The Army of Professionals with Folded Arms

Intro

This morning I was scrolling LinkedIn to post a job ad. Nothing special: a routine task that turns into an almost automatic ritual, click after click, profile after profile.

At a certain point, however, something began to bother me. I couldn't pinpoint it precisely. It wasn't in the descriptions, not in the job titles listed with encyclopedic meticulousness, not in the titles inflated like balloons. It was something else. A physical, almost visceral sensation that grew as I scrolled. A sense of... conformity...

Then I realized: profile photos. ALL THE SAME!

The anatomy of the perfect professional clone

Arms folded. Gaze directed at the camera, proud and slightly challenging. Three-quarter angle. Neutral background—gray, white, or that vague blue that doesn't belong to any real sky. A moderate smile, neither too expansive nor too serious: the smile of someone who exudes competence with a touch of humanity calibrated to the milligram.

Someone, somewhere in the recent history of work, decided this was the formula. I'm not sure who that someone was. Perhaps an enlightened photographer. Perhaps a human resources department struck by an epiphany during a convention in 2011. Perhaps an algorithm that analyzed millions of profiles and extracted the geometric mean of professional trust.

The result is ahead of anyone who has spent more than five minutes on LinkedIn: an army of digital body snatchers, uniform in posture, light, expression, and intention. Perfect professionals. All of them. No exceptions.

And after scrolling a lot, I realized something terrible: This kind of photo is starting to have the same effect on me as the photos with the chicken-ass mouth on Instagram: but why? The target changes, the outfit changes, but the psychological dynamic remains the same. It's an artificial pose, endlessly replicated to please an algorithm or an imaginary audience, devoid of any real meaning.

And that's a problem.

The paradox of personal branding

“"Personal branding" is one of the most overused phrases of the last ten years. The underlying idea is noble: building a recognizable, authentic identity that distinguishes a person from the crowd. The point is that when everyone follows the same instructions to stand out, the inevitable result is an indistinguishable mass.

Who sets the standards for professional profile photos? The short answer is: fear of not conforming.

This isn't an exaggeration. The psychology of digital conformity describes this mechanism precisely: in online professional spaces, deviating from perceived aesthetic standards is seen as a real risk. It's better to blend in. Better to appear like one of many than to be yourself and suffer the consequences during a selection process. Personal branding, in its LinkedIn incarnation, has become the art of appearing unique, just like everyone else.

It is a surgical operation to remove one's identity, performed with the patient's smiling consent.

What is missing in that photo?

There's something unsettling about watching an endless gallery of people struggling to convey confidence through the same posture. Folded arms, for example, are a defensive gesture in almost every body language manual: yet on LinkedIn profiles, they convey solidity, control, and reliability. It's as if the form has taken over the gesture's original meaning, emptying it to fill it with a shared, conventional value.

What's lost in that photo is the real texture of a person. The way they genuinely laugh. The authentic disorder of an unposed gaze. Vulnerability—which isn't weakness, but human presence in the fullest sense of the word.

I looked at my profile picture after that scrolling session. It's almost laughable in comparison. It's not a three-quarter view, my arms aren't crossed, I don't have that soft, studied light. It's simply a photograph. And... I'm keeping it!

Looking for beauty where no one looks

I've always believed that authentic beauty lies precisely in the imperfections that a formula doesn't allow for. In the out-of-place detail, the wrong light, the expression no professional photographer would approve.

LinkedIn has built an ecosystem in which the personal image is compressed into a format acceptable to an algorithm and to a selector who scrolls through profiles as quickly as one scrolls through an Instagram feed. In this ecosystem, being recognizable as human has become an act of resistance.

I'm not saying you should boycott LinkedIn or that having a well-groomed professional photo is bad. I'm saying that something's wrong when scrolling through a hundred different people's profiles feels the same as scrolling through a mannequin shop's catalog.

I seek beauty everywhere. And if I don't find it, I create it.

But on LinkedIn, for now, I'm still keeping that almost hilarious photo. It's the only one that truly makes me look like myself.

• → Who I am — “If you want to see the real profile, without crossed arms, it’s this way.”

• → Metal FM Interview / Symphonic Reverie — “Because in music, as in work, true artistic expression doesn’t fit into any template.”