The Problem With Personal Brands

I’m old enough to remember the early days of Facebook and Instagram where social media functioned as a place to share photos of your life with your friends and your family.

It was a fun place! You uploaded albums with hundreds of photos from vacations without a second thought. Your friend’s mom would send you endless Farmville invites. You poked your friends back and forth for no reason at all.

The great shift that has taken place to take these platforms from that point to the brand-infested, influencer-focused mess that they are today is a subject that I find truly fascinating.

I’ve talked previously about the shift from the emphasis on social, to the emphasis on media and about The Great Brand-pocalypse that has befallen all of our favorite apps, but I want to talk today about the impact that this whole movement has had upon the individual. Vying for attention against brands and professional influencers has put social media users under tremendous pressure to create and maintain a “personal brand.”

It would be disingenuous to suggest that the comparative dimension of social media was not always present even in their early days: getting a few hundred likes on a new Facebook profile photo or Instagram post has always been a sign of popularity. But what HAS noticeably changed is the extent to which external pressures have encouraged and, in some cases necessitated, the cultivation of a consistent, identifiable online presence that defines who you are in the digital space.

The unwritten rules of personal brands go something like this:

• Aesthetics: Your photos should have a cohesive look, feel, and mood! People should be able to know at a glance that they’ve seen a post from you because it looks similar to all of your others! You use the same VSCO filter, the same Lightroom preset, or the same pose.

• Niche: Do you constantly post about your travels? Your kids? Timeless communication principles? Everybody’s gotta have a “thing” that’s their “thing.”

• Tone: Are your posts snarky? Oozing in palpable irony? Maybe you compose multiple stanzas of poetry to accompany every photo to express your inner emotions. Whatever it may be, no one is allowed to share a post with a simple descriptive caption, and you’re never allowed to deviate from the persona you’ve created.

The business principles of brand recognition (consistency, repetition, etc.) were never intended to apply to three dimensional people. Personal brands force ambitious or self-conscious people—effectively most of the human population—into creating profiles that exist as a sort of caricature of themselves. Deviating from the expected formula can diminish any hope of widespread recognition in the online space.

After all, if we think about it, at this point in our lives we often depend upon our internet profiles to do a lot of our self-promotion for us!

We’re only as popular as our Instagram like count says we are.

We’re only as funny as our TikToks or Tweets say we are.

We’re only as dateable as our Hinge profile says we are.

We’re only as hirable as our LinkedIn profile says we are.

The decision to forgo participation in social media has real-world ramifications, particularly when it comes to our professional opportunities. This effect is amplified for those of us who work in creative or freelance-oriented spaces. In order to find work, you need to both produce high-quality work, and have an internet profile to back it up.

The gig economy promised freedom from the 9-5 grind—a chance to identify as someone other than a cog in the corporate machine. Yet, this has given way only to an incessant, all-consuming drive for self-promotion. A truly daunting and exhausting task.

Similarly, the work from home push was billed as a way of “reclaiming” our time and “rebalancing” our lives against the encroaching demands of our work upon our personal lives. Yet this was not to be. In the age where Slack messages show up on your phone screen at all hours of the day prompting you to do a quick task for work—it doesn’t matter whether you worked from home or worked in the office, or whether you get paid with a W-2 or a 1099, you’ll still feel the pressure to return to the grind.

When you can work from anywhere, you are at work everywhere.

Let’s be clear: I believe work can and should be dignifying, meaningful, and constructive. It’s good to enjoy what you do and to see purpose in it. But it also needs to be fused with an appreciation for rest.

For a culture that often speaks to the need for “boundaries” and “work-life balance,” we’ve ceded a tremendous amount of ground to a gamified, social-climbing, online network that requires us to carefully curate our digital presence to maximize our social, relational, and professional appeal.

Takeaway: The cultural drive to decouple our work lives from our personal lives has resulted in the former consuming the latter.

My name is Brent and I like to talk about ideas and the way that we share them. Thank you so much for reading!

If you learned something today, I’d appreciate it if you’d share this newsletter with a friend. Good ideas should be contagious, so please help them to spread!

As always, if you disagree or have thoughts to add to what I’ve said, feel free to respond and let me know! I’d love to know if this newsletter is helping you think or changes your opinion on any topics that it covers.