LinkedIn is a waiting room of doom.

It’s not a network. It’s a holding pattern for the white-collar workers who helped build the modern world—only to find themselves without a future in it. Two hundred and twenty million people have signaled they want out. That’s not a platform—it’s a collapse with metrics and a sales campaign.

This insane story from Karel Vredenburg appeared in feed and slapped me upside the head—

According to LinkedIn, as of January, more than 220 million users had turned on the “Open to Work” feature—either privately to recruiters or publicly with the green profile badge. That’s 21% of the platform’s entire user base, and it represents a 35% increase over the previous year.

And that was back in January. Several of the professionals I’m coaching now are telling me that job offers are also evaporating overnight—due largely to tariffs causing economic and market uncertainty.

There’s something deeply broken in how businesses are being run today in my view when one in five professionals on LinkedIn is seeking to leave their job—or is already out of work. And one particular country is now making the situation even worse by the actions of its leader. 

What?!

Let me play that back to you. One in five LinkedIn users are either out of work or quietly trying to leave the job they already have. That’s  two hundred and twenty million people.

Two hundred and twenty million people have turned on “Open to Work.” That’s the number LinkedIn shared. The number Karel, thankfully, called to attention.

It doesn’t include the people too scared to post the green badge or quietly indicate to recruiters because they still need the health insurance. It doesn’t count the folks who are fried—the ones who stopped caring three months ago but still show up to every meeting like they’re gunning for a promotion. Or the ones who once gave everything and now just need to make it to Friday.

Let’s put this into perspective.

Using Dunbar’s Number—the upper limit of meaningful social relationships—and the robot to do maths, you and I probably know sixty or seventy people who are unemployed, exhausted, scared, stuck, or pretending. Not abstractly. Personally. Right now.

Most of us have way more than 150 connections. I’ve got nearly 5,000 people in my network. Statistically, that means at least 2,200 of them are not in a good place.

This isn’t a wave. It’s a collapse in motion. And it’s wildly out of sync with the world outside the feed.  

U.S. unemployment is around 5%. LinkedIn’s is 21%.

That means “Open to Work” is four times greater than the national unemployment average. And that number—220 million—is just the tip of the iceberg.

Organizational psychology tells us it’s way more. The rest shows up as resentment. Burnout. Checked-out ambition. People who’ve gone numb under bad leadership. Who’ve mastered the art of looking engaged to stay employed. Who quietly die inside every time someone says “Q3 opportunity.” People stuck under managers who stopped leading a long time ago—if they ever knew how to lead at all. People who haven’t seen a raise in four years and are still told to “do more with less.” People who keep their mouths shut, their calendars full, and their profiles polished.

This is what impression management looks like at scale: a workforce that performs stability while silently drifting. The green badge is the visible signal. The rest is hidden below—quiet survival, forced cheer, strategic silence. Pure professional agony.

We’re in a situation where people are trapped in roles they’ve outgrown, cultures that burned them out, industries that keep promising reinvention and delivering chaos.

If LinkedIn were a country, it would be in a workforce crisis. Like, deep IMF-level bad.

What value does this network actually provide, when the majority of users refreshing their browsers are trying to escape the system it was built to serve?

When four times the national unemployment rate is sitting right here, asking for help, and getting served LinkedIn Learning courses about “nailing your elevator pitch” or motivational posts from executives who just laid off their teams and are now talking about “resilience.”

LinkedIn isn’t a professional network anymore. It’s a waiting room of doom.

Every day I get an email telling me someone looked at my profile. A digital nudge—someone might be interested. Want to know who? Just pay up. As if voyeurism equates to opportunity. As if clicks ever translated into work. Maybe that’s how it used to function, back when the platform was something closer to a meritocracy.

Now it just feels like a casino for the professionally anxious and unemployed.

That 220 million figure also explains why most job listings already have hundreds of applicants by the time you see them. It explains the desperation. The rise in glossy storytelling about “resilience” and “growth mindset.” It explains the increase in performative bullshit on the platform—because when real traction is rare, performance is the only currency that seems to count.

We’re all supposed to keep showing up. Keep pretending. Keep polishing our “personal brands” like there’s a recruiter on every corner with a golden ticket. For the job listing that isn’t real. But underneath the surface, people are stuck. And tired. And quietly wondering if any of this is working.

Pssst… it’s not.

LinkedIn wants you and I to believe that visibility is the same as opportunity. That if enough people see you, something good will happen.

But when everyone is shouting into the void, attention becomes noise—and the system starts to cannibalize itself.

And no—I’m not paying LinkedIn a dime. Not for phantom views. Not for bad analytics. Not for the privilege of performing success in a system designed to benefit from mass insecurity.

Also, their publishing tools are absolute trash.

But mostly, it’s the insult of it all. The quiet grift. The way it repackages economic instability as “career movement.” The way it pretends to be a network when what it’s really selling is hope on a payment plan.

LinkedIn has 220 million people signaling: “I want out. I need something better."

And what do they get? More nudges. More premium features. More empty metrics to obsess over while wondering if they’re disappearing.

They could be doing more. Hell, they could be doing anything.

And yeah, I’m in it too. I see the emails. I watch the views go up, the interviews go nowhere, the interested leads evaporate. I’ve tried to play the game with dignity to no avail.

Because that’s what we’ve been trained to do: look hirable. Be valuable. Not human.

If you’re reading this while doom scrolling, somewhere between your 200th application and your fourth coffee, I’m not going to tell you to keep grinding.

I’m just going to say:  You’re not alone. You’re not imagining it. And you’re not the problem. This system was built to extract your ambition and sell it back to you in monthly installments. The sooner we stop playing along, the sooner something else becomes possible.

It's time to wake the zombies.