Here’s a hot take: LinkedIN is for career networking and business marketing/sales. That’s it. It’s not Facebook. It’s definitely not Twitter. It’s also not the bar down the street where you go to gossip.
I visit the LinkedIn Lunatics subreddit regularly to get myself appropriately worked up over people who were apparently never issued self-awareness or restraint. I’ve written before about my experiences with Facebook community groups where someone will confidently shitpost to 10,000 neighbors—real name, profile photo, zero hesitation—apparently unaware that this is functionally identical to grabbing a microphone in a packed stadium of those 10,000 people and insulting half the crowd like a mouthy pro wrestler monologuing… except, it’s the real world and you live next to these people.
It’s the same baffling lack of perspective. The only difference with LinkedIn is that you expect better, because this is the platform where people are supposedly networking and building careers, not documenting their descent into public HR violations.
We’ve all seen the classics: the sales guy who gets married and immediately posts about what his wedding taught him about B2B sales, or whose kid breaks a leg and miraculously that too becomes a lesson about B2B sales or even worse “what my son’s death taught me about B2B leadership.” Yikes. No, I didn’t make that one up, unfortunately, even my mind isn’t that dark. But beyond those well-worn tropes, there’s a whole other category of posts that are genuinely weird, deeply baffling, and frankly impressive in their commitment to missing the point.
Take these fucking weirdos for example:
lol, this take is completely unhinged. The entertainment industry fought streaming like it was a personal insult to their families and only gave in because consumers very clearly said “no, actually, we want this.” And now the proposal is… what, everyone voluntarily abandons convenience, goes back to buying physical media, and shrinks their TVs so they can lovingly enjoy 480p like it’s 2003? No one on Earth is watching 480p on an 85″ screen and thinking “ah yes, progress.”
And the cherry on top: this is framed as a critique of AI’s energy usage, but the argument is actually about streaming’s energy usage. These things are not even in the same solar system. AI training and inference operate at a scale that makes streaming bandwidth look like loose change in the couch. Turning off a few streams would solve exactly zero problems, except maybe this guy’s need to feel clever.
#oPinIoN #eXpeRieNcE #!!!!!! #IamAfucKinGdoRk
Why in the absolute fuck would you post internal workplace drama on your public feed? Is this supposed to be a marketing strategy? Because if the CEO of my company did this, I’d be profoundly mortified.
And what’s the goal here—actually understanding the “blind spot” multiple people have pointed out to you (what’s the common denominator-dude?), or just farming validation from an audience that assumes you don’t have one and will cheer you on because they’re happy to publicly grift off you at the expense of the women you keep condescending to?
Posting this doesn’t refute their point. It perfectly illustrates it. This is what happens when someone mistakes confidence for understanding and assumes that talking the loudest makes them the expert. And the use of the word “dissent”? Absolutely telling. Fucking lunatic asshole.
These are the most common posts from LinkedIn lunatics: work addicts whining about people who expect a basic work-life balance and don’t want to be bothered by grind evangelists while they’re out enjoying being alive. Look at her—thrilled to be alone in the office, staging a photoshoot like she just invented and patented the wheel.
Meanwhile, the people actually doing real work—trades, construction, hospitality, retail, logistics—aren’t writing motivational fanfiction about how “weekends are a mindset” that their less-enlightened peers just haven’t unlocked yet. They’re exhausted, underpaid, trying to survive their shift, and would very much like weekends off, thank you very much.
Weekend work isn’t the problem. The problem is lunatics expecting people to go unpaid/underpaid to earn “experience” while enriching the lunatic, burnout as a personality, and executives cosplaying as laborers when most of them are just professional bullshitters or inherited their business and probably haven’t actually worked a day in their life.
Ok, one more…then I need to go back to my life.
Paid time off is not a modern indulgence or a reward for “not working.” It is the result of more than a century of labor history, economic research, and hard-won worker protections in the United States.
Ah you’re one of those “Make America Great Again” people wanting to go back to the 19th century and early 20th century workplace where American workers were paid strictly by the hour with no benefits, no job security, and no time off. The result was widespread burnout, unsafe workplaces, poor health outcomes, and extremely high turnover. Labor movements, unions, and eventually lawmakers pushed back not out of sentimentality, but necessity. Employers learned—sometimes reluctantly—that treating workers as endlessly replaceable inputs was economically inefficient and socially destabilizing.
Workplace benefits like PTO emerged alongside the 40-hour workweek, weekends, and employer-sponsored insurance because uninterrupted labor is neither sustainable nor productive. Time away from work reduces injury, improves health, increases retention, and leads to better long-term performance. In other words, PTO exists because decades of evidence showed that “no work, no pay” is a short-sighted model that harms both workers and businesses.
Importantly, PTO is part of total compensation. Employees accept lower direct wages in exchange for benefits that provide stability, predictability, and recovery time. It is not payment for “doing nothing,” but a structured acknowledgment that human beings are not machines and that rest is a prerequisite for consistent, high-quality work.
Nearly every developed economy recognizes this, which is why the U.S. is an outlier in how little paid leave is legally guaranteed. Even so, most American employers offer PTO because the alternative of constant churn, disengagement, and burnout is far more costly.
So while the idea may seem “simple” to your simple brain, history learned in middle school shows it isn’t. PTO exists because the pure transactional model you describe was tried extensively and it failed.
There’s also the matter of people getting sick or seriously injured and not being able to work through no fault of their own. I suppose they deserve to not have a paycheck as a result in this Dartmouth alum’s mind?
Ok one more, I just can’t end on that serious note.
Some people apparently think LinkedIN is Facebook. And that’s probably the same group of people who think the workplace is still high school and act that way. 50 years from now, that kid is definitely putting them in the cheapest nursing home.
I purposely left out all the examples of people shitposting their extreme political views on LinkedIN. Just as an intentional break from politics. Perhaps I’ll make a Linkedin Lunatics post in itself about those guys and gals some day.
