July 1, 2026

What the Buddha Would Think of LinkedIn

What the Buddha Would Think of LinkedIn I opened LinkedIn this morning before I opened my eyes to the room. That is not a metaphor. Before I felt my own breath...

What the Buddha Would Think of LinkedIn

I opened LinkedIn this morning before I opened my eyes to the room. That is not a metaphor. Before I felt my own breath, I had already scrolled past three announcements, one motivational quote attributed to someone who never said it, and a photograph of a man I do not know smiling in front of a whiteboard.

The Question I Keep Returning To

If the Buddha sat down beside me on my couch, sipped my coffee, and looked over my shoulder at the screen — what would he see?

I do not think he would be shocked. I do not think he would scold. The mind that produces LinkedIn is the same mind that produced the marketplaces of Rajagaha and the royal courts of Magadha twenty-five centuries ago. The stage is new. The performers are the same. And I am one of them.

The question is not whether social media is good or bad. The question is quieter. How did we get here? How did a species that once sat around fires telling stories about the dead arrive at a place where we announce our promotions to strangers and refresh the page to see who noticed?

The Old Machinery in New Clothes

The Buddha spoke often of something he called māna — a Pali word usually translated as conceit, but that translation flattens it. Māna is not vanity in the ordinary sense. It is the deep, background comparison the mind runs constantly. Am I better than. Am I worse than. Am I the same as. The Buddha considered it one of the last fetters to fall away, even for advanced practitioners. Even someone very far along the path can still feel it. It is that stubborn.

I find this humbling. Because when I post something on LinkedIn — even something sincere, even something I believe might help someone — I can feel māna moving underneath. It is not loud. It is a small hum. Did the post do well. Did the right people see it. Did anyone I quietly measure myself against notice.

The platform did not create this. The platform found it, named a price, and built a market around it.

Different traditions have named this same machinery in their own languages, and I find it useful to sit with them side by side. Not to rank them. Just to notice how many wise people, in how many places, saw the same thing.

Tradition	Term	Rough Meaning	What It Suggests About LinkedIn
Early Buddhism (Pali)	māna	The mind's compulsive comparison — better, worse, equal	The feed is a comparison engine wearing a professional costume
Mahayana Buddhism	ahaṃkāra (borrowed from Sanskrit)	The "I-maker," the fabrication of a separate self	Every post is a small act of self-fabrication
Advaita Vedanta	ahaṃkāra	Identification with the body-mind as "I"	The profile is not you, but you may forget this
Stoicism	kenodoxia	Empty glory, hollow reputation	The metric can be full while the person is empty
Christian mysticism	superbia / vainglory	The oldest of the deadly sins in the desert fathers' list	Even monks in caves wrestled with this. So will you.
Taoism	míng concerns	Attachment to name and reputation	The named self is not the true self
Sufism	nafs al-ammara	The commanding self that demands to be fed	The self demands. The feed feeds it.
Ubuntu (Southern Bantu)	umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu	A person is a person through other persons	We are shaped by the mirrors we choose

Look at that list. Every one of those cultures, separated by mountains and oceans and centuries, noticed the same thing. There is something in the human mind that wants to be seen, wants to be ranked, wants to be a name. And there is something else in the human mind — some quieter thing — that suspects this wanting is the source of its own suffering.

LinkedIn did not invent the wanting. It simply industrialized it.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying the platform is a demon. I use it. I have hired people through it. I have found real conversations there. Some of my most meaningful professional relationships began with a message from a stranger who read something I wrote. To pretend otherwise would be its own kind of performance.

But I notice that when I post, I check. And I check again. And the checking is not neutral. There is a small chemical event in me when a number goes up. There is a small deflation when it does not. Neither of these is the truth of my life. Neither of these is who I am. But my body does not know that. My body has been trained, patiently, over years, to respond to little colored icons the way a dog responds to a bell.

The Buddha would recognize this immediately. He described exactly this loop. He called it taṇhā — thirst. Not desire in the ordinary sense. Thirst. The kind that gets stronger the more you drink.

So what would he think of LinkedIn? I suspect he would smile a little. And then he would ask me, gently, whether I had sat this morning. And I would have to say — not yet. I opened the app first.

The Deeper Layer

Here is what I keep noticing beneath the noise.

The performance of professional identity is not new. What is new is its permanence and its scale. In earlier times, if I bragged at a dinner party, the words dissolved with the evening. Now the words are archived. They accumulate. They form a shape that begins to feel like me, even though I know, when I am honest, that I am not the shape.

The Buddhist teachers I have read from would call this papañca — proliferation. The mind spins out and spins out and each new thought becomes the ground for the next thought, and soon we are living inside a construction that has almost no relationship to what is actually happening in this breath, in this body, in this room.

The profile is papañca in structured form. Job title, headline, banner image, endorsements. Each element seems small. Together they form a self-portrait we then have to defend, update, protect. The tighter we hold it, the more anxious we become when the world does not confirm it.

And yet — and this is important — the answer is not to delete everything and disappear into the forest. The Buddha did not tell householders to abandon their trades. He told them to hold them lightly. To do their work well. To be honest in speech. To not cling.

Can we do that here? I do not know. I am trying. Some days I hold the platform lightly. Some days it holds me.

What I Am Still Learning

I am learning that I cannot post my way to peace. That the number of people who see my words has almost no correlation to whether the words are true. That the hum of māna does not go away because I noticed it — it goes quiet for a moment and then returns, patient, waiting.

I am learning to sit before I scroll. Not always. Not perfectly. But more often. And on the mornings I do, the feed looks different when I finally open it. Smaller. Less urgent. More like weather passing through a sky than a verdict on my life.

I am a temporary guest in this body and this mind. LinkedIn will outlive this version of me, and then it too will pass. Something in me finds that comforting. Perhaps something in you does too. Perhaps not. I leave that to you.

FAQ

Q: Should I delete LinkedIn? A: I cannot answer that for you, and I would be suspicious of anyone who tried. What I can suggest is a small experiment. For one week, notice what you feel in your body the moment before you open the app. Not the app itself — the moment before. See what you find.

Q: Is all self-promotion a form of ego? A: Sharing your work is not the same as clinging to how it is received. A carpenter shows the chair. That is not ego. The trouble begins when the chair must be admired for the carpenter to feel real.

Q: How does a CEO reconcile being on a platform built for performance? A: Imperfectly. I use it. I try to notice when I am using it and when it is using me. Some days I get the ratio right. Most days I do not.

Q: What does Vipassana specifically teach about this? A: In the tradition I practice, the instruction is to observe sensation without reaction. Craving arises, aversion arises. You watch. You do not feed either one. LinkedIn is a very good laboratory for this, if you can catch yourself before the scroll begins.

Q: Is comparison always harmful? A: I do not think so. Learning from someone further along a path is not the same as measuring your worth against theirs. The difference is subtle. It lives in the body more than the mind.

Q: Would the Buddha have used social media if it existed then? A: This is the wrong question, and yet I love it. The Buddha walked from village to village and spoke to whoever was in front of him. His medium was breath and presence. I suspect he would have found our medium curious. I do not think he would have hated it. I do not think he would have needed it either.

Q: What is one small practice I could start today? A: Before you open any app tomorrow morning, take three breaths. Just three. Feel them in your belly. Then do whatever you were going to do. That is all. See what happens over a month.

Paweł Sokołowski is a CEO, Vipassana meditator, and student of Ayurveda and Thai massage. He writes from the intersection of technology, consciousness, and the ancient body.

← Back to the journal