There was a period, not that long ago, when the internet discovered toxic masculinity. And the conversation was necessary. It named something real. It gave language to patterns that had been invisible for decades, and it forced a reckoning that was overdue.
But then something happened. The language got loose. It stopped being a diagnostic tool and became a content format. Anyone could pick it up, attach it to any grievance, and publish. The phrase stopped pointing at a specific, structural problem and started pointing at whatever the writer needed it to point at that morning. By the time it showed up on coffee mugs and Instagram reels, it had lost its teeth. The original problem had not gone anywhere. The language had simply been strip-mined for engagement.
I've been watching the same thing happen to workplace culture conversations. And this time, the strip-mining is being done by the people who were supposed to be the guardians.
Scroll through LinkedIn on any given Tuesday. You will find a certain genre of post that has become so common it practically has a template. It goes like this:
A short, punchy opening line is usually a quote or a reframe of something everyone already believes. Something like "People don't leave companies. They leave cultures." Attached to it, a graphic. The graphic will have bold typography, maybe a metaphor involving a conveyor belt or a wilting plant, and a list of organizational sins: poor leadership, no growth, lack of trust, toxic behaviour.
The post will have hundreds of reactions. The comments will be a chorus of "So true" and "Louder for the people in the back." And somewhere in there, a handful of people will share their own war stories, some devastating, some vague, all treated with the same weight.
What nobody asks: Who is the person posting this? What did they actually build? What organization did they make better? What hard conversation did they have, off LinkedIn, in a real room, with a real human, where the outcome was uncertain and the stakes were personal?
I want to be careful here. Workplace toxicity is real. I've seen it. I've been on the receiving end of it. I've also, if I'm being honest, probably contributed to it at points because building a company is messy and you don't always get it right, and anyone who tells you they've never been the difficult person in someone else's story is either lying or hasn't led anything.
My worry is narrower. Something has gone wrong when the dominant voices in the "workplace culture" conversation on LinkedIn are the people narrating cultures while the people building them stay silent. When the most-shared posts about leadership come from people who have never had to make a payroll decision, or fire someone they cared about, or sit across from a client and explain why a project failed.
There's a specific pattern I keep noticing. Someone has a bad experience at a company. Maybe they were let go. Maybe they were unhappy. Maybe the environment was genuinely terrible, and that happens. But instead of processing it as one data point in a complicated career, they build an entire identity around it. Every post becomes a variation of the same wound. This is toxic, that is gaslighting, a manager who didn't see their value, or a culture that didn't deserve them.
And LinkedIn rewards it. Because outrage is engaging. Because grievance is relatable. Because the algorithm doesn't distinguish between wisdom earned through decades of work and a well-formatted graphic with a quote that confirms what people already feel.
These posts can exist for all I care. People can post whatever they want. What gets to me is what they do downstream.
There are twenty-three-year-olds reading these posts and absorbing a worldview where every difficult manager is "toxic," every uncomfortable piece of feedback is "gaslighting," and every company that expects hard work is "exploitative." They're learning the vocabulary of dysfunction before they've had the chance to learn the vocabulary of craft. They know what a red flag looks like. They don't yet know what a hard-but-good workplace feels like, because no one is posting about that. It doesn't perform.
The irony is heavy. HR exists at least in theory to be the connective tissue of an organization. To hold the tension between what a company needs and what its people need. To make difficult, often thankless decisions that don't reduce to a carousel post.
But the HR professionals building a personal brand on workplace trauma content? They're doing something else entirely. They're taking the most complex, nuanced, deeply human part of organizational life and flattening it into bumper stickers. And in doing so, they're not just diluting the conversation, they're actively making it harder for the real work to happen. Because now every time a manager gives tough feedback, there's a voice in the room wondering if this is going to become someone's next LinkedIn post.
I think about this through a lens I care about a lot: the cost of cheap information.
We live in an era where creating content costs almost nothing. A phone, a Canva template, a feeling, and you're a thought leader. The barrier to publishing is zero and that's mostly a wonderful thing. It is democratized knowledge, giving voice to people who were previously unheard which made it possible for a founder in Kochi to learn from a founder in Copenhagen.
But there's a shadow side. When the cost of creating information drops to zero, the cost of evaluating information climbs. You're drowning in content, and distinguishing between the person who has spent fifteen years in organizational development and the person who had one bad boss and a Canva subscription requires a kind of literacy that most people haven't developed.
And the people most vulnerable to this are the youngest people in the workforce. The ones still forming their understanding of what work is, what professionalism means, what it looks like to disagree with your manager without calling it abuse. They're getting their workplace education from a feed that rewards the loudest, most wounded, most absolute version of every story.
I don't have a clean solution for this. I'm not going to pretend I do. But I do think there's something each of us can do, which is simply to ask better questions about the content we consume.
When someone posts about workplace culture, ask yourself what they have actually built. Describing a problem is easy. Critiquing one is easier. Building something is the rare part. What team did they hold together through a hard quarter? What system did they design that actually made an organization more humane? What's the evidence that they understand the full weight of the problem they're posting about, and not just one side of one story from one job?
When someone generalizes, "all managers are," "companies never," "HR always," treat it the way you'd treat any other absolutism. With suspicion. Because the world is not a carousel post. It doesn't come in five slides with a swipe-right CTA.
And if you're an HR professional, or a people leader, or anyone who takes the work of building culture seriously: I'd gently push back on the instinct to engage with this content, even to agree with it. Because every time a credible voice validates a shallow take, it trains the algorithm to surface more of it. And the conversation gets a little more hollow. And the people doing the real work get a little more invisible.
The best cultures I've seen were built by people who never once posted about building culture. They were too busy doing it.
