On LinkedIn invitations: I’m sorry

I better knock this article out. The pangs of compunction come steadily; I feel them, and I wince. Admittedly, that’s about the sum total of the pain, such as it is, but it happens every week, and I’d like to be rid of it.

This is about all those LinkedIn invitations I receive and don’t respond to, and if you could see my face scrunching a bit as I wrote that, maybe that’d be enough for you to be convinced of my sincerity.

Here I am, with you, on LinkedIn, and that’s because back in the day employers and prospective employers tut-tutted at my absence therefrom. I don’t use any other form of social media, other than WhatsApp threads, but I’m not the kind of trailblazer who can break the rules on the route to a fulfilling career. In a word, I’m conventional, and I tread well-worn paths.

A data point contradicts this assertion, though it doesn’t disprove it: I was the 457,253rd person to join LinkedIn, and the random article I found on the Information Superhighway to determine that number says I’m an early adopter—no, wait, an innovator, no less. In truth, I’m neither; I really did just join because of career pressure, though I suppose I enjoyed the fleeting fillip of ego when, more than a decade later, a bot sent me an email message of congratulations for joining so early. And my prize is … ?!

Oh, the email itself was the prize. Yay.

More convention: I use LinkedIn to connect to people I have worked with or know personally. I never want to be asked about someone in my network only to respond with a shrug of the shoulders or by squinting, looking up to the right and submitting ‘Oh … I think he was so-and-so’s friend.’

When I moved to Britain for the second time as an adult, armed perhaps with an outsider’s righteousness as I’d never electronically friended anyone (and still haven’t), I looked askance at all the LinkedIn invitations flying around from stranger to stranger until I surmised how common it was and then I just got used to it. But I maintained my approach, and when the system allowed me to reply to these strangers, I did so by asking how I could help but without accepting the invitation. I very rarely heard back.

LinkedIn doesn’t allow for those replies anymore [actually, it does; see the explanation in the comments –ed.], so I’m stuck. This, then, is an apology: to all of you inviting me to connect, please know that I appreciate your outreach, I am certain you are a wonderfully complicated and worthy human, and I am not the arbiter of your work or your networking, but I am the guardian of my own.

And so, kind people who have found something interesting about my profile or writing, thank you for your implicit compliment, and I acknowledge your invitation to connect on LinkedIn, even if it was extended at the suggestion of an algorithm, and I respectfully decline. If I can help you with something, do get in touch through my editing website or my CIEP profile and introduce yourself.

Now I’m off to meditate on the irreconcilability of humility and that golden mean: four five seven two five three.