The Absurdity of Personal Branding

The modern fixation on “personal branding” has quietly reshaped how people understand identity. What began as a corporate marketing strategy has migrated into professional life, asking individuals to package themselves with the same brevity and shine as consumer products. Résumés become value propositions, bios become slogans, and purpose statements are engineered like logos. The result is sameness disguised as distinction, a culture where expression flattens into cliché and lives are curated for legibility rather than depth.

This essay traces how branding logic replaced self-authorship, how it hollows the inner life, and why real transformation requires confronting contradiction rather than compressing it into a marketable surface.

The essay is available as a downloadable PDF.

The Collapse of Identity in the Age of Personal Branding

No, Don’t “Let Them” — Part II deepens the critique begun in Part I by shifting from the psychological flaws of the slogan to the structural weaknesses of the book behind it, and the broader problems of the self-help industry that sustains it. If Part I dismantled the emotional and neuroscientific claims at the heart of Let Them, Part II widens the aperture to examine the genre-level patterns that make such ideas marketable, persuasive, and ultimately misleading.

The first weakness concerns the foundational move that structures much of the self-help canon: the transformation of private anecdotes into general theories. Robbins’ book exemplifies this pattern. Instead of grounding her claims in established research, she assembles a collection of personal experiences and post-hoc rationalizations, stitching them together into what she calls a “theory.” But the mechanism is clear: something worked in her life, or appears to have worked in retrospect, and the narrative of personal growth becomes the evidence. Correlation becomes causation. Context is erased. The reader is encouraged to universalize a story that may not apply to them at all. This tendency - elevating the singular to the universal - is the backbone of pop psychology, and one of its most persistent failings.

From there, the essay moves into a deeper critique of the emotional machinery of the self-improvement economy: the subtle blend of self-promotion and flattery that masquerades as empowerment. Robbins’ rhetoric leans heavily on a two-step dance familiar to the genre: Look at me, I’ve figured it out and Look at you, you’re just as extraordinary. At first glance, the messages sound motivational. But the moment you press on the logic, it simply gives way. Having an idea does not make it good. Having a vision does not make it viable. Being “laser focused” does not guarantee competence. History is full of individuals who believed fiercely in their abilities, only to steer themselves - and others - into catastrophe. Pop psychology’s devotion to universal exceptionalism blinds readers to the statistical reality that ability, judgment, and talent fall on a spectrum. If everyone is exceptional, no one is.

The essay then addresses the book’s claim to theoretical seriousness. A real theory must articulate testable hypotheses, withstand falsification, offer explanatory power, and contribute meaningfully to an existing intellectual conversation. Let Them meets none of these criteria. Its central claim is vague, unfalsifiable, and incompatible with the complexity of interpersonal life. Robbins gestures toward psychological and neuroscientific literature, but mostly as window dressing. The bibliography is extensive, yet disconnected from the text, and many of the cited authors directly contradict her model. In the absence of citations, the gesture toward expertise reads less like scholarship and more like the aesthetic of scholarship - science used as decoration rather than discipline.

This leads to one of the essay’s central concerns: the illusion of authority. Robbins frequently declares that her insights derive from conversations with the world’s leading experts, but these conversations - when they appear - do not support her conclusions. The borrowed credibility is thin, and at times demonstrably misaligned with the arguments she makes. Without notes, references, or evidentiary links, the claims float free of verification. The reader is left with assertions framed as facts, and a bibliography that functions more as a shield than as an anchor.

From here, the essay moves toward the philosophical heart of the critique: Robbins’ insistence that emotions often “prevent us from making the right decision.” The flaw is not the observation that emotions shape judgment, but the assumption that there is such a thing as a singularly “right” decision in the first place. Human life does not grant us the luxury of perfect information, parallel timelines, or ceteris paribus stability. Decision-making is bounded by uncertainty, limited knowledge, and the irreducible messiness of context. Meaning emerges not before action but through it. The self-help genre’s obsession with “right choices” reflects not reality but wishful thinking, a desire for clarity in a world that rarely provides it.

The essay then transitions to a constructive alternative: a leadership paradigm grounded in complexity, relational courage, and iterative action. Unlike the disengagement Robbins prescribes, genuine leadership requires engagement, remaining present in uncertainty, taking responsibility for influence, and cultivating the discernment to know when to step forward and when to step back. This view aligns with decades of leadership theory, from distributed leadership models to Schön’s “reflection-in-action,” and with philosophical traditions stretching from Aristotle’s phronesis to contemporary adult development psychology. Emotional maturity is not a matter of stepping away from friction, but learning to interpret feedback, recalibrate, and act again.

The neuroscientific frame reinforces this. If emotions and perceptions are constructed, as Feldman Barrett and modern consciousness theory suggest, then disengagement is no guarantee of accuracy. Stepping back may feel peaceful, but it risks locking in flawed predictions and obscuring the relational data needed for growth.

Part II closes by offering a different stance: one rooted in accountability, clarity, and the courage to remain in relationship even when it is uncomfortable. The problem with Let Them is not its recognition that control is futile, but its refusal to engage with the harder alternative, the discipline of staying present. True leadership demands not withdrawal but discernment; not slogans but practice; not emotional avoidance but emotional responsibility. In the end, the essay argues, peace and maturity come not from letting people drift, but from standing firmly, acting consciously, and holding complexity with integrity. 

The essay is available as a downloadable PDF.