It feels like nowadays everything people do is about building a personal brand for themselves. You watch a video of someone craving attention, check the comments to see other people’s perspectives on the topic, and spot some witty comment that has been posted on another video as well. In the real world, using someone else’s joke for your own benefit is lame, but online, it gets you likes.
People are quick to poke through that facade if they’ve seen it before, but the likes go to the early bird. Thousands of likes might lead to a few people checking out your profile, and maybe one of them might start following you. You grow your number of followers by doing random shit, mostly things that either ridicule yourself or someone else. Eventually, your personal brand becomes bigger, gets noticed by other, bigger personal brands, you collaborate, you acquire sponsors, and voilà; you’re part of the upper layer of personal brands. You are noticed instead of screaming for attention, and you start refusing because you now have the power to choose. Your personality turns to shit, and you think you’re on top of the world, better than the lower zones of personal brands you once belonged to.
The most interesting aspect?
Put one hundred ‘personal brands’ in a room together for one hundred days, and their true personalities come out. Remove the cool clothes, the flashy cars, the glimmering watches, the perfectly trimmed appearances, and, most importantly, the sheepish entourage, and you get someone’s real ‘brand’.
The point of the matter is, it’s good to work hard for something, to challenge yourself to reach new places, but in this post-pandemic, socially awkward, “I’ll do anything for likes“-culture, it seems like we’ve forgotten that we’re all humans who are the same at our core: bones covered by muscles and skin, filled with thoughts and emotions. In that way, there is no difference, but there is a difference in ego, and let that be the thing that causes us to long for becoming something different. Better.
In the end, your personal brand comes down to survival of the fittest, and while we’re not trying to survive another day by hunting, gathering, and recreating, we’re trying to stay relevant and create a legacy.
Shame that more and more of those legacies are seemingly built on who can sell bullshit best.
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