How the Turntables
I was scrolling LinkedIn this morning, iced coffee in one hand, phone in the other, doing the thing we all pretend we don't do before 8 a.m., when I noticed something.
The posts that stop me lately aren't always the polished thought leadership pieces. You know the ones — "6 Ways to Improve Your Job Search," complete with a stock photo of someone confidently pointing at a whiteboard.
No. The posts that actually stop my thumb are the ones that make me laugh.
A joke about AI coming for someone's job before it even learns how to use the office printer. A meme about job searching that hits a little too close to home. Someone admitting they've applied to 200 jobs and are one rejection email away from becoming a goat farmer, no notice needed, references available upon request from the goats.
And then, right underneath, in the comments, like clockwork:
"LinkedIn is becoming unprofessional.""Why is everyone trying to be funny?""Can we get back to serious content?"
I read that last one twice. Serious content. On the platform that also hosts "hustle culture" infographics shaped like pyramids. Sure. Let's get serious.
That's when I had one of those full-circle moments that seem to happen more often the older I get. The kind where two completely unrelated thoughts collide in your brain at a red light and suddenly you understand something about yourself you didn't ask to understand.
I call it the Millennial Effect.
We Didn't Invent Coping Through Humor. We Just Made It a Personality Trait.
If you're a millennial, chances are humor has always been one of your favorite coping mechanisms. Not a hobby. Not a personality quirk. A coping mechanism, filed right next to "conflict avoidance" and "chronic apologizing."
We grew up making jokes online before "coping through humor" was something people actually said out loud in therapy, because most of us weren't in therapy yet. We were in AIM chatrooms with away messages that were somehow both devastatingly sincere and completely unhinged.
We watched our parents navigate the 2008 recession from the passenger seat, too young to understand foreclosure but old enough to notice the tension at dinner, while we were busy trying to beat each other's Mario Kart records and figuring out how to connect our brand-new Wii to the family TV, one tangled cable at a time.
That was the whole plan. Rainbow Road and remote controls. Nobody handed us a manual for the rest of it.
Fast Forward Almost Twenty Years
Now I'm the parent.
I'm typing this while my four-year-old is home because summer camp wasn't in the budget this year. Not a dramatic sentence. Just a true one. The kind of sentence a lot of us are quietly living in right now, one line item at a time.
And what's he playing?
My old Wii.
Apparently it's vintage now. Vintage. A word I used to associate with my grandmother's furniture is now attached to a game console I once begged my parents for on a Black Friday morning. Somewhere, a twelve-year-old me is having an identity crisis on my behalf.
Somewhere between wondering whether AI is quietly rewriting my entire industry and listening to the Wii startup music for the first time in over a decade. That little chime that somehow still lives rent-free in my nervous system. Then it hit me.
The tables really have turned.
Or, as Michael Scott would say, with the confidence of a man who has never once been right about anything:
"How the turntables."
Maybe That's Why LinkedIn Feels Different Lately
Many of us are juggling careers, raising kids, caring for aging parents, navigating layoffs, learning AI tools we didn't ask for, and trying to figure out what the next ten years of work even look like. All while somehow being expected to post about it with the polish of a keynote speaker.
So the memes aren't a symptom of a platform going downhill. They're a pressure valve. A way of saying I see you, this is a lot, and I refuse to pretend otherwise in size-14 font with a header image.
Humor isn't replacing expertise. It's not a substitute for substance, and it's definitely not "unprofessional" just because it doesn't take itself too seriously.
It's helping us carry the weight of everything else.
The best creators I follow still teach me something real. They teach me how to negotiate, how to lead, how to survive a round of layoffs with some dignity intact. They just make me smile before they do it. That's not a lack of seriousness. That's emotional efficiency. That's knowing your audience is tired and meeting them where they actually are, instead of where a content calendar says they should be.
Maybe That's the Millennial Effect
Or maybe we're all just doing the best we can with a little sarcasm, a few memes, one AI tool we half-understand, and, apparently, a twenty-year-old game console currently taking up more real estate in my living room than it ever did in 2007.
The turntables, folks. Might as well laugh about it.