I do not like LinkedIn very much. I find it to be a collection of self-aggrandizing spam and unsolicited direct messages from strangers who want to sell you a product or service you don’t need. It’s a distraction posing as a necessary evil. All the worst elements of Facebook—a platform I abandoned years ago—but with fewer baby photos. 

But it does have some fun aspects. Consider, for instance, broetry. 

For the unitiated, broetry was first described by Buzzfeed as “elongated self-help posts that look like poems.”

When I first saw it, I did not know its name but it fascinated me. What was happening? Why? Who were these strangers with whom I was connected and why were they writing poems about their startups, their sales funnels, their .

I started to become fascinated by the way LinkedIn seems to be poisoning the minds of its users. People treat it like it’s their job. They treat it like the purpose of LinkedIn is not to get a new job or find a new client or hire a new employee but to simply grind away in perpetuity, posting paragraphs and broems and videos. Clicking “like” under every other broem. 

As described by Joe Heix in an only somewhat tongue-in-cheek article in The Outline, LinkedIn is a MMORPG that

sets itself apart from its competitors by placing players not in a fantasy world of orcs and goblins, but in the treacherous world of business. Players can choose from dozens of character classes (e.g., Entrepreneurs, Social Media Mavens, Finance Wizards) each with their own skill sets and special moves (Power Lunch; Signal Boost; Invoice Dodge). They gain “experience” by networking, obtaining endorsements from other users, and posting inspirational quotes from Elon Musk.

Note that Heix isn’t the first to point out the extent to which LinkedIn resembles a video game. This tweet predated his article by a few years

But the broems. Nothing compares to the broetry that still floods LinkedIn. In late 2017, when I first discovered it, I went from looking at LinkedIn on the rarest of occasions to checking it regularly just to see what bizarre things were happening there. 

All of this escalated to perhaps the strangest thing I’ve ever done on social media. 

The William Carlos Williams LinkedIn Status Updates

In December of 2017, I posted my first LinkedIn status. It was a repurposing of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”, written for and about LinkedIn itself:

I guess it’s pretty obvious, in retrospect. It’s an easy joke. 

But then I started doing it weekly. (My favorite is here.) And here’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about as I ran with this joke… 

Would Williams Carlos Williams ever use LinkedIn?

Would William Carlos Williams have had a LinkedIn profile? If he did, what would he list his job as? And would he write broetry?

As to whether or not he would’ve had one, it seems hard to imagine the guy ever needing one.

But wait—is William Carlos Williams not the definition of the working artist? The poet who maintained a day job until he retired? The brilliant mind who devoted himself to two crafts to the entirety of his life?

Through that lens, of course he would have a LinkedIn profile. 

Consider the extent to which his poetry and his ostensible day job fueled one another. As Linda Wagner-Martin described him,

“...he understood the tradeoffs: he would have less time to write; he would need more physical stamina than people with only one occupation.”

Neither job was an afterthought to the other. And to say that being a physician was his day job wouldn’t even be true, as he was known to scribble poems on prescription paper during his breaks throughout the day.

So, then, on that note:

What would his LinkedIn say? 

Would it list poet first? Or doctor? Would he use a pipe or a semi-colon? Perhaps a comma?

Would he agonize over it?

Would he click the edit button and stare at his screen, pondering options?

Would he consider this option:

There is no reason to ask this question, I realize. This is a needless hypothetical. 

Yet I think about this question. I do. I began this blog post with a mockery of LinkedIn yet I know that I will share this blog post on LinkedIn once it is finished. My own LinkedIn is structured the way I imagine William Carlos Williams could have structured his: both things are represented, the salaried position balanced against the passion project, both of which absorb tremendous amounts of my time and energy; both of which pay the bills. 

I think about Williams a lot because I think he, better than anyone, represents a refusal to compromise on one dream or the other. 

But I do think something else, too. William Carlos Williams, if he did have a LinkedIn, would not have written broetry. He would not have bragged, would not have sold, would not have flaunted or boasted or InMailed.

He probably would not checked his LinkedIn at all. He would have had better things to do. Like saving lives and writing poems and saving more lives.