There is a draft of an article or an essay or a story or a narrative that is due today. Or yesterday. The dorm is dark, my roommate is asleep, and I sit cross-legged with my back against the cold, white prison wall of my room. I am attempting to write. I am in writerly crisis. I am experiencing writer’s block. Everything I type is hackneyed and boring and unoriginal. Even writing about my inability to write is, I think, a little overdone.  

So, I do what any self-respecting, rational writer would do. I type linkedin.com into my search bar, except I don’t even have to type out the full address. I get as far as “li,” and Google—and its meticulous record of my search history—does the rest for me. 

Scrolling through LinkedIn in the wee hours of the morning is a special brand of existential crisis. I like to think it starts off innocently enough—there is a high school classmate whom I knew tangentially, exchanged brief hellos with in the hallways, and it’s not long before I suddenly start to wonder how she’s doing. Sure, I know what college she went to by virtue of our high school’s college acceptance Instagram page, but there’s a little itch in the back of my mind that needs to be scratched. Did she end up majoring in Political Science? Did she turn to Computer Science? Public Health? Pre-med? Is she in any clubs? Does she have a summer internship yet? Any research? Fancy connections? 

There’s no room to even take a breath. I scroll through her profile, sighing in relief when I find there’s not much to be afraid of, though I’m not sure what threat she could even pose to me. Then, I see the accursed sidebar menus: “More profiles for you,” and “People you may know.” There is an intimidating collection of people who look more accomplished than I am: a first-year at Harvard University on a first-name basis with my state senator. A CS-Econ senior from Brown who is “proud to announce [they] recently finished a summer analyst internship at Goldman Sachs!” Then, there’s that someone, older than me, whose life trajectory is an uncanny prediction of what I could be if I make the right choices.—if I join the right clubs, meet the right professors, smile at the right people. 

This is the horror of LinkedIn. Faced with the endless expanse of accomplished profiles stretching out before me, I start to question if I will ever amount to anything meaningful. If I will fade out into another mildly overachieving face by the time I graduate, absorbed into the vast, welcoming masses of postgraduate interns.

Lists of every individual achievement, every part-time job, every single summer program. By the end of a LinkedIn session, there is nothing but an amorphous swarm of college students giving the vague impression of professional competence. All this, for just that.

Everything in life will eventually fade out, compartmentalized within the neat categories of “Experiences,” “Education,” and “Honors.” You may eventually be defined by the school you went to, the clubs you were in, the internships you’ve experienced. Someone will print your resume out, highlight the key parts, and turn you into someone to emulate. Then what? 

LinkedIn is the ninth circle of hell. Stare into LinkedIn, stare into the void. 

What about late-night snack runs with your roommate? What about that party you went to last weekend? What about the question you asked in your lecture today that made the professor really think? What about the fact that you’ve been going to the gym every other afternoon? What about your daily journaling habit? What about—

Isn’t that part of your life too? Isn’t that an achievement? What about an internship warrants more recognition than your commitment to cutting down your caffeine intake? Shouldn’t employers value the steadfastness seen in your daily 5K run? Maybe even more than a two-month unpaid stint? The horror of LinkedIn is perhaps less about the idea of comparison, relative incompetence, or even nihilism—it’s the reductionism of it all, the minimization of your hours into neatly palatable categories that leave no space for the joy in your life.

Personally, I’ve started logging my daily steps.