The Highs and Highs of Humblebrag
Substack vs. LinkedIn - and why the former feels much more liberating
Reinvigorating the habit of writing comes with its own supplementary activities. Now, one needs to think about distribution, reach, engagement, impressions, clicks, comments, reactions, shares, reposts, and so much more. Hence, the natural question that came in from a few well-meaning friends was: “Why don’t you share these posts on LinkedIn? Social pressure can work in positive ways as well, and ensure you stick to your habit of writing.” Going one step further, a couple of them even offered, “You can write these on LinkedIn, no? People are writing anything and everything out there. Would give you a better personal brand as well.”
The idea seemed/seems/will seem tantalizing enough. Sure, why not? I mean, I am writing anyway. And, I have a LinkedIn profile. Might as well just put it out there. But then, thanks but no thanks. The perils of social media are too hard to swallow, and I know the traps I will fall into. Following are the reasons I prefer Substack over LinkedIn - or Twitter (I refuse to call it by the new name even if my opinion does not matter):
‘Success’factors:
Sorry, that was a bad pun. And, I have not used the tool, so am definitely not marketing it. Every story on LinkedIn has to end on a success note. It HAS TO follow that three-act structure, and must mostly always be a rags-to-riches story. And, everyone in LinkedIn always come from a downtrodden, poor family (perhaps because the benchmarks are different; I mean, why not? I can always call myself poor in comparison to Mukesh Ambani) and have broken the shackles of <insert any form of bias/stereotype> to reach where they are. And most certainly, the people are younger than 35.
I did not realize it until recently when one of my friends messaged me stating he often kept benchmarking his ‘accomplishments’ with my ‘records’ and he was not able to match up. For a moment, I felt on top of the world - “I am an THE achiever!” But the next moment, I knew what he was talking about. Oftentimes, I have been at his position, and it never felt good. Besides, I had not mentioned that I had carefully cherry-picked 10 feathers in the cap to portray an amazingly flawless portrayal of myself, almost like a post-surgery, pimple-less face posing for a camera or a post-liposuction model claiming to be fit.
LinkedIn imposes this hierarchy upon users, whether they like it or not. It has successfully modelled the Instagram phenomenon. But my ‘Trysts with Stress’ would have to be tweaked, if I choose LinkedIn as the medium. I cannot end it with a note that I have not found a solution. Nope, that is not a successful story. Let’s suppose I end it that way. What could be the potential reactions/comments?
Groupthink: Folks will start merely agreeing to everything. Invariably, complex sentences with unnecessary praise will be thrown at. It would appear as if the whole world was at the tip of the stress nuclear bomb, and I was the Oppenheimer who finally triggered the explosion.
The deliberate contrarianism: Someone will start offering gyaan on why this whole ‘stress’ thingy is an overblown argument, and folks are finding it as an excuse for not having to work hard. Brownie points for quoting economic figures of China, Japan or some random country, and then some nationalistic follow-on to top it all.
Garbed lament: This category represents a fair proportion of commenters as well. The description of folks here goes something like this: Those who pretend to be empathetic but actually want to position their struggle to overshadow the OP.
But I cannot end the story without a peaceful conflict resolution and me having overcome all the battles, struggles, and troubles. So, I have to do one or more of the following:
The Godfather syndrome: “It has been a tough battle and I have had my bad moments, but lessons have been learnt. So if you are going through something, do not hesitate to reach out to me.” (Of course, not to forget the Topmate link announcing limited slots for 1:1 booking)
The Humblebrag Hallucination: “If I, with zero talent, zero privilege (but do not ask me about the fact that I am a third-generation graduate, born to an upper-caste family with amazing networks of corporate folks in my vicinity) and no skills can overcome these battles, you can as well. You just have to try, choose your battles, and fight.” (End it preferably with an Elon Musk quote, or if you are a jingo, something from Ratan Tata or even from Kunal Shah (additional toppings if you can quote a profitable founder - think Sridhar Vembu or Nithin/Nikhil Kamath))
The Shallow, Superiority-meets-Inferiority Sandwich: “Of course, folks graduating at IIT-IIM have better packages, but I faced and won life. Let’s celebrate each of our victories.” (If you are an IIT/IIM graduate, find some other pivot to seek sympathy and validation)
Content vs. content:
Now, it’s easy-peasy. I post something here, share the link maybe on WhatsApp, and I know there will be 25-30 people who read it, 5-7 who text me for a useful discussion, and 1-2 who pass on the link/word about the write-up and why they found it important. On LinkedIn, that is not the case. There are two potential ‘risk exposures’.
Flawed associations: The recruiters looking at my profile will think that I am a weakling. The algorithm will suggest ‘stress’ stories all the time on the feed (and I will be left wondering, “Why the fuck am I not getting those ‘Hiring Alert’ posts at all?”). I will be asked to ‘contribute’ to articles on the topic of workplace stress, leadership, and more.
‘Voice’: Imaging becoming the ‘LinkedIn Top Voice’ for ‘stress, anxiety, depression’ when I have no expertise in any of these. I will start chugging out ‘content’ even when I do not have anything to write or say. I am not kidding - there was this dude who wrote an entirely stupid piece of shit on LinkedIn about how he did not have anything to write for that day even though he had been posting daily, and made why-I-can’t-write into a post (of course, with all the “People think content creation is easy but it is not” jazz typical of LinkedIn posts).
From a guest faculty I have been a student of, to a college mate who uses LinkedIn like Facebook (think playground photos) and Quora (think random questions like “Money vs. peace : What should I choose?”), I have seen the compulsive rut LinkedIn ends up creating. It is unfortunate but it is what it is! And, parallel ecosystems (think ‘Unstop Mentors’) are thriving by serving as piggybacks to this clusterfuck on LinkedIn.
Everyone has so much advice to offer and almost always none to take. But my best picks have to be about the three aspects pertaining to the whole B-school cycle.
Personal interviews: Of course, ask your close friend or a sibling who had cracked a B-school interview earlier, and they would say it is highly subjective. An individual cannot decide and will not be able to predict the flow of an interview. But the number of bullet-point lists that offer gyaan to the already freaked out group of aspirants who are waiting to have a decent-to-good shot at an actual interview might discourage them to such an extent that they will feel overwhelmed.
Just for context, I took close to 30 mock interviews this season, and the number of times I felt inadequate relative to the profiles and domains the candidates specialized in and knew about were countless. Most of us millennials have no job ‘advising’ succeeding generations how to succeed in academics but we do. Folks appearing for B-school interviews are better informed than I was when I prepared for the interviews, they are actually more diligent and take the B-school process very professionally. I ended up taking away a lot of notes, pointers and to-read list of concepts (which I have been trying to complete reading for over a month now, in vain; there is just too much stuff out there I have no clue about. WTF!)
Interviews are about power dynamics. An interviewer can be incompetent to the core and still be able to mess with a fully-competent candidate (I know because I interviewed a CA, CFA candidate; by now, you should know that I did not know ABC of Finance, while the candidate was facing my inferiority complex masquerading as ego). There are egos involved. An interviewee who has more knowledge to offer than the one questioning them might come out of the panel feeling uncertain and worthless. These are unsolvable human mysteries. A LinkedIn dipshit would not sort it out. It is that obvious. And, folks posting on LinkedIn know this. So, it is not even unintentional; there is a cruel narcissism hiding somewhere beneath that listicle.
Case competitions: Corporates found a way for candidate - employer match-making (and also getting a few free ideas in the process) which encouraged/s students to solve business problems. The idea behind most of these problem statements are trying to get an outsider perspective which might end up being innovative and implementable. In short, being unstructured and out-of-the-box are the objectives of case study competitions.
LinkedIn (and Unstop and Topmate) chatterboxes changed it. Essentially, case competition winners over the previous years (have) started ‘teaching’ the wannabe winners ‘best practices’ to crack case competitions. What ends up happening is, people know how to make amazing decks with a structured flow (that remains constant across the competitions) and win a few laurels. The misses are costly - the idea of original thinking is lost, the concept of sitting and brooding over a problem statement and finally cracking it has all but disappeared, and the whole case competition enthusiasm has become a virtue-signaling industry by itself.
How am I able to say this so confidently? Because I was at both ends of this spectrum - as a person who received gyaan and one who ended up transmitting gyaan. It is almost like a coding expert telling a noob, “You don’t need coding because you have ChatGPT.” Dumbing down successors has become a habitual practice and people have come to call this by various fancy names.
‘Cracking’ job interviews: Ah, the juiciest of all! First of all, what does ‘cracking’ mean? Is job an eggshell or something? Or, is it more of a metaphor to mean how much of a ‘crack’ we all would end up becoming after ‘cracking’ successful dream jobs?
The extent to which one’s originality is compulsively distorted and made to disappear here is a sorrowful story in itself. “This past experience of yours does not evince any emotional interest; tweak it”, “You volunteered for that NGO, no? Project it as if you did it all through your life right from the time the feeding bottle was in your mouth.”, “I know you are trying to be honest, but please be more tactful in your articulation. Your career break cannot be for no reason. It has to mean something.”
Nobody knows how this job thing works as well. Companies come at random hours, companies end up not hiring anyone, students can be recruited by firms they have no interest working with, and a lot more. But all those would not matter. All that matters is that you need to ‘project’ yourself. Again, the problem remains the same as the B-school admission interviews; nobody knows how it will go. But people end up advising anyway. Because, people want to talk. To someone. About something. Hence, this ends up getting propagated in an endless loop.
How do I know? Well, because… I have been there and done that. Both as a victim and as a perpetrator, I mean. And for the LinkedIn profiles, this is ‘content’. Opportunity to milk.
The most disgusting aspect of all was how an IIM C alumnus’ death was used to milk content for likes, comments, and the tag of being the most-informed-and-most-successful-work-life-balance-seeking-and-accomplishing person. Nobody seems to be immune. I thought this was endemic to the folks graduating from colleges that are not top tier IIMs owing to the inferiority complex naturally emanating because of having fallen short. On the contrary, the ones from IIM are the ones most affected by this plague. Every possible real estate on LinkedIn is a place to subtly signal that you are from IIM (think “During our batch’s time at IIM-A…” being mentioned on a random comment for no reason).
Speaking of all of these, the concept of ‘mentor’ and ‘mentoring’ needs to be relooked at. Immediately. And, seriously. Right now. A mentor is not someone who offers a 30-minute 1:1 slide deck of ‘Case Competitions 101’ or a paid mock interview. In my town at least, this is called ‘tuition’. You pay money, you go to a teacher (it is quite a different matter altogether that most of the Unstop/Topmate guys do not have an iota of idea about what and why they are advising about) who knows their shit, and get them to teach you something. A mentor is someone who, in addition to offering you (preferably non-paid) advice, inspires you via their value systems, and is also someone who can offer words of wisdom and guidance that stand the test of time.
Profiling EVERYTHING:
Compulsive addiction this has become. Folks are posting about random protein powders on LinkedIn. Mukesh Bansal might be wondering if he should have started a LinkedIn copycat instead of trying to establish Cult gyms. And, there are posts about grandmoms, dads, security guards, cab drivers, scavengers. One might think these are important. Stories, novels, and biographies have been written about all these kinds of personas, so it is not entirely unwarranted that people would want to write about them on LinkedIn. The crucial difference lies in positioning. Is the story about them? Or, is it about the fact that the driver benefited from the Rs. 50 you gave them? Are you really trying to appreciate someone whose help you benefitted from? Or, is it merely a facade for yet another instance of humblebrag?
These are crucial questions. And, I know this might sound like a virtue-signaling-post-about-virtue-signaling but that is what one ends up becoming if one talks about - or lives on - LinkedIn. Substack does not bring any of this pressure. I can write, hit publish, land on a few inboxes, and be done with it. And, I need not be worried about my ‘professional image’ over here. Of course, in the day of digital data trails, professionals, recruiters, and managers - past and present - can find out that I rant/vent here quite easily. But at least, I can keep this separated from a platform that is supposed to be meant for work and careers.
Substack, FTW! Substack, zindabad! Substack, vaazhga!