Strategy ·
LinkedIn envy: why the feed makes you feel like you're running late
The other day I had lunch with an old university classmate. Between courses he told me he had just closed a funding round for his company. I was genuinely glad, I hugged him and we toasted to it. That same night, back home, I caught myself looking at his LinkedIn profile, working out how much he had raised and measuring it against mine. The happiness from lunch had turned, within hours, into an uncomfortable pang I could not even name at the time.
If you have felt something similar, I have good news: you are not broken and you are not a bad person. It happens to almost everyone who uses LinkedIn daily, and the sooner you look at it head on, the sooner you take away the power it has over you. Let us talk about it without softening it: why it hurts, what you almost never see behind what you envy, and how to turn it around so it plays in your favour.
By Mario Pérez
You are comparing your kitchen with somebody else's shop window
The first trap is arithmetic. When you compare, you put your whole life on one side of the scales and, on the other, the best moment of somebody else's. You know yourself from the inside, with your doubts, your weak months and your afternoons in a slump. Of other people you only see what they decided to show, which is almost always the photo from the summit.
Breaking it down helps me a lot. For every thing people publish there is another, just as real, that stays outside the frame.
| What gets published | What almost never gets told |
|---|---|
| The round just closed | The twelve investors who said no before |
| The promotion finally landed | The two years of frustration that preceded it |
| "I am leaving my job to start something" | A redundancy reframed as a story of courage |
| The post that took off this week | The thirty before it nobody read |
| The smiling photo on stage | The sheer panic of the week before |
Where exactly the pang comes from
Knowing you compare badly is not enough to stop doing it, so it is worth understanding the mechanism. LinkedIn rewards milestones. An announcement of a funding round or a promotion generates fast reactions, and fast reactions drive reach, so by pure design the feed fills with the most triumphant version of other people's careers.
Your head does the rest. It takes that biased sample, the achievements the algorithm pushed upwards, and confuses it with the real average of your industry. The automatic conclusion is devastating: everybody is moving forward except you. It is false, but your mood believes it and sends you the bill in the form of discouragement.
There is also a factor rarely discussed. A good part of the most brilliant content is not even written by whoever signs it. Agencies exist, ghostwriters exist and groups that inflate each other's reach exist. Sometimes you envy the consistency of someone who has in fact hired a whole team to sustain it.
Not all envy tells you the same thing
Here comes the part that reconciled me to all of this. Envy, if you listen to it instead of feeling ashamed of it, is one of the most honest indicators you have. It points at what you genuinely want, underneath what you think you should want. But it is worth tuning your ear, because each kind of envy points somewhere different.
Envy of achievement
The most obvious one. You want the specific thing the other person got: that role, that award, that number of clients. When you feel it, ask yourself what small step would bring you closer to it this very week, and take that step instead of carrying on looking.
Envy of freedom
More subtle. What stirs you is how that person lives: their autonomy, their control over their time, their ability to say no. Job titles matter little here. The signal is about your relationship with your work more than about a goal on a task list.
Envy of recognition
The one that stings most. What hurts is that somebody else is seen and you are not, over and above whatever they did. It usually appears when you have spent a long time working in silence, and it has a fairly direct antidote, which is exactly the subject this article ends on.
The stands are the worst place to watch from
We reach the idea that took me longest to learn. Comparison becomes unbearable when your only role on LinkedIn is watching. Whoever only observes has nothing at stake, so they measure themselves against everyone crossing their screen at once. It is a fight lost in advance, because there will always be somebody with better news than yours that day.
Whoever takes part is playing a different game. As soon as you publish something of your own, with your judgement in it, you stop consuming on autopilot and start receiving your own signals: somebody replies, somebody messages you, somebody cites you in a debate. Suddenly you have a yardstick that is yours, the growth of your own conversation, far more useful than an acquaintance's promotion.
You do not need to become a full time creator. Stepping down from the stands and onto the pitch is enough. One thoughtful comment in a discussion in your industry already puts you inside, and from the inside envy dilutes, because you are too busy building your own thing to keep count of everyone else's.
How to start posting when fear of what people will think holds you back
What never shows up in any feed
Let me finish with what I repeat to myself on the nights the feed gets the better of me, like that one after lunch. No real career is measured in reactions per post. It is measured in the problems you know how to solve, in the people who trust you and in whether your work lets you sleep at night. None of that fits in a funding announcement.
The feed is a splendid place to build a reputation and a terrible thermometer for measuring your worth. Use it for the first and distrust it for the second. The day you publish something of your own and somebody tells you it made them think, that sentence will be worth more than a hundred of other people's achievements keeping you awake tonight.