“Who doesn’t like being praised? It happens so rarely as an adult.”

MAY 27, 2025

I knew I had a LinkedIn profile because I had been receiving emails from LinkedIn for nearly a year. Like the one with the encouraging subject line Well done, Anna. Or the weekly messages I got for a while, telling me that one person had visited my profile. “Your profile looks great,” the messages said. “Your work and your achievements are being recognized.” Debatable, but then again, who doesn’t like being praised. It happens so rarely as an adult.

What I didn’t know was when — and, more importantly, why — I signed up for LinkedIn in the first place. The settings on my profile can’t tell me why I set it up, of course, but I’d hoped they might clue me in on the when. All I can see is that I started receiving emails in 2023, on December 2, which is my friend’s birthday (and Britney Spears’s), but otherwise holds no particular significance for me. In other words, I’m drawing a blank: I have no idea why I set up a profile.

I don’t get the sense that LinkedIn is an appropriate place for irony or sarcasm.

It’s all the more mysterious as I’ve never quite figured out what LinkedIn is. It doesn’t strike me as a suitable place for a writer. I get work based on things I’ve written in the past, but I can’t see any way to upload a book or a script to LinkedIn. I suppose I could write a profile bio, mimicking my writing style:

“Thirty-one-year-old award-winning author seeking employment. I’m especially interested in a consultant position where I don’t have to write anything. Preferably, I’ll be the one coming up with ideas that other people have to implement. I’m not very reliable when it comes to deadlines, because when I get stressed, I usually end up in hospital or off sick. On the plus side, I’ve only got one ovary, so you don’t need to worry about me suddenly going on maternity leave.”

I may be wrong here, but I don’t get the sense that LinkedIn is an appropriate place for irony or sarcasm. People take themselves seriously on this site, which is something that’s always prompted equal parts respect and irritation in me. People who take themselves very seriously, I mean.

Thankfully there have only been a few times in my life when I’ve had to actively look for work, and — despite my fair share of adversity — in many ways I’ve been spectacularly lucky. It was lucky, for instance, that a friend told me about the radio show Den Korte Radioavis when they happened to be looking for a student intern. It was lucky that I applied for the internship and got it, even though I was not yet eligible for a student internship. It was lucky I was asked to fill in on Radio24syv, inventing a satirical character that later ended up on Den Korte Radioavis, and that this character was subsequently allowed to write a book and make a TV series.

I know I’m also talented and hard-working (when I’m not on sick leave), and you’re not supposed to hide your light under a bushel. But plenty of other people are talented and hard-working yet haven’t had the same opportunities fall into their laps. They say success is 10 percent talent and 90 percent hard work, but personally I think a solid 20 percent is luck. At least. And maybe 1 percent LinkedIn?

I vaguely remember spiraling into a kind of freelancer’s panic last year and thinking maybe I could send a friend request (or whatever it’s called on LinkedIn) to someone at Netflix or Danmarks Radio, who would then slide into my DMs (or whatever it’s called on LinkedIn) to offer me some kind of cushy gig. Then I could tell them about my latest idea, for the Danish “Dodgeball”:

The actress Trine Dyrholm and I play mother and daughter. Many years ago, Trine Dyrholm’s character won Olympic gold in discus, and ever since I was a child she’s put me under tremendous pressure to be an elite athlete — especially after my sister, once a rising tennis star, suffered a shoulder injury that forced her to abandon the game. Unfortunately, the only thing my character in the movie is moderately better at than other people is opening jars (like, jars of pickled beetroot, stuff like that). Trine finds a jar-opening competition for me, which brings me face to face with my jar-opening nemesis, played by Alexander Clement, and his psychopathic trainer, played by Rasmus Bruun. I win the competition, but Trine learns — because she falls in love with Rasmus — that not everything in life is about winning. In other words, it’s a mother–daughter movie dressed up as a sports flick.

I don’t think the film will ever be made, because everybody I’ve pitched it to thinks I’m kidding. Personally, I think it could be a hit. Sports films are popular, after all, because sports are popular.

Anyway, it turns out it’s surprisingly easy to request a new password to my LinkedIn profile (I obviously had no idea what it was), and I now have access to it. It’s very … spartan. It says my name, that I’m based in Copenhagen, and that I have experience as a TV writer with Miso Film. There’s no profile picture, but I do have four “interests” listed: Danmarks Radio, TV2, Miso Film and the Danish Patient Compensation Bureau, which I assume must have been a mistake. I can see they’ve just done their first webinar, on “Patient compensation and dental damage for dentists, dental hygienists, dental nurses and other healthcare workers.” The post has 61 likes. Or “reactions,” as I think they’re called. So that’s nice.

The first thing I see is a DM from Franklin Tavarez, who signs off as “marketing@LinkedIn.” He thanks me for being a valued member of LinkedIn’s network, which is a lie, because I’m not, but I suspect Franklin may be trying to sweet-talk me into upgrading to LinkedIn Premium. One month free.

I skim the homepage, and I’m disconcerted: I’m still not sure what this place is for. I thought it was about getting a job, but the scant posts I’m presented with include, for instance, hot takes on the food at the Danmarks Radio cafeteria — the kind of thing that I associate with Facebook. I come across a post by a woman who found her husband of 12 years on LinkedIn. It began, like so many other love stories, with someone reaching out for work-related reasons to an old acquaintance, and after a few professional messages sent back and forth, he ended up inviting her to see the Batman movie. Which Batman movie she neglected to mention, but I suppose it must have been The Dark Knight Rises. And the rest is history, as they say.

Frankly I’m not qualified to judge, and I can confirm that lots of people meet their future partners by hooking up with them in the workplace. (Well, not necessarily in the workplace, but you know what I mean.) There seems to be a consensus that when it comes to real, lasting love, it doesn’t really matter where you met your partner.

I have vanishingly little experience with dating apps, but my general sense is that they’re usually a potpourri of people (men) putting up photographs of bare torsos, tigers and enormous fish, and I haven’t come across any of those things on LinkedIn, where the profile pictures are primarily headshots with a sliver of suit jacket. LinkedIn allows you to get to know people via their professional lives, and since I feel like we probably spend more time working than hanging out with tigers, there’s a good chance your LinkedIn says more about you than your Tinder profile.

I could have exposed the whole thing as a massive hoax, because everybody knows the job market is blatantly nepotistic.

As I continue to poke around LinkedIn, I receive a recommendation for the profile of a woman who calls herself a “specialist in career change and changing track, recruiter, WHY guru and jobtimist,” which is so obviously irritating that you could write a long, Knausgaardian essay about the human urge to infantilize everything, or the perhaps more Danish urge to make everything “hygge.” On the other hand, it’s also genuinely kind of sweet — and if the self-proclaimed jobtimist needs a bit of optimism to get through her daily grind, which is bound to be just as miserable as everybody else’s, then what’s the problem?

The jobtimist’s speciality is apparently seeing the potential in other people, and she has already helped more than 2,500 people get a head start in their careers. As she tells it, she couldn’t find a job after finishing her degree in literature, and when she went to the job center they told her she would be well suited for a job as a careers consultant, which sounds like a bit of a blind-leading-the-blind situation, helping other people get a job when you don’t have one yourself. But since then, she’s had quite a lot of jobs: Communications officer, administrative staff, careers counsellor/business consultant, mentor, case coordinator and careers consultant. “We all have talents — we just need to spotlight them,” as she concludes on her profile.

If I’d been a proper investigative journalist and not just a stalker, I’d have added the woman. I’d have started chatting with her, gone undercover as a jobseeker. I could have exposed the whole thing as a massive hoax, because everybody knows the job market is blatantly nepotistic (especially in the screenwriting industry, I might add). But I simply can’t bring myself to do it.

My reluctance isn’t due to any particular moral qualms. I find it embarrassing to be on LinkedIn at all, let alone to actually follow someone on it. I don’t really follow anyone on Instagram either. Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé and Drake, the Liberal Alliance, a few Danish writers, plus a handful of friends who explicitly asked me to follow them because they obviously think it’s weird that I don’t. A follow for a follow. Clearly, I’m someone who prefers being followed to following. (Much as in real life.) But I suppose I’m being a bit mean and narrow-minded about LinkedIn and its users. I can see that plenty of people in my industry do use it, so maybe I’m the one in the wrong here. I usually am.

I’m still none the wiser as to why I joined LinkedIn in the first place. I’m seeing an uptick in emails from the site itself, presumably because I’ve been spending more time on it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t massively care what the Patient Compensation Bureau is up to these days. So I’ve decided to delete my profile, and file away the enigma of why I joined LinkedIn with all the other mysteries that human beings will never understand. Like how people are capable of love, or why some of us put remoulade on our chicken-liver pâté.

I’m also not sure if I’m any closer to describing what LinkedIn is. I suppose, like most social media sites, it’s a hodgepodge of people trying in their various ways to be human. My brother’s punk band once wrote a song called LinkedIn Park, and I feel like that might be quite a good description. Perhaps LinkedIn is simply social media’s answer to Linkin Park. Gauche, trying a bit too hard, but also strangely lovable.

This article was originally published in Atlas Magasin.