The humiliating hell of posting your 'silly little comment' on LinkedIn

LinkedIn: where confidence goes to die and cringe comes to thrive.

Let's be honest: opening LinkedIn in your early twenties is a specialized form of self-inflicted torture. It’s not just a social platform; it’s a virtual stage where you’re forced into a full-time, awkward performance of competence, and it gives you the ick. Full stop.

You log in, and immediately, the imposter syndrome hits you like a truck. Everyone is absolutely crushing it. People your age are founding successful, thriving businesses. They’re raising capital before breakfast, securing impossible seed funding, solving world hunger on a Tuesday, and building AI that will probably steal your soul by Friday. And then there's you. You're just sitting there, trying to write your silly little comment. You know the agony:

"Great post!" No, too basic. "Really insightful, thanks for sharing!" Ugh, corporate cringe.

Or worse yet, your silly little post about, like, an online course you managed to finish without falling asleep. You type: “Happy to announce I am actively exploring this space!” You slap a smiley face on it, which only makes it look more desperate. You quickly hit post and switch apps to pretend this wasn’t you.

The real hell is the tone. The mandatory LinkedIn dialect is cold, stiff, and aggressively polite. Suddenly, the generation that’s used to writing "Y/N fanfiction" is expected to switch to corporate speak, using words like "burning fire" and "bandwidth" when you could just say "don't have time" or "this is urgent."

What's more, the typing styles and use of emojis that are considered inherently passive-aggressive or mildly rude in our regular communication are the accepted norm here, and that will never feel normal. You have a genuinely insightful thought, but you have to translate it into corporate gobbledygook: “A truly thought-provoking read, [Name]! Great to see this focus on synergistic scalability.” It feels like an adulting simulation gone wrong.

You’re experts at being authentic everywhere else. On Instagram, you’re chaotic. You shitpost your failures on X. But here, you are forced to adopt the voice of a fifty-year-old CEO who studied only in bullet points. The humiliation is the forced performance, the terrifying notion that you’re submitting a job application to the social club of the eternally impressive just by typing "Happy to announce."

Commenting? Immediate jail. Someone’s funding a Series B, and you’re over here typing, “Wow, amazing, congrats!!” while internally screaming because you barely grasp what Series B means. You just feel like a fraud, a nervous human improvising a joke in a hall full of hyper-accomplished robots.

And yet? You do it anyway.

Because posting anyway is growth. Awkward, embarrassing, slightly humiliating growth. You're living this weird hybrid existence: half dancing to Tiktok trends and oversharing on Instagram at 2 a.m., half trying to sound competent on LinkedIn at 11 a.m. The cringe, the cold bars, the stiff posts—it’s the initiation. You put your slightly-fake, totally polished self out there, and that risk is the whole point. You’re leveling up. Slowly. Awkwardly. Cringe included.