Imposter syndrome is real. Plenty of people, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, genuinely struggle with feeling like they do not belong despite evidence to the contrary. That is a real thing that affects real people and deserves real support.
But somewhere along the way, the discourse around imposter syndrome went completely off the rails. It became a content genre. A personality trait. A thing people perform on LinkedIn for engagement. And I think it is doing more harm than good at this point.
Everyone has imposter syndrome now
Scroll through tech Twitter or LinkedIn for five minutes and you will find someone posting about their imposter syndrome. Senior engineers with fifteen years of experience. CTOs of successful companies. People with hundreds of thousands of followers and obvious career success. All of them, apparently, crippled by self-doubt.
At some point we have to ask: if everyone has imposter syndrome, does the term mean anything?
When a staff engineer at Google posts about feeling like an imposter, they are not describing the same experience as a bootcamp graduate trying to break into the industry. When a VP of Engineering shares their vulnerability about not belonging, they are not in the same position as someone who is the only woman on their team.
The term has been stretched so thin it covers everything from clinical anxiety to mild discomfort before a meeting.
This flattening is a problem. It makes it harder to talk about the actual thing. The specific, identifiable phenomenon of being competent but unable to internalise your competence gets buried under a pile of content from people who are doing fine and just want to seem relatable.
It became engagement bait
Here is the formula. Post about having imposter syndrome. Receive supportive comments. Get engagement because vulnerability performs well on social media. Repeat weekly.
I am not saying everyone who posts about this is being cynical. Most people probably mean it in the moment. But the incentive structure is clear.
Posts about feeling like a fraud get likes. Posts about feeling confident get ignored or, worse, get you labelled as arrogant. The algorithm rewards performed vulnerability, so that is what we get.
The result is a feed full of successful people insisting they are secretly failures. This is not helpful.
For people actually struggling with imposter syndrome, seeing that even the most accomplished people feel this way does not reassure them. It just suggests that the feeling never goes away no matter what you achieve. That is depressing, not comforting.
Sometimes you are just new at something
Not everything is imposter syndrome. Sometimes you feel out of your depth because you are out of your depth. That is called being a beginner. It is normal. It does not require a clinical term.
Starting a new job feels uncomfortable because you do not know how things work yet. Learning a new technology feels hard because you have not learned it yet. Speaking at a conference feels scary because you have not done it before.
None of this is imposter syndrome. This is just the normal discomfort of growth.
But we have pathologised being new at things. Every moment of uncertainty gets labelled imposter syndrome, which makes it sound like a problem to be solved rather than a feeling to be endured while you skill up.
The framing matters. If you think you have a syndrome, you focus on your psychology. If you think you are just new, you focus on getting better.
I have felt out of my depth plenty of times. Usually the solution was learning more, not therapy. Sometimes you just need to study harder and practice more. Not every uncomfortable feeling is a mental health issue.
The advice is always the same and always useless
Every imposter syndrome post ends with the same advice. Remember that you were hired for a reason. Remember that everyone feels this way. Remember that you belong. Be kind to yourself.
This is the mental equivalent of telling someone with depression to cheer up. It acknowledges the problem and offers nothing actionable. You cannot think your way out of imposter syndrome by remembering platitudes. If you could, nobody would have it.
Actual imposter syndrome, the clinical kind, often benefits from therapy, specifically cognitive behavioural approaches that address distorted thinking patterns. It can be connected to anxiety, perfectionism, trauma, or systemic factors like being marginalised in your workplace. These are real issues that require real intervention.
But the LinkedIn version of imposter syndrome gets LinkedIn solutions. Affirmations. Self-care. Remembering your worth. It is feel-good content that makes the poster seem vulnerable and the audience feel seen, and it helps precisely nobody actually struggling.
It lets companies off the hook
Here is the sneaky thing about making imposter syndrome an individual problem. It lets organisations avoid examining whether they are creating environments that make people feel like imposters.
Maybe you feel like you do not belong because your workplace is hostile to people like you. Maybe you feel like a fraud because you are not getting the feedback you need to know if you are doing well. Maybe you doubt your competence because your manager only ever criticises and never praises.
These are environmental problems. They require environmental solutions.
But if we frame everything as imposter syndrome, the solution is always internal. You need to fix your thinking. You need to believe in yourself.
The company bears no responsibility for creating a culture where people feel valued and secure. It is all on you to feel better about a situation that might actually be bad.
This is convenient for employers. Much cheaper to tell people to practice self-compassion than to actually build healthy workplaces.
What would actually help
For people genuinely struggling: consider that you might need actual help, not Twitter platitudes. Talk to a therapist. Examine whether your feelings are coming from distorted thinking or from real environmental factors. If your workplace makes you feel like an imposter, maybe the workplace is the problem.
For people posting content: consider whether you are adding signal or noise. If you have genuine insights about overcoming self-doubt, share them. If you are just performing vulnerability for engagement, maybe do not.
For everyone: stop using imposter syndrome as a catch-all for every moment of discomfort or self-doubt. Precision matters. A bootcamp graduate feeling out of place in their first job is having a different experience than a senior engineer with anxiety. They need different things.
The discourse has become so saturated that the term barely means anything anymore. That is a shame, because the original concept described something real and important. We talked about it so much that we talked it into meaninglessness.
Maybe that is the real imposter. The discourse itself, pretending to help while accomplishing nothing.