Like so many of us in the corporate world, I use LinkedIn (sometimes grudgingly) to connect with others. Look, it’s not my favorite site in the world, but in many ways it’s a necessity, so I try to focus on the benefits. ANYWAY… I was scrolling through my feed the other day and realized how little of it felt unfinished. Everything was presented as a completed thought. The lessons were clear. The vulnerability was controlled. Even the hard stuff showed up only after it had been resolved, when it was safe to talk about. Some of the posts felt like they were just missing the “tonight, on a very special episode of Terry’s LinkedIn feed….”

Each post was a single moment in time, presented as if it stood on its own.

And it made me think about how much we’re being trained to see the world in fragments.

LinkedIn isn’t unique in this, but it’s one that hits the business world hardest. It takes long, messy careers and compresses them into highlight reels. It turns ongoing work into finished insights. It rewards confidence, clarity, and closure, even when none of those things are honest representations of real life.

On the cutting room floor

I should probably admit that I can overthink this type of thing. I was a history major, and that way of looking at the world tends to stick with you. You get trained early to be suspicious of tidy explanations and single moments presented as truth.

In history, context isn’t optional. A quote only makes sense when you know who said it, when they said it, and what was happening around them. An artifact on its own might be interesting, but without knowing how it was used or what problem it was meant to solve, it’s easy to get it wrong.

That’s probably why LinkedIn, and social media in general, often makes me uneasy.

Most things that matter don’t make sense in isolation. Careers, decisions, leadership, relationships, etc., are shaped over time by pressure, tradeoffs, and accumulated experience. The way we consume information online trains us to do the opposite. We take in a post, a screenshot, a clip, a “stitch” (and yes, I know putting that in quotes makes me look old) – each one detached from what came before and what followed. Over time that starts to feel normal, even sufficient.

It isn’t.

When we start treating fragments as facts, it becomes remarkably easy to draw confident conclusions from very little information. We forget something archaeologists and historians take for granted: meaning lives in the context, not the artifact.

And once the fragment starts to feel like the truth, it changes how we judge people. We become less generous with our assumptions. Quicker to decide we understand someone based on a moment that was never meant to carry that much weight.

What we miss in the edit

When we lose context, we lose patience…and empathy usually goes with it.

It becomes easier to assume intent instead of complexity. Easier to believe that someone else’s decision was obvious, careless, or self-serving because all we’re seeing is the outcome, not the constraints, the history, or the tradeoffs that led there. We react to the end of the story without having seen any of the middle.

What makes this harder is that social media doesn’t just encourage that kind of thinking; it actively trains us for it. The constant stream of short, emotionally charged moments rewards quick reactions over reflection. Our brains get used to novelty, speed, and certainty. We’re nudged toward snap judgments because they feel efficient and satisfying, even when they’re wildly incomplete.

So we get quicker to judge and slower to wonder.

That shows up everywhere – not just in leadership, but in how we relate to colleagues, friends, and strangers. How willing we are to extend grace. How quickly we write people off based on a moment that was never meant to carry that much weight. A post becomes a personality. A decision becomes a character flaw.

At the same time, we start editing ourselves.

If every moment can be isolated and judged, we learn to present only the most defensible versions of ourselves. We share conclusions, not process. Results, not uncertainty. We wait until things are resolved before we talk about them, because unresolved things require context…and context doesn’t suit the algorithm.

Over time, this creates a strange feedback loop. Everything feels more staged, so we trust less of what we see. And because we trust less, we harden our judgments even further. The system rewards polish, but it quietly erodes understanding.

Finding the Director’s Cut

I don’t think the answer is to stop using these platforms or pretend they don’t shape us. They do.

But I do think we can be more intentional about how we show up within them, and how we interpret what we see.

That might mean slowing down before forming an opinion based on a single post. Reminding ourselves that most of someone’s story is off-screen. Choosing curiosity over certainty when we don’t actually have enough information to justify either.

And when we’re the ones posting, it might mean resisting the urge to over-polish. Offering a little more context than the format encourages. Letting things be unresolved. Accepting that real life, real work, and real people are rarely as tidy as a feed would suggest.

Context doesn’t fix everything. But without it, misunderstanding becomes the default.

If people who study ancient civilizations know better than to judge meaning from a single artifact, maybe the rest of us can learn to sit with a little more uncertainty when all we’re seeing is a moment, carefully curated into a post.