The news headlines over the last few weeks have made for some fairly depressing reading with headlines announcing that the “situation with energy bills is a national crisis” followed closely by “Supermarkets not passing on lower fuel price”.
Enough is enough I decided one lunchtime as I headed over to LinkedIn for some light relief but woah…what a mistake.
I’m one of those people that ‘flick’ on LinkedIn. I stop on stories that might interest me or the ones with the big pictures of cool things….I’m not going to apologise I like big pictures of cool things!
Anyway, the thing that caught my eye this time round was the number of people starting their posts with: “I don’t normally post this type of thing but”. Ok so if you don’t normally do it then why start now? There then follows a story designed to elicit sympathy and a few thousand comments delivering the sympathy. It’s like Facebook on a bad day when one random person posts ‘Feeling sad’ and all their mates reply with ‘you ok hun?’
Don’t get me wrong I do have sympathy for most of these people – I just don’t think that posting pictures of people crying on LinkedIn is the way forward. More importantly, when did we stop talking to each other? I would hate to think that someone who was close to me chose to post on LinkedIn rather than picking up the phone or dropping me a text. I would want people to think that I was approachable and that when life was generally heading in a southerly direction they could come to me for a chat.
The point is we should all move away from posting our woes on social media – more often than not there is a troll who will just make you feel worse anyway.
A lot of people are struggling at the moment and don’t know where to turn. Let’s start talking again and make ourselves approachable so that those who are struggling have someone to talk to. The headlines are not going to get any better so we are going to have to weather this storm together – let’s do that properly and leave LinkedIn to do what it does best.
See you next month – Tracey Rushton-Thorpe Editor
