You're not a person. You're a brand.

The dystopian story of the "personal branding" movement.

Huge thanks to Shopify for (relevantly) sponsoring this video:

Alphabet Superset:

"BRANDIFICATION" created by Campbell Walker, Cameron Davies, and Billy Guest

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[karacoldmusic]

It's strange to me because being a "brand" seems to give no wiggle room to change your mind, grow, learn, and just simply be a different person from one in point in time to another. I hate the idea of being locked in.

[minorcadence]

I have stopped going on socials, am settled at a place in my career where I earn a comfortable wage and don't feel the need to fight for further promotion, and finally feel like I can live life for 'me' and not as a brand. I touch grass often, and socialise in real life without even telling the internet what cool things I am doing! Sometimes I don't even take pictures of the cool experience!

Not having a personal brand felt almost misanthropic at first, but not caring what others think of my actions is so freeing. This must have been how my parents and grandparents lived their life. Crazy to see how we have adapted so quickly to hustle culture. I agree economic stability has a lot to do with reclaiming your life from branding.

[bf]

Branding is actively bad for creativity and problem solving. It narrows decision making drastically and always makes you think from outside in. As someone who's working on unmasking, and using art to help build self identity, it's one of the things I have to actively bump up against when I have conversations about art. People have been conditioned to steer conversations about art into commerce, and the effect is disgusting.

[garth]

I don’t know why, but I just rarely post on socials and get a lot of anxiety when I do. I have a lot of creative dreams, but I think the weight of being perceived as a brand and being unable to sustain that image is overwhelming. I just give up before I even get started, the dreams persist

[amygirl]

The irony I find is how often the word "authenticity" comes up in personal branding labels.

[adroitws]

I know "touch grass" is a good meme and very memorable, but I think the key takeaway from the answer is "economic stability"

[chifuchi]

Im always been baffled that people buy clothes by brand, and not by how it looks. I just go for an asethetic and colour palette and try to find whatever cheap cloth fills that specific look.

[checreates]

I appreciated this breakdown sooo much. I work in branding and I refused to touch personal branding because I don’t believe in glossing ourselves up just to get what we want. As a digital marketer, I cut ties with ALL my channels because it was making me feel so fake and performative. I’m an artist in a branded / branding world, but I maintain that staying connected to ourselves and our neighbors is the key to getting our head out our own @$$ and living a satisfying life.

[alexanderklepp]

I remember I wanted to be famous when I was younger as I think a lot of us fantasize, but as we get older, we realize that being famous leads to constantly perform and that can include being a brand which is pretty dehumanizing. Being a brand has its limitations and doesn't allow us to grow as people.

[JLM]

I've been in marketing and advertising for 15 years... I hated the idea of people referring to their 'brand' since 2010. It's very dystopian. Nice video, thanks spreading the word!

[HigherSelfKorea]

This was amazing! This is literally at the basis of how modern society changed. In Korea, one of the main trends these days is 'personal branding'. Everyone is obsessed with it, there are courses everywhere, and guess what... people are miserable. Of course in this pressure, 90% of people cannot get over their fears and are left behind, feeling even worse. Thanks again for this eye-opening video! (and of course the Alphabet Superset!)

[jesuswwwept]

I call this the commodification of the self. Its hard. If you leave social media or dont post people ask if something wrong with you or youre going through it. everyone is trying to be famous or known for something. I suffer from this too. Capitalism ruined us as a society. Doesn't help that social media made us more lonely so we do stuff for attention to feel worthy of others time since our favourite famous personalities get so much love.

[orange-micro-fiber]

17:52 you remembered the "touch grass" part. I remembered the "degree of economic security" part. I live in so much fear of my paycheck being messed with and no safety net (bc there realistically isn't one) that I will not do anything to jeopardize it.

[SGYAwriter]

I'm always so impressed by the way you take a broad topic and pinpoint the exact moments in history that contributed to how things are today. I feel like I just watched the confusing background static of my entire life being explained to me in a way I could finally understand.

[NoiseDay]

My latest struggle is designing an entire identity for myself as if I were a brand and then getting upset when I don't fit that brand 24/7
For reference, I'm (mostly) not doing it for anybody else. I'm autistic and my sense of identity is very fuzzy. What I want out of life changes fast enough that I never get it. I need the stability that self brandification brings, even if it doesn't really work in practice.

[PandorasExecutioner]

this mini-documentary changed my life. THANK YOU, MAN. im masochistically interested in this stuff, and i am nerding out hardcore over the evolution of branding. i love the full-circle moment from the podcast. form genuine relationships that make you drop the facade, drop the brand. in a way, it's returning to that promise from IBM for lifelong communal stability, but forming it as a community instead of relying on some corporation to give it to us.

[emmelinesprig]

Super insightful!! I have social anxiety, so the pressure to brand myself is excruciating. It amplifies my fear of rejection and criticism to a deafening decible. I wish I could have financial stability without constantly scarring myself like chattel. At least cows got branded once and then just touched grass every day. We’re expected to monitor and shape our brand every single day, and touching grass is just an “instagrammable” opportunity to continue branding ourself. People can’t even retire anymore, so we must spend our whole life anxious we could lose our livelihood tomorrow.

[fllenstarr]

As someone whose career is a music producer, song writer, dabble in film making, graphic designs, along these lines I feel it's basically a necessity to brand yourself if you want to build.

Unless you have parents in the industry or a connection you got to find ways to attract eyes.

[iamrjdennis]

Such a great video, Struthless. This is a huge problem we face in society. We are human beings! We should not constrict ourselves to the rigidness of a brand. We need to allow ourselves to grow, learn, adapt, and change whenever we want to.

[MartinKPettersson]

When I lived as a Buddhist monk I always felt like people viewed me as a brand or stereotype rather than a person with struggles and adversities I was working with.

I guess it has to do with Buddhism as a religion and that they want conformity between everyone who called themselves a monk.

Advantage is that people have an idea of what to expect. But disadvantage is that the individual monk will always be stuck doing the same thing everyone has done before him which unfortunately has a lot of things lacking since the general concensus is that no one can get enlightenment anymore and if they do they absolutely cannot share it with anyone.