The ledger
I have had a LinkedIn profile for over a decade. More than once, I paid for the premium version. In that time, I cannot point to a single thing it gave me – not a meaningful connection, not an idea worth having. What it did reliably deliver was a steady drip of universities hawking graduate degrees I have no interest in, contact requests from strangers, and a low-grade psychological pressure I could never quite name. An open loop, always sitting there, never resolved. There is also the matter of duplication. Once you have a personal website, LinkedIn stops being a complement and becomes a redundancy. Everything it was supposed to do – establish credibility, communicate who you are, make you discoverable – a personal site does better, with more depth, on your own terms. At some point I had to ask: who is actually deriving value here? The honest answer is Microsoft. I have grown increasingly aware of what it means to live inside someone else’s ecosystem, and I want to be precise about my objection – because I am not against sharing. I publish on a public website. I post on X. I know machines read what I write and I am not troubled by that. What I object to is walled gardens (i.e., platforms that require an email and password to access content) – handing my information to a single company that controls who sees it, how it is structured, and what gets extracted from it. LinkedIn’s value to Microsoft lies in the uniformity of its data – millions of profiles, same schema, same fields, same metadata. That standardized, structured dataset across its entire user base makes it a hyper useful proprietary asset for one gatekeeper and whomever they choose to share the data with. My website contributes to the open web. Anyone can access it. No single company owns what I put there.The comparison trap
LinkedIn is engineered for comparison. The template is the point. Everyone gets the same fields, the same format, the same implicit ranking – your title, your company, your degree, lined up neatly against everyone else’s. I was handing people a shortcut to judge me by superficial markers before they ever encountered how I actually think or work. I do not believe my resume tells the most interesting story about me. Honestly, I think it tells a pretty flat one. I have spent years building a way of thinking – across systems theory, philosophy, knowledge management, technology – that no job title has ever come close to capturing. If I am going to communicate who I am, I want to do it in full, in my own structure, with the context that actually makes it make sense. A profile page in Microsoft’s database is not that.What I did
I did not delete the account. The handle is clean, the URL ranks in search, and those are worth preserving as passive assets. But I stripped everything back. The work history is gone. The education is gone. The skills and endorsements – gone. What remains is my name, a photo, and an About section that says, plainly: “As of 2026, I’m no longer active on LinkedIn. Please find me at the following:” And then links to my website and knowledge base, where the actual work lives. It is not an incomplete profile. It is an intentional one pointing people to a space with far more depth.Immediate payoff
The moment I stripped my profile bare, I felt a little lighter. When subtraction produces relief rather than loss, it’s a solid sign the thing you removed was costing you in some capacity and needed to go. Again, there is a weird nagging that platforms like LinkedIn create – a sense that you should be checking it, updating it, performing on it, even when nothing of value is happening there. Stepping away from that felt like closing a browser tab that had been open far too long.Where the value actually exists
So let’s talk about X, because the contrast matters. I have been on X for a little over two years. In that time I have made genuine connections with legitimate people – real relationships, real conversations, real learning. I have kept pace with what is happening in AI, in government, in business and reindustrialization, from people who are living inside those worlds. I have shared my own thinking and had it met with actual engagement. The value has been immediate, consistent, and compounding. Put that next to a decade on LinkedIn and the math is not close. A pattern I have noticed since the dawn of social media is that I have capacity for one platform at a time. Attention is finite. If I am going to invest time and attention somewhere, I want it to be on a platform that is actually returning something. X, when curated carefully, optimizes for ideas. LinkedIn optimizes for career performance. Those are fundamentally different things and they attract fundamentally different people. The conversations I have had on X – on the topics I care about – go deeper than anything LinkedIn ever surfaced. That delta between the platforms did not create my dissatisfaction with LinkedIn, but it made it impossible to ignore.Opting out is an option
I believe most people would benefit from taking a harder look at what they are maintaining out of habit versus what is actually earning its place. LinkedIn was, for me, a perfect example of the latter masquerading as the former. My thinking, my writing, my systems – reside in my digital home, where I retain full control and source files – not compressed into someone else’s proprietary format If you have been quietly questioning LinkedIn – the energy drain, the data exhaust, the performance pressure – just know you are allowed to opt out.Last update: 2026.03.05