We live in a moment when identity is asked to behave like marketing collateral. What began as a corporate tactic - distilling complexity into a clean, seductive and portable message - has migrated into the private sphere with surprising ease. Professionals are now encouraged to compress their lives into “value propositions,” as if the contradictions, reversals, and stubborn ambiguities that define adulthood could be rendered in the manner of a tagline. The effect is not empowerment but erosion. The more we polish ourselves into something legible, the more we converge toward the same aesthetic and the same vocabulary.
The deeper loss is psychological. When a life is curated rather than examined, the interior world thins out. People begin to inhabit the version of themselves that plays best on screens, mistaking consistency for coherence and visibility for substance. I see the consequences in my work: individuals rehearsing their personal brands with meticulous discipline and then wondering why their lives feel strangely vacant.
The alternative is not better packaging but authorship, an ongoing negotiation with the private narratives that shape us, a willingness to live in the unfinished rather than the marketable.
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