I’ll be perfectly, painfully honest: I don’t have a LinkedIn. As a young (relative), accomplished (debatable) woman of STEM, it genuinely pains me to say that not only do I not have a LinkedIn, I don’t even have a resume. To be clear, it’s not that I lack content, because lord knows I didn’t slave through volunteer jobs and lab hours to let that golden shit go undocumented, but it’s more that typing it all out and topping it with a well-lit, shoulders-up profile photo makes me look like a frigid, stiff-armed, goodie-three-shoes, “welcome to Sears can I help you find anything” lil dork. And I really just don’t think that’s how I’d like my future employers to see me. I identify as a cool girl, a fun girl, maybe even a (dare I say) dream girl–not the square that every aspect of my professional history paints me to be. Hell, I wanna work at Google. They have a fricken slide.
A little background first: you’ve heard of a finsta, right? The “fake Insta” that a quirky individual might create solely for the eyes of fellow weirdos, to show off the illegalities, the profundities, and the mindless ravings that the followers of a public Instagram account are simply not ready to see. For those who are unfamiliar, a finsta is a lens upon the self, a collage of the wacky and the ugly and the sometimes nude; a closet of skeletons that only the truest friends may peer into. Finstas make us feel a new, extra-special, welcome-to-the-inside-of-my-brain kind of feeling. It’s like I’m in on some weird online cult that posts photos of everything and anything, from drugs to cats to buttcheeks. But why can’t this feeling transcend Instagram? Why can’t professional young people celebrate their true selves via credible social media? Suchly, I have coined a brand spanking new trend that I’m planning on kicking into gear: the FinkedIn.
Via a FinkedIn, any budding professional can advertise their not-so-marketable skills and any particularly unique experience. Rather than endorse my “Leadership Ability” or “Knowledge of Excel,” my FinkedIn connections endorse my “Prolific Shotgunning Experience” and my year-long employment at “Chopping Those Goddamn Salads All Night.” My work interests include “Hot Coworkers” and “Wear-Your-Lunch Fridays,” and my favorite pastime is scrolling through my feed, watching the app painstakingly attempt to provide me with job opportunities that fit my rare tastes. A FinkedIn– like a finsta–utilizes the safety net of aliases, which provides an anonymity and facilitates some delicious thrill at the thought of a potential real-life human employer stumbling upon it. I guess you could say it’s a form of that classic millennial evasion of reality, or maybe just a big ridiculous “fuck you” to a merit-based intellectual-ranking system that solely takes place in the Cloud ™. Both of these explanations lend some sense or method or overarching social purpose to this weird shit my friends and I do, and nonsense in the face of social order makes my lil asshole heart sing. So if you want a more in-depth analysis of my propensity to waste your time, you can find it on my FinkedIn.
Really I’ve never understood how exactly to start a “thing,” or also exactly what constitutes a “thing,” but I’m almost totally sure I’ve stumbled upon a gold mine of the needlessly odd and the exceptionally extra, albeit at the expense of a moderate disposal of precious time, effort, and bytes. Besides, monetarily maximizing off a social movement meant to throw a finger up at the “system” is apparently the hot new business technique, so I guess I’ll just sit back and watch as my little artsy cool-kid puppets create a corporation for me. Your move, Google.
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