Everything I Documented on LinkedIn Disappeared. It Turned Out to Be a Relief

Yesterday, almost three years of my LinkedIn history disappeared in one go. Every certificate I had uploaded. Every project demo I remember being excited about at the time. Every post, comment, and small win I had shared along the way. The Dean’s List updates, that 3.93 SGPA post that brought in thousands of impressions, and all the moments in between vanished because of a single security incident.

My first reaction was frustration and why wouldn't it be. I had been deliberate about documenting things and events. I treated it like a record of progress and logged milestones as they happened. Losing all of that in one moment felt stressing, and even unfair.

But once that initial reaction settled, something unexpected took its place. Nothing important was actually gone. The achievements did not disappear with the posts. The systems I built and shipped are still running. The problems I solved are still solved. And the personal and professional lessons I picked up along the way never depended on a platform to exist. They were formed while navigating uncertainty, failure, iteration, and figuring things out in real time, long before anyone reacted to them.

That is when I realized something else. At some point, without consciously deciding to, I had changed how I used LinkedIn. It stopped being a place where I thought out loud and slowly turned into a résumé. I was putting everything on display, even projects from my earliest semesters when I was still learning the basics, instead of using the space to reflect on how my thinking was evolving, what I was learning as it happened, or how new technologies were reshaping the way I approached problems.

Without noticing, it became a place to store proof. A timeline of credentials. A list of milestones. A record that showed progress, but not process. There is nothing wrong with that but I just feel it tells an incomplete story. I was sharing outcomes without context. I was listing achievements without talking about the decisions, tradeoffs, and mistakes that led there. My profile was showing movement, but rarely showed how that movement actually happened.

Because of that, I have decided not to restore the account. Instead of trying to recreate what was lost, I am rebuilding with a different intention. Less focus on what I have accumulated, and more focus on how I think, what I am building now, and what I have learnt and am learning while the work is still messy and unfinished. I want to talk about the parts that never make it into clean bullet points. I will be talking about the false starts, the wrong calls, and the tradeoffs that only make sense in hindsight.

If you have ever changed the way you use LinkedIn as your career evolved, I would genuinely love to know what triggered that shift for you.