Einstein Didn't Have LinkedIn

Social media weaponized your social graph

Do you think Albert Einstein knew where his friends were doing an internship over the summer? He certainly knew his closest collaborator, Michele Besso, was working at the Patent Office alongside him. But did he know where every single person he graduated with was working the summer after graduation? Certainly not. And that lack of awareness was intentional, perhaps essential.

Think about the “good old days.” Whether they were better is up for debate, but they were logistically different. Your social world used to be severely constrained by geography. Information traveled slowly. There were only a handful of people you could know about at a given moment, and you actually had to put in effort to track them down—call, write a letter, or visit.

If you were struggling, your failure was local and quiet. You had time and space to fail, pivot, and restart without a global audience watching. The lack of data was your protective shield. You couldn’t know what most of your peers were up to, and they didn’t know about you.

But then things changed.

Social media weaponized your social graph. LinkedIn is a prime example. It aggregated every professional connection from every period of your life—high school, college, random summer camp—into a single, always-updating league table.

And of course, I wasn’t immune either.

In high school, I knew almost everybody who was aiming for the best schools. We’d ask about summer programs, research, activities, test scores. Everything was visible and common knowledge. Once the admission season ended, everybody knew where everybody else got in—not only on a school level but on a country level.

I got into Georgetown. It was a triumph. I had a $300k scholarship. But because of the unrelenting view of my peers, I didn’t feel the win. I asked myself: Why am I not in the Ivy League? Why am I not in the United States like my other peers?

My scholarship didn’t look as good to me anymore simply because it was from Qatar and not the US or the UK. The comparison had stripped the achievement of its value.

It isn’t just about the job title. You scroll through updates of peers “thrilled to announce” their new roles while you sit in a studio apartment with a leaky ceiling, wondering: how the fuck are they doing that?

The digital age forced us into an arena where we are constantly spectating the victories of others while living our own struggles in private.

Now, this panic is becoming pre-emptive. Students start stressing about internships before classes even start because a peer from a different university secured one a year earlier. The digital environment imposes a false, universal timeline for success (Internship → Full Time Job → Promotion). This path is visible to everyone you have ever known.

But this timeline is a lie. Individual paths are rarely linear.

If LinkedIn existed in the past, Harrison Ford would have been an embarrassment to his peers; he was a carpenter until his 30s. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was scrubbing toilets at Denny’s. He didn’t start the company that powers today’s AI until he was 30, and even then, he faced years of near-bankruptcy.

In the digital age, Rowling’s three-year employment gap would have been a “red flag” to every recruiter. She might have been pressured to take a safe administrative role just to close the gap, and Harry Potter would never have been written.

Before, comparison was minimal. You were compared to a local few—mostly the neighbor your mom kept talking about. Now, it is about where you should be compared to a globally visible, hyper-successful average.

Technology has confiscated our shield of ignorance, forcing us to build a mental one in its place. The only true victory isn’t winning the comparison game—it’s reaching a place where you no longer need to play it at all.