The Personality Graveyard

LinkedIn is where interesting things go to die.

We don't mean that as a joke. Open the app and you'll find a parade of job titles, humble brags dressed as gratitude, and the same five sentences about “thrilled to announce” rearranged into a new order. Somewhere behind all of it are real people. People who paint on weekends, who grow vegetables they can't give away fast enough, who write novels in the hours before their kids wake up. None of that makes it onto the feed, because the feed has decided it only wants to know what you do for money.

That's a strange decision for a network built entirely on people, but it didn't start with LinkedIn. It starts the moment you meet someone new, at a party, in a queue, at your kid's school gate. The first question out of anyone's mouth is what do you do, not what do you like to do, not what would you make if nobody was paying you for it. We've been asking that question for so long that a platform built entirely around the answer felt inevitable. LinkedIn didn't invent the habit. It just gave it a login and a newsfeed.

We work with writers, most of whom kept a day job while their book took shape somewhere off to the side. An accountant working through her memoir in the evenings. A copywriter who paints, badly and happily, and keeps the canvases in a spare bedroom where nobody has to grade them. Their actual lives were more interesting than their job titles ever were, and yet on the one platform built to hold a professional's whole self, none of it shows up.

Part of the reason is fear, and it's not an unreasonable one. Show a colleague your unfinished novel and you risk the question every hobbyist dreads: “Oh, are you any good?” Post a painting next to a quarterly report and someone will wonder if you're taking your job seriously. The professional mask is safer because it asks nothing of you. It can't disappoint anyone, because it isn't really you to begin with.

But the mask is also boring, and boring doesn't build anything. It doesn't build trust, or memory, or the kind of connection that makes someone think of you a year later when they need exactly what you can offer. Nobody remembers the fortieth “excited to share” post. People remember the finance director who posted her tomatoes and got forty comments about her garden, or the engineer who shared a short story and heard back from strangers who'd lived some version of it themselves.

We started Studio Deiora on that same instinct. The books we publish tend to come from people who spent years being competent at something else first, and who quietly wrote a manuscript on the side because the job never asked for that part of them. Publishing those books mostly means giving permission. The talent was already there. It just needed somewhere to be seen that wasn't a group chat with three friends.

So here's what we'd like to see more of. Accountants who show their paintings. Artists who write about their gardens. Marketing people who mention the book they've been quietly working on. Not dressed up as a personal brand exercise, not filed under “authentic storytelling,” just the plain fact of a whole person showing up where the professional one usually stands alone.

LinkedIn will keep rewarding the safe post. That's fine. We're not asking anyone to abandon the feed, just to let it hold a bit more of what's actually true. The best version of any of us was never just the job title. It's worth letting that version through the door once in a while, even here.