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

1. A seductive Promise 

Imagine Augustine on LinkedIn: Confessions™ - Living Authentically Since 354 AC”.

Or Kierkegaard with a tagline: Committed to Existential Clarity.

Even Jesus, reduced to a pitch deck: Transforming Lives, One Soul at a Time.

The thought is laughable, but also revealing. The very density that gives a life its meaning - its complexity, contradictions, reversals, struggles - disappears the moment we try to compress it into a slogan.

What began as a corporate marketing strategy has trickled down into the marrow of identity. Today professionals are told to curate their lives the way Nike curates campaigns. Résumés are rebranded as “value propositions.” LinkedIn bios are rewritten as “elevator pitches.” Even purpose statements are taught as if they were logos, engineered to be short, resonant, and endlessly repeatable. The promise is seductive: stand out, be memorable, be seen. Yet the outcome is uniformity. The more we brand ourselves, the more we look the same.

2. How Corporations Set the Stage

In the late twentieth century, corporations discovered that “purpose” could be sold. Patagonia wasn’t just selling jackets; it was selling moral participation in saving the planet. Nike wasn’t just selling sneakers; it was selling willpower, achievement, and heroic striving. Starbucks wasn’t just selling coffee; it was selling belonging, the promise of community in “the third place.”

Each case illustrates the same shift: the product recedes, and ethos becomes the proposition. Once companies learned to commodify purpose, it was only a matter of time before individuals were told to do the same. The leap was almost seamless: if brands could win markets by attaching themselves to values, why couldn’t people win careers the same way?

3. The Brand Called You and the Flattening of the Self

That moment arrived in 1997, when Tom Peters published his famous essay “The Brand Called You.” What began as a management metaphor hardened quickly into cultural doctrine. Entire industries emerged to coach people in crafting their personal brands. Universities now encourage students to “curate their digital presence.” Influencers and consultants sell formulas for self-packaging.

The doctrine felt empowering, promising that with the right polish and hustle, anyone could rise, not just by doing good work, but by packaging the self as if it were the product.

4. The Farce of Sameness

Social media makes the dynamic painfully clear. Scroll through Instagram or LinkedIn and you’ll see an endless procession of curated selves, each claiming originality while echoing the same culturally acceptable messages. The boundaries of expression are policed not by law but by algorithms and taste, the pre-approved vocabulary of impact, innovation, inclusion. What looks like freedom of expression is, in practice, conformity with a smile. Corporate mission statements follow the same script. Distinctiveness collapses into cliché, as everyone scrambles to repeat the signals that the culture has already blessed. Even the aesthetics are standardized: the same filters, the same poses, the same tropes.

What is supposed to be a celebration of individuality becomes a carnival of monotony. Consider Burning Man. Participants imagine themselves liberated from convention, crafting costumes, vehicles, and rituals to proclaim originality. But from a distance, the eccentricity resolves into uniformity: a variation of the same clothes, the same language, the same gestures of difference endlessly repeated.

5. A Coaching Perspective

The tragedy is that what looks like harmless mimicry on screens or festivals seeps into the way people actually live and narrate their own lives. On the personal level, existence is reduced to display. Language collapses into slogans. Presence hardens into logo. People begin to narrate their lives not in terms of truth or depth, but in terms of optics.

On the collective level, discourse is impoverished. Complex arguments collapse into campaigns. Ethical struggles are reduced to hashtags. Politics and morality are reimagined as contests of visibility. When the very language of value is colonized by the logic of packaging, the moral domain is displaced by the commercial. The self becomes one commodity among others.

In my coaching work, I see the consequences when individuals confuse their polished “brand” with a life. They spend years curating an identity instead of authoring one. The effort is relentless: maintaining consistency across platforms, rehearsing the right slogans, performing a version of themselves that is always legible to others. But beneath the polish, many discover an unnerving hollowness. What they have cultivated is not a self, but a surface.

6. The Courage to Author 

If branding hollows the self into mere packaging, the alternative must be authorship. Instead of asking, “What’s my brand?” the better question is: “What’s my story? What remains unresolved, unfinished, still becoming?”

Real transformation is not about adopting a brand. A brand asks you to be recognizable, to be packaged, to repeat the same signals in order to be legible to others. An author, by contrast, wrestles with contradiction, lives with ambiguity, and accepts that life is never fully coherent. Branding seeks to erase the mess; authorship insists on engaging it.

This is the heart of the work. Transformation requires interrogating and disrupting the unconscious narratives that silently govern our choices, then rewriting them with greater clarity, responsibility, and fidelity to what we truly desire. That process is not linear, not slogan-ready, and certainly not always attractive from the outside. But it is the only process that produces depth rather than display.

 To live as an author is to take ownership of a story that continues to unfold, layered, contradictory, and still becoming.

The essay is available as a downloadable PDF.