Because I live in the UK, I’m often told this narrative of social decay, about how everything is getting worse and no one cares about doing anything properly. I disagree; I think it’s always been like this, and our feeling of disappointment persists because our expectation of improvement grows faster than actual improvement.

LinkedIn is full of bullshit because no one has anything genuine to say that’s appropriate for that platform. The people posting that nonsense don’t actually believe it.

The game is tedious, and if you don’t play you lose. It was like this before the Internet, too: my father limited his earning potential by being bad at networking, whereas my grandfather did went so far as to join the Freemasons to climb the corporate ladder to the top.

This. There are so many examples of this just from my childhood in the 60's in the U.S. My father was a machinist who refused to play this game--and he constantly complained about the other guys who did. There is nothing really new under the sun when it comes to human behavior.