Hmmm

Last night I was in a weird dream state so I got up for an hour or so and read. Eventually I read a novel but for the first 15 minutes I was on Reddit, and stumbled upon LinkedIn Lunatics.

LinkedIn is nuts. What with so many people touting their successes and self-proclaiming their godlike abilities, and so many corporate hiring manager expectations that we maintain a LinkedIn profile where we tout our resume for the world to see. And for the past 10 years or so LinkedIn has encouraged anyone and everyone to post, so there are a LOT of posts, mostly self-improvement types where people are like Jesus sharing learning parables and such.

But what makes me sad is the LinkedIn Lunatics subreddit wherein people re-post people’s LinkedIn posts to mock the writer and more often than not include the LinkedIn poster’s name and picture.

Why the public shaming and mocking? Why include the person’s name?

Mostly these are regular working people hoping to get someone’s attention so that they get a better job, or more clients, or become respected in some way. It’s a human need to be loved and respected, and this is their attempt to become that in the professional world. Is it weird that so many people essentially brag and act like sages on LinkedIn? Sure. But publicly mocking them in a widely read forum is unkind.

We’re all buffoons sometimes. We all have our moments where we maybe brag a little too much. Or say something that we think is profound but is actually goofy. And I think it’s awesome that the bottom 99% of people (nearly all of us) in 2026 has a variety of platforms to be heard or seen —- time was 30 years ago the only way to be seen or heard or to express a voice was to be lucky enough to have some editor somewhere decide to share you with the world.

Reading these LinkedIn posts, I feel like most of the bravado is actually self-talk, as in, “I can do this.” It’s the little engine that should telling themselves “I think I can.” I think it’s great people have a self-contained platform to do this that I can tune out if I want to, and I sure as heck don’t need to mock them. That is a non-public human being that we are mocking on LinkedIn Lunatics. At the very least, can’t they at least scratch out the original name and picture?