A friend jokingly admitted he’d finally made a “privileged and honored” post on LinkedIn.
“Virtue signal more,” I said, laughing.
He then told me it’s something he sees all the time on LinkedIn. “Everyone does it there, sooner or later. It’s about the only way you can announce something in your professional life.”
It’s classic humble-brag language, basically.
When you don’t know how to announce to the world something you want them to know you did, received, or experienced, when you don’t want to come off as bragging, you have few options other than brutal honesty, which I am almost certain goes against social media algorithms.
We could express gratitude and excitement differently, though maybe “I’m so happy I got this new job because my old boss was a top-shelf d-bag” doesn’t play well in Peoria.
What do people who truly are privileged and honored now use? I mean, for the DEI stuff still straggling on, can’t we just assume all white people, no matter what they post, are privileged? Now they have to be honored, too?
Stuff I would be privileged to announce and stuff I would be honored to announce are not necessarily overlapping sets in the way you might imagine.
I’m privileged that Ed McMahon stopped by with a giant check. I’m honored he remembered me after that one year in college where I got suckered into spending abhorrent amounts of money simultaneously subscribing to Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, People, US News and World Report, and Vogue because I didn’t know how to get the persistent salesman off the phone and I didn’t want to miss any more of the new Star Trek: TNG episode than I already had.
Privileged is a special advantage and opportunity. Honored is about receiving recognition for something. I’m more likely to agree that a person can self-announce a privilege, but I’m not convinced about self-announcing honor. A few scenes from the movie Gladiator come to mind, but they end in death.
We toss around the word “privilege” and bastardize the idea of “honor” so carelessly it would probably be better to announce your new job by admitting you can’t believe you got it because they must not have called the references on your resume.
In a worst-case scenario, if you find yourself in a situation where you’re not sure if you’re privileged, honored, or able to go on living without announcing it to the world, just use #blessed, spiritualize it, and really take the win.
Who can top that?