The Anxiety Gap is real

Lately, I’ve noticed more and more people on LinkedIn… complaining about LinkedIn.

Here’s my take on why that’s happening.

The anxiety gap is opening up.

On the one hand, life feels more uncertain than ever at the moment. If you’re anything like me, the world feels like a scary, unpredictable place.

But then, when you jump onto LinkedIn, you’ll typically see 1 of 2 things:

• Success - ‘look at all the cool stuff I’ve done’

• Certainty - ‘here’s exactly how to do cool stuff like me’

When we feel uncertain, and when we aren’t experiencing the ‘success’ we’d like to be experiencing, exposure to this combination of success and certainty (from everyone else) creates what I call the anxiety gap.

The anxiety gap is the space between what you’re experiencing and what it looks like everyone else has already figured out.

Close the gap in real life

I spent three nights in London last week, catching up with friends, clients, ex-colleagues & old flatmates. It had been way too long since I just hung out with old friends.

Every single person I spent time with is dealing with something big in their life - uncertainty, grief, money stress, identity shifts, moving overseas, burnout, career confusion.

It was grounding to hear the real stuff again. Messy, emotional, unresolved. The kind of conversations you won’t find on LinkedIn. It was a great reminder that real life IS still full of stress, failure and uncertainty, even if you don’t see it in the feed.

LinkedIn isn’t optimised for nuance

The algo rewards clarity, confidence, consensus. Black-and-white thinking wins attention. Grey areas? Not so much.

So we get content that sound suspiciously like gospel:

“Here’s the exact way I signed 5 clients in 30 days.”
“Do this one thing to 10x your business.”
“Why you must stop doing XYZ immediately.”

There’s a reason this content performs well on LinkedIn. It plays to an underlying belief many of us carry:

“I’m not good enough as I am.”

So you read it and spiral.
You feel behind.
You think you’re missing something.
You think everyone else has it figured out.

But here’s the truth:

No one has it all figured out.

Everyone — even the person posting that ‘Just Win’ content — is navigating some form of uncertainty. And the moment you realise that? The anxiety gap starts to close.

You stop obsessing over symptoms.

You remember that building a business (or a life you love) isn’t linear. It’s nuanced. Complicated. Full of contradictions and bad drafts and awkward pauses. Not to mention a life full of friends, family and other stuff that has nothing to do with work.

You get more comfortable with trying. With failing. With taking wrong turns and learning as you go.

There are a million shades of grey to doing this well.

The sooner we accept that, the less pressure we put on ourselves to perform a version of success that isn’t even real.