinkedIn page.

This is what it says:

This is Josh’s LinkedIn profile.

Because you’ve gotta have a LinkedIn profile.

Gotta sum up your life with bullet points so employers know what it is you do.

There’s some good bullet points on this page. But there’s an awful lot of stuff you won’t find here too. Because summing things up with bullet points means you miss a lot of the life lived in the spaces between those bullet points.

On a LinkedIn page like this one, there isn’t space for the stories. Stories like juggling twenty credit hours, a seat on the Studio Theatre Board of Directors, performing in five shows a semester, running a campus radio show, and completing a thesis presentation on John Mayer and Race Theory, which would later win the Outstanding Research Project of the Year.

There isn’t space for stories like founding a theater festival or leading a group of teenagers on a mission trip to rural Tennessee or writing and directing a web series while working eighty hours a week at a theater company.

Bullet points don’t quite capture the details. Details like the smell in the basement of a Dayton punk house or the warmth of the overhead lights on Broadway stage. Details like the gut-punch of having to fire one of your model employees for accusations of sexual assault or the elation that comes from winning grant money to fund a food kitchen in Cincinnati’s worst food desert.

Stick to the bullet points and you miss the good stuff. Talking movies over lunch with the former Board Chairman of a major film studio. The comedian from that show about nothing making a joke at your expense. Asking Broadway legends what fame does to their psyche. Holding hands with a popular music legend in the wings of a historic Hollywood theater. Standing in a movie star’s Broadway dressing room.

Somehow the bullet points don’t quite capture the moments. Moments like the standing ovation the full-length play you’ve written gets at its first public reading. Seeing your signature next to the signature of your favorite recording artist on a licensing contract. Watching that short film you wrote and made with a bunch of friends in a movie theater for the first time.

Summing up your life for potential employers means there isn’t space for any of these things.

Nope.

Instead, you’ve gotta tailor everything nice and neat so it fits in the little text box. After all, there’s only so much space on a LinkedIn profile like this one.

And you’ve gotta have a LinkedIn profile.

You’ve just gotta.

Given the choice between living a digital or analog existence, I’ll take analog every time.

And now for something completely different: the ways Facebook has made us all into a masked mob.