Not very long ago, people simply introduced themselves. They spoke about where they came from, what they enjoyed and perhaps what they did for a living. Nobody worried excessively about whether they were positioning themselves correctly. Nobody paused before expressing an opinion to ask whether it aligned with their long-term narrative. Most people went through life with personalities, quirks and contradictions rather than carefully managed identities.
Today, everyone seems to have a personal brand. Not just actors, politicians and entrepreneurs. Consultants have brands. Students have brands. Fitness enthusiasts have brands. Travellers have brands. People who occasionally bake sourdough bread appear to have brands. LinkedIn profiles increasingly resemble annual reports. Holidays are documented with the precision of advertising campaigns. Morning coffee arrives with better lighting than many boardrooms. The average citizen now manages visibility with the seriousness once reserved for multinational corporations.
Perhaps this was inevitable. Human beings have always cared about reputation. Long before social media, communities functioned on impressions, trust and word of mouth. We all wanted to be respected. We all wanted to belong. The desire to matter is hardly a modern invention. What is new is the scale and sophistication with which ordinary life has acquired the language and habits of marketing.
People no longer merely share interests. They build communities. Friendships become networks. Hobbies become side hustles. Opinions become thought leadership. Experiences become content. Even the most ordinary moments sometimes appear to arrive with production values. The vocabulary of the marketing department has escaped the office and wandered into everyday life.
Curiously, corporations have been moving in the opposite direction. Companies spend millions trying to appear human. Brands speak of purpose, empathy and authenticity. Organisations aspire to personality. Executives are encouraged to be relatable. Advertisements tell stories instead of describing products. Institutions seek emotional connections. At the very moment corporations started sounding more like people, people began sounding more like corporations. Somewhere in the middle, the boundaries became delightfully confusing.
Authenticity, of course, has become the most fashionable word of all. Everyone wishes to appear authentic. Yet authenticity advertised too enthusiastically begins to resemble theatre. Spontaneity is planned. Vulnerability is edited. Behind-the-scenes moments occasionally require several attempts. Even imperfections are carefully selected. There is something mildly amusing about a world in which people strive to look effortlessly natural through considerable effort.
None of this is necessarily cynical. Personal branding has genuine benefits. Professionals need visibility. Artists need audiences. Entrepreneurs need recognition. Ideas deserve platforms. Social media has democratised influence in ways previous generations could scarcely imagine. The problem begins when visibility quietly becomes identity.
Being a person used to be enough. Today, many people feel an additional obligation to remain interesting, relevant and discoverable. Every experience risks becoming content. Every achievement appears to require communication. Silence feels wasteful. Ordinary life struggles to compete with performed life. The pressure can be surprisingly exhausting.
Perhaps the burden comes from the fact that previous generations enjoyed the luxury of separation. People played different roles in different settings. They were one person at work, another among close friends and someone entirely different at family gatherings. Those identities coexisted comfortably because life allowed boundaries.
Digital life has collapsed many of those distinctions. Colleagues, classmates, neighbours, distant relatives and complete strangers now inhabit the same audience. The performance, therefore, never really ends. The expectation of consistency follows us everywhere. Yet human beings have always been gloriously inconsistent creatures. We evolve, contradict ourselves and occasionally surprise even those who know us best. That complexity is not a flaw. It is what makes people interesting.
Human beings were never designed to become twenty-four-hour public relations departments for themselves. We contain contradictions. We change our minds. We possess qualities that refuse to fit neatly into categories. We are inconsistent, occasionally irrational and gloriously unfinished. Brands, by contrast, prefer clarity. They seek consistency. They avoid mixed signals. Their stories are tightly managed. People, thankfully, are far more complicated.
Grandparents somehow survived without curating narratives. They had eccentricities instead of strategies. Nobody expected them to optimise their visibility. They were allowed bad hair days, unpopular opinions and moments of complete irrelevance. Most importantly, they were free to be interesting without needing to appear interesting. Perhaps that freedom deserves greater appreciation.
The irony is that many of life’s richest moments are deeply unsuitable for marketing. Friendships are messy. Families are complicated. Grief refuses branding guidelines. Love does not care about engagement metrics. Joy is often spontaneous and unphotographed. Some memories become precious precisely because nobody thought to document them. Not everything meaningful requires an audience.
Future historians may find our age rather fascinating. They may observe that after spending decades humanising companies, humanity embarked upon the opposite experiment. Ordinary citizens began managing themselves with the discipline of corporations, while corporations attempted to acquire the warmth and personality of human beings. They may conclude that both sides met somewhere in the middle.
Either way, the ultimate luxury in the years ahead may not be influence, visibility or followers. It may be the freedom to live a life that requires no marketing campaign. To remain wonderfully imperfect, gloriously inconsistent and unapologetically human.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. |
