Why I Hate LinkedIn: The Market and the Selling of the Self

Every time I scroll on LinkedIn, I don’t feel I am seeing people. I feel like I am walking in a big souk, not souk lkhmis with faces and voices, but a cold market. Everyone is trying to look perfect, important, and in demand.

When I read Erich Fromm, I understood this feeling. He calls it the marketing orientation.

From Usefulness to Image

In the past, markets were simple. Producers knew their customers and they sold what was useful. Today it is the market itself that decides the value, not the real use.

As Fromm writes: “The market concept of value, the emphasis on exchange value rather than on use value, has led to a similar concept of value with regard to people and particularly to oneself.”

On LinkedIn this is obvious. Your value is not in what you really do or who you are. It is in how well you can present and sell yourself.

The Personality Market

Fromm calls this the personality market. Skills are no longer enough. What matters is how you look, how you behave, and how you can package yourself.

“Success depends largely on how well a person sells himself… whether he is ‘cheerful,’ ‘sound,’ ‘aggressive,’ ‘reliable,’ ‘ambitious.’”

That is why so many profiles look the same. The same smiles, the same words about leadership, the same stories of success. It is not always fake, but it is shaped by the rule that you must appear marketable.

The Onion Self

The hardest part is what this does to our identity. Fromm compares modern man to an onion. You peel one layer, then another, but you never find a solid core.

“His feeling of identity becomes as shaky as his self-esteem; it is constituted by the sum total of roles one can play: ‘I am as you desire me.’”

This is exactly how LinkedIn feels. If your post gets likes, you feel valuable. If it does not, you feel invisible. Your worth is no longer in your work or your life but in how others react to your profile.

Losing Individuality

In this world being unique is almost a problem. Fromm explains that equality today means interchangeability. On LinkedIn different does not mean authentic. It means risky.

People are reduced to numbers like followers, endorsements, and job titles. Just like products in a shop, some are more attractive than others, but all are part of the same market logic.

My Reflection

This is why I say I hate LinkedIn. Not because the platform is evil, but because it shows clearly how our society turns people into commodities.

For me the challenge is to keep a core. To remember that I am what I do, not what I sell. To remind myself that behind every polished profile there is a human being with doubts, contradictions, and real life.

As Eric Fromm said in his book Man for Himself:

“The depersonalization, the emptiness, the meaninglessness of life, the automatization of the individual result in a growing dissatisfaction and in a need to search for a more adequate way of living and for norms which could guide man to this end.”