So the other day--I believe it was March11th--I shuttered my LinkedIn account. I have downloads of my archived LinkedIn content, but I doubt I'll look at them. I suppose there's some amount of loss in all this, of connections, of content, of being a part of. But not really. I very belatedly realized that I'd first signed on to LinkedIn in 2007. So I'd been a part of that networking community for fourteen years. And I had a whole lot of nothing to show for it.
Truthfully, I'd never used LinkedIn with professional expectations. In recent years, I'd given up even on the pretense of using LinkedIn for professional networking and posted increasingly--if not exclusively--personal content. Everything from observations about and reflections on my kids, to comments on what I've been reading, and what I've learned from various Jewish ed classes. I became more cynical and discouraged about the nonstop self-promotion and branding that seem to characterize much of LinkedIn--and all of social media, it seems. There was nothing I wanted to brag about, nothing to brand, nothing I had to sell. So why bother?
I thought I'd mind being off LinkedIn, and maybe I will at some point. It's only been about a week, after all. But I was pretty confident that no one would know I'd left. Or more accurately, no one would care. And it was that revelation, that my absence would matter to exactly no one, that made me realize that my time on social media was an utter, and sad, waste. If I'm going to be invisible, let me just be. Without the grasping for attention, without checking to see how many people read or commented on a post of mine, without doing the math to calculate what percentage of my 900+ followers cared at any given time about anything I had to say.
I scrolled through my list of connections before I shuttered my account, and I realized that at least two of them were deceased. That seemed the perfect exclamation point, somehow, for this entire undertaking. I was imagining I was part of something that even I didn't much care about being a part of. I was imagining that being on LinkedIn mattered to my so-called career, when it had no relevance at all, since I wasn't actually pursuing any leads or connections that were career-related. What I was doing, I think, was imagining that I had a toehold in a world that everyone thinks you must have a toehold in to matter. It's as if not having any kind of social media presence makes you truly worth less, outside the bounds of all those folks keeping busy doing, and posting, and being and branding.
Maybe I've just consigned myself to utter irrelevance. If so, it would just validate feelings I've had for some time now that as the world races ahead (toward what, who knows?), I'm left standing still, befuddled by all the change happening around me, and unable to keep up. I'm the horse and buggy lady in a world of flying cars. I'm just a person, after all, and an infinitely insignificant one. I suppose to some folks that sounds sad. And maybe it is. But maybe, in my embrace of my smallness, of my footprint that barely registers, of my voice that no one hears, I'm embracing something of value. Maybe in the quiet, in the self-imposed exile I have chosen, there is something better. Or at least something not worse than that thing I pretended to chase, half in, half out, never believing that I belonged anyway.
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