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Why You Should Hide Your Birthday on LinkedIn
Protect your identity, minimize noise, and reserve your time with your beloved ones
How many connections do you have on LinkedIn? Digital marketing guru Jeff Bullas mentioned that people have 1K connections on average. And for reference, people in my network who are in consulting and design field have around 3–5K connections in their accounts — as we have a relatively active community there.
LinkedIn, without any questions, is a place where people establish relationships. It is like a master marketplace that offers you inspiration, business match-making, easy access to your professional network, and keeping an eye on new opportunities. It is commonly found that nowadays, when we meet someone new, we love sending a connection request over Linkedin to stay in touch. As a result, there are thousands of names we have accumulated over the years.
In many ways, Linkedin has now intersected with our personal life. And in particular, do you still remember that on your birthday, your phones would be bombarded with blessings from your LinkedIn friends? If you opt to share your birthday with LinkedIn, it will automatically push notifications to all your connections on the day. Not just a reminder, it will invite everyone to send you a birthday message with a ready-to-go blessing for your selection — how easy they make it sounds. So when you wake up in the morning, you will get hundreds of blessings from around the world, and I must confess that I did feel great about that before.
In college, I cared a lot about how many friends I had on Facebook and how many of them did send me a birthday message on the day. I remembered myself scrolling and refreshing my wall, staring at the notification feed to see whether there were new ones posted. Each like, each share, each response — I felt excited and thought it proved that people love me. But later, I discovered it was all because of the dopamine of the positive social interaction, the illusion that “I belong,” and the so-called proof that I deserve to be loved. Then eventually, I decided to quit Facebook in early 2020.
