What Hath LinkedIn Wrought?

LinkedIn — the social media app in which users can network with others and post their professional accomplishments and updates — has become an inescapable part of being an Amherst College student. It only takes one search of “Amherst College” on LinkedIn to see hundreds of current students and alums each sporting their professional headshots and detailed descriptions of their resumes and work experience. The Loeb Center has embraced LinkedIn, even going so far as to host a workshop during the career-development event, Sophomore Summit, on how to build one’s “digital profile (including LinkedIn).” Even my high school held a LinkedIn workshop for graduating seniors. 

LinkedIn can be a very useful tool. For instance, you can use LinkedIn to help you find a job, both by browsing its job board and by messaging alums who might be able to help you. Having a public LinkedIn profile also cultivates your digital image, which can help you get jobs and internships as employers inevitably search you up. However, in this article, I want to focus on the negative mental health impacts that LinkedIn causes — especially for Amherst students — by stoking anxiety and comparison to others’ professional lives. In this regard, LinkedIn is not a benign platform for flashing your online resume. Rather, it parallels traditional social media apps in the risks it can pose to mental health. Because of this, we — both students and the college administration — should be cautious about LinkedIn’s rapid proliferation in our professional lives.

It wasn’t until this summer that I realized the negative mental health impacts LinkedIn could have for me, all of which came to a head this August. Every time I looked at other people’s profiles, or their posts cataloging their summer plans, I felt tremendously insecure. I wondered if my accomplishments could ever stack up to theirs. I spent time ruminating on and regretting my own past academic and professional decisions. These feelings of inadequacy all reached a breaking point one Friday night in mid-August, when I was watching a YouTube video for my thesis. A random part of the video compelled me to look up somebody I know at Amherst on LinkedIn. Once I saw their profile, I felt utterly hopeless and inadequate about myself. I felt as if I was too far gone — as if my future professional life was already gone because I did not optimize every little second of my Amherst career to be Harvard Law School’s supposedly perfect applicant. I sent frantic texts to a friend, telling them that I felt like a failure.

Of course, in hindsight, none of these thoughts were realistic. I also know that on a professional social media site, especially one where over half of employers are using it to recruit employees, you want to look your Sunday best. And just as most people do not list on their resumes every job rejection, most people are not filling their LinkedIn profiles with rejections. But it did not feel that way at the moment. LinkedIn was able to do this to my mental health because it is to our professional lives what Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are to our personal lives. 

Unfortunately, there is substantially less research on the potential mental health effects of browsing LinkedIn relative to other social media sites. However, a recent study on the mental health effects of  “Internet-Based Professional Social Networking” sites like LinkedIn said that “our hypothesis that increased frequency of use of LinkedIn would be associated with an increase in depression and anxiety was supported.” The study did not say that LinkedIn usage caused depression and anxiety, and that causality is something psychologists should study further. However, in principle, it makes sense that LinkedIn contributes to these negative effects for users, something I had experienced firsthand this past summer. 

The problem is not necessarily that LinkedIn incentivizes people to post their professional history. The problem is that LinkedIn turns our resumes into a feed of content to browse, vis-à-vis Instagram and Twitter, and we become bombarded only with everybody’s exciting job updates. Constantly seeing images of perfection on our feeds, whether it be on Instagram or LinkedIn, can cause us to compare ourselves to others and set unrealistic expectations for ourselves.

I worry, moreover, that Amherst students are especially vulnerable to suffering negative mental health consequences from using LinkedIn. This is for several reasons. Very selective schools like Amherst naturally bring in a crowd that is much more fixated on “prestigious careers” than the average college campus. Considering Amherst’s tiny size and intimate residential community, we are constantly surrounded by people for whom name branding holds an almost religious power. When we all file back into campus, a normal question, especially in upperclassmen circles, is “where did you work this summer?” And I’ve noticed that saying you’re “busy” confers a sense of social clout on campus, because it makes you seem like you are important and on the path to professional success. And all of this is without LinkedIn. This is not a bad thing, but LinkedIn’s model often removes the complexity and nuance that our conversations about our professional lives can have by stripping away the failure and emotions inherent in building a career. Instead, we obsess over only presenting the happy end result. 

Furthermore, as Max Feigelson ’27 pointed out in his recent article, “Better Unemployed Than Working in Private Equity,” we students are currently in “the worst entry-level job market in 37 years.” And we’re quite stressed about it. I’ve seen this firsthand as a Sophomore Summit Peer Leader, where I helped sophomores navigate internship applications. At our parties, as Feigelson highlights in his aforementioned article, we talk about “going corporate,” or exchanging uncertainty and “selling out” in exchange for a guarantee of a high-paying, traditionally prestigious job on Wall Street. And when we see our peers achieve big, professional accomplishments, such as winning a prestigious fellowship like the Marshall and the Rhodes Scholarships, a very natural feeling —that I’ve felt myself many times — is envy. Therefore, for us students, especially for those like myself who — at the time of writing — are still uncertain of our professional futures, browsing LinkedIn can become especially overwhelming. The portraits of professional success we see are the ones of our peers whom we already live in close contact with and compare ourselves to. 

So then, what should we do? On a large scale, psychologists should conduct more research on the negative mental health effects of LinkedIn. A cottage industry of books and academics has emerged to discuss the negative effects of social media and smartphones, and these efforts at public scrutiny have been thus far successful in reigning in social media companies, such as a recent $17.6 billion settlement several State Attorney General’s Offices achieved against Meta. I don’t want to say that LinkedIn is engaging in similar nefarious practices as companies like Meta, because we do not have the evidence to suggest that. But more research will allow us to have more informed conversations about LinkedIn’s impacts on society. 

Finally, we students do not necessarily need to delete LinkedIn forever. It still brings us substantial benefits, such as allowing us to put our best selves forward online when employers search us up. However, we should be self-aware of how “doomscrolling” on LinkedIn, as we do on Instagram, can also yield negative mental health effects, and change our behavior accordingly. We should be more open to discussing professional failures and professional uncertainties in our lives, so as to stay grounded in reality. I would also suggest that the Loeb Center incorporate these discussions about LinkedIn and mental health into the next Sophomore Summit. Finally, we ought to remember that our professional lives are only a small part of the grand sum of our wonderful, complex selves. And LinkedIn cannot take that away from you.