Getting Weird on LinkedIn

My favorite plea for normalcy this year — a year that, so far, depends on quite a few pleas for normalcy — was that we need to make LinkedIn weird again.

It’s a fair request. I am a professional, and LinkedIn continues to be, in spirit, a professional social network focused on connecting (mostly) white-collar professionals to further their professional careers. It’s the “Hey, pal — how’s business” part of the internet. It’s exhausting and earnest and transparently desperate. Nothing is written on LinkedIn without an agenda. It’s LITERALLY All Business, and it needs to be weirder.

But, I’ll posit this: LinkedIn is already “weird.” It’s weird how people have identified a certain LinkedIn voice and pander to a handful of very specific topics. It’s weird how people use personal failures and successes as a loose metaphor for, like, project management or coding or whatever. It’s weird that no one seems to enjoy or have fun on LinkedIn. What we really to do is make LinkedIn normal again.

In the United States, at last count, there are over 340 million people. These 340 million people share very few things in common — they are humans, ostensibly; they are breathing, and they take in water and food, and they get rid of waste. The comparisons literally stop there. The mass of humanity is heterogeneous — composition is not uniform, and individual components can be identified on their own — rather than some kind of homogenous slurry; we are sedimentary rock, pressing whole elements together into a solid structure.

Which is to say there’s only one real “normal” within society: being weird. Being weird is normal. It’s comfortable. There are 340 million different combinations of humans in our country, and each of them is a little weirder than the next. It’s true and unassailable because it’s fucking math.

I saw Laura Jane Grace — noted frontwoman of Against Me! and modern-day troubadour — perform last night, and it strengthens my argument. There was a wide sampling of every flavor of human — punks and trans and parents and cis dudes and neurodivergent kids and boring dads with puffy vests — all just co-existing, just enjoying a show, just singing along when the time was right. For the hundreds of us at the show, there couldn’t be anything more normal.

But, at the same time, to a lot of people, this would have been really weird. When Grace sings about how she’s not a cop, we understand what she’s saying. When Grace makes fun of spineless liberals, we understand what she’s saying. When the drums start chugging along, and the band starts jumping around, and we all start screaming the sad story of a woman who hadn’t forgotten her lost love, who lived with his memory and a lock of red hair, who never loved another because how could she love another and we all pretend that this is a universal truth, we understand what she’s saying. We understand what we’re doing. And we understand that despite the disparate voices, we’re all doing it as one.

And, yet, many do not. Many do not understand the nuances of being human, the math of weirdness. They feel boxed in, treating the world like a multiple-choice test, trying to get all of the correct answers, pushing for 100% so that the other people who got 100% can identify them as Doing Life The Right Way. These are the people who took offense to J.D. Vance being called “weird” during the election — a word that Tim Walz used not because he thinks weird is bad, but because there’s a subset of humans who do not understand the idea or appeal of differentiation, of choosing and moving forward with their own ideas and desires and loves and weirdness. These are the people who can’t imagine the freedom of growing up in the weeds, hacking away at the brush. These are the people who create insecurity, who make kids feel bad for not going to the game, or to prom, or to college. Who make us feel self-conscious about our own choices, who plant the seeds that grow into topics for our next therapy session.

There are incredible things in the weeds. And that’s where we belong.

By day, I read articles about building websites. I’m drawn to the ones that don’t claim there are perfect answers or, really, any normalcy in any thought-based industry to begin with. By night, I understand why: I come home to my weird family, and I listen to weird music, and at times I end up at weird shows with weird bands and my weird friends, and it is the most normal thing in the world. Because normal is a construct that we’ll never figure out. A container that never quite fits, because we can never quite sit still. Trying to standardize life is failing to understand what life is in the first place.

And so we pushed our voices to the ceiling, and we did so because it was the most normal thing we could do. A community standing by one another not because we all passed the test, but because we spent more time in the weeds looking for something new. Some of us knew the words, and some of us couldn’t really sing, and some of us weren’t comfortable with either one but we still stood there because our collective weirdness is the most normal thing in the world.