the cage of the personal brand
When I created this blog, I had no idea where I was going with it. Frankly, I don't want to pin myself down at all. While I say on the front page what I presume my writings to contain, this is in no way a definite scope. It's just what I assume I will write about in some way, shape or form because those three admittedly very broad concepts have been part of every interest of mine for as long as I can remember.
As someone who spent their formative years almost exclusively online, I was inundated with self-optimization/-perfection content and this fear of ever expressing myself in a way that could be tied back to my real identity and potentially leading to worsening my job chances. I refuse to live my life in fear of a potential or actual employer. I've had to self-censor and mask who I was enough in my school days already. I'm done with that.
With that said, I don't want to overshare either. However, we don't have to overshare to be authentic. Even oversharing can be marketable in some capacity nowadays. Your very specific friendship drama that should've stayed in the group chat can get you a multi-million dollar sponsorship with Coca Cola and H&M that help catapult a podcast in which you suck a celebrity's ass for them on a weekly basis. It likely pays well, but does it hold meaning because it serves a material purpose? We don't have to do something for a purpose. Value is not derived from purpose. Expression is inherently valuable because we appreciate seeing ourselves in each other—an immaterial perk of being human, and that is not achieved if we don't express ourselves for the expression's sake in the first place.
The dawn of social media panopticon together with the neoliberalization of every aspect of life have made it unthinkable to appear to anyone outside one's familiar circle without "media training." It is not so much about getting any actual media training, just appearing as if. This is shaping our discourse in very subtle but equally harmful ways, sanitizing any realness from pop culture. Things are so bad that the word "rebrand" (used to describe the act of switching up one's own style) has become part of the core lexicon. It's hard to find authentic people that are just being who they are because they could not care less about their "personal brand;" who refuse to be stale, uncontroversially "unique" and chasing the next hot thing.
A brand will cage its face inevitably because that's what a brand is: a marketable set of descriptors bundled together. If the descriptors change, the brand changes as well. For it to remain marketable as what it implies it is, it has to remain the way it is: stable. If a person—who is bound to change with time—cultivates a "personal brand," they have buried any chance for personal development (at least when looked at from outside) for as long as they depend on their brand. That dependence, though, will grow with time making the brand an inescapable cage.
I am not a brand and will try my best not to become one. Thus, I don't want to label this space, myself or my posts. It will be me as I was, am and will be.