Personal Branding is Bullshit.
By: R. Decker
Tags: Opinion, Influencers, Personal Branding, Entrepreneurship, Branding

Photo by Steve Gale on Unsplash

I often wonder how much of any given person’s activities, mannerisms, habits, and personality traits are quite purely performative. As I browse through an ocean of strikingly identical individuals, I can’t help but notice how everyone has found a magical ability to condense the entirety of their being into a one-word sentence or snappy little bunch of bullet points.

“I help women achieve their dreams and run six-figure businesses.”

“Wife. Christian. Boy Mom.”

“Marathon runner and motivational speaker.”

“Digital nomad loving every step of my entrepreneurship journey.”

I always knew that the standard advice was to niche down until you could niche down no more — to find a target audience so specific that you would be an undeniable magnet of attraction to them, and therefore easily gain, grow, and sustain a following. The only trouble I had was figuring out what singular niche or topic could fully represent the self I wanted to show the world and be known for. For this reason, I believe fully that personal branding is utter bullshit, at least in the way we’ve been told to believe.

Human beings are incredibly complex individuals, with innate contradictions, imperfections, and paradoxes that cannot begin to be understood, let alone explained or synthesized into a neat little compartment. Even though there may be distinct archetypes or groups that individuals can certainly belong to, assuming that our personalities never veer into the middle of a hundred-circled Venn diagram is naive and false. Even groups that should seemingly never overlap in theory often do in practice and real-world applications; the doctors who smoke cigarettes, the mechanics with cars falling apart, and so forth. Although these are extremely simplistic examples, everywhere around us, we can see how we all are and continue to be consciously chaotic beings — always fighting against eternal internal entropy to claw back some semblance of order.

I believe the human mind works to box things up in as digestible of a package as possible. Think of a brain teaser — intentionally confusing, misleading, and puzzling to make you work for the answer and engage your mind. To me, all of human life and philosophy is precisely that: a brain teaser which we are never actually meant to truly find an answer for. To deal with the uncertainty and unfinished nature of this looming existential question mark, we attempt to find foundations of permanence and stability that we can build our lives upon, often ignoring the fact that even the most solid of grounds in life are as fragile as our bodies themselves. Marriages end, deaths occur, jobs are lost: the only certainty we ever can count on is uncertainty itself, it seems.

And so, given the continually changing nature of all that reality is to us, I find it contradictory to try to rigidly force ourselves into such narrowed down definitions of all that we encompass. As the iconic saying goes: “no man is an island,” and I interpret this to mean not only that humans are interconnected to one another, but also that we are meant to be interconnected to the various pieces and fragments of ourselves.

The bullishly cold, capitalistic view of human life has pushed us to the final frontier of commodification: selling ourselves. Not only in the way of our precious bodies in the form of labor, either sexually, physically, or mentally — but now we are also expected to quite literally sell our souls, to allow ourselves to become the product to be consumed, and with that, to play business owner for our very personalities. The customer must always be satisfied, must always be right, and so we sanitize away every imperfection and flaw until we finally become less human and more of a brand. Soon, our every move and decision in life comes down to questioning if something is “on brand” for the persona we have turned ourselves into. Before we know it, we have become a society of walking, talking caricatures, pretending to interact with each other, and never even scratching the surface.

In a way, a personal brand is like a mask. We walk around with the perfectly constructed facade, limiting ourselves to the content that applies to our niche, or if you’ve managed to be a “lifestyle” / “self — branded” individual, still never entirely escaping from the claws of performing for the whole world, never allowing yourself one spontaneous moment, or spinning the unplanned outtakes in such a way that can be capitalized upon as well. Even our tragedies and embarrassments have become another chance to grasp at dollars and cents, always scanning the present moment for an opportunity to create content or profit and keeping an eye on the horizon for any upcoming ways to do so.

The concept of a personal brand has become a cringe-worthy and disappointing way for us to make excuses for our lack of depth as a society. We stay wading in the crystal-clear shallow end of the pool, never tip-toeing to the murky waters of the deep for fear of what may undiscovered monster of vulnerability or authenticity may lurk beneath the surface. We are all so busy constantly worrying about our own image and endeavors that we are losing the ability to maintain empathy and compassion for others — we continue to dance on stage as the theatre seats remain empty, only caring that the spotlight is still shining upon us. We perform these same routines over and over, living our half-lives, our meaningless truths, and staying stagnant in our inability to expand our self-image. I used to believe that figuring out a way to get paid for being yourself was brilliant, but now I too recognize that this is the great lie we have been sold — even those that seem the freest to be themselves, to live life on their terms, and to the fullest, are always still shackled by the expectations of others and society — the moment that you forget to take a bow, you’ll find out how replaceable your unique personality was all along, and how inconvenient it is to be unbound and liberated.