It starts small. Five quiet minutes, a puzzle on LinkedIn. A minor distraction on a platform built for performance. Yet even here, the scoreboard glows like a mirror.
The Ritual of Play
Each morning, I open one of those little games: Sudoku, Queens and some other logic grids to let my mind click into rhythm before the day begins. It’s become a ritual; a mental warm-up before the noise of calls, teams, and timelines. Somewhere between focus and escape, it reminds me I still have agency in how I use my time.
LinkedIn says these games are for cognitive training, to keep the professional mind sharp. But something else happens when your score appears next to your colleagues’, your partners’, your clients’. It becomes a quiet competition masked as productivity—the digital equivalent of glancing sideways in a meeting to see who’s already taken notes.
From Handshakes to Algorithms
When I first joined LinkedIn, I had a simple rule: never connect with anyone I hadn’t met in person. A handshake meant context; a shared moment that made the connection real. Over time, I let that rule soften. Networking became expansion. Connection turned into collection. My feed filled with names I didn’t recognize, and somewhere along the way, meaning got replaced by metrics.
So when a stranger suddenly outranks me on the daily leaderboard, I feel that tiny irrational urge to remove them—not because I mind losing, but because it feels like competing in a conversation without faces. Play needs presence. Without it, the joy turns hollow.
Recognition in the Noise
At our headquarters the other day, someone greeted me at the coffee machine: “Hey, you’re the AI guy!” I smiled. Out of six hundred people, that’s how I’m known. It made me think about how algorithms compress identity into a single label, the same way a leaderboard compresses effort into a number. Recognition, too, has become data.
And yet, I still play. Because for all its irony, there’s something grounding in the act. Something that pulls me back to focus and curiosity. Maybe that’s the hidden virtue of these games: they reveal our patterns, the balance between ego and empathy, between logic and play.
The Ambiguous Connection
Maybe that’s the real paradox: that even words like network or connection have become ambiguous. They mean everything and nothing, depending on who’s keeping score.
So yes, I still open LinkedIn, find a quiet moment, and play. Not (only) to win, but to remember. To see how competition can still teach connection—and how, even in a professional network built on progress and performance, the most human thing we can do is pause and play.
What's on your mind?