My Personal Branding Hangover

Over the course of the past weeks, I’ve been wrestling with what to write for this newsletter. I had announced an essay on internet brain to you, but didn’t send it.

When I was writing that piece, I got distracted by another. I ended up with two different first drafts and didn’t know which to share.

It wasn’t indecision. 

I felt I couldn’t cover topics as varied as neuroscience and nutrition in this newsletter, while still talking about beautiful things and lovely photos.

It’s somewhat unfortunate, because I am interested in all of these things. Sometimes at the same time and sometimes in succession. It’s a blessing to have a curious mind. Though, often, in the world of niching down and branding, it didn’t feel like it.

Own Your Niche, Bruh!

The “pick a niche and slay in it”-rhetoric, has left a deep mark on my mind. I myself chiseled it into the veiny marble of my gray matter with the repeated clink, clink, clink of the content I’ve scrolled through over the years.

Girlboss, girlboss, girlboss…Monetize, monetize, monetize…Post, post, post…

This reads like a depressing internet almost-haiku.

My Personal Branding Hangover

I deleted all my social media accounts about a year ago (with a 5-day slip up, when I felt I needed an Insta to promote my art and writing, blergh). Yet, algorithmically curated, branded thinking has stayed with me beyond my social media’s grave. It’s been so hard to shake, it feels like a type of hangover in my brain cells.

Whenever I think about what to write or a creative project I want to start, I immediately go into full-on branding mode: This is the niche, these are the people to serve, this is the person I need show up as so others can make sense of it.

I begrudge how branding culture on social media has infiltrated my mind. And not only that – how it’s successfully hollowed out my creative impulses. The opportunities for making a living online are vast and fantastic. Yet, the personal branding rhetoric has turned so many things I used to like into a hustle of some sort - side or full.

When I set out to write Seeing., I wanted to do something just for me and my creativity. Yet, it’s been unexpectedly challenging to divorce myself from the perceived pressures of branding myself and my work online.

Do you sense this, too, in your experience of the internet?

Personal Branding as a Millennial Experience?

I wonder if Gen X and boomers feel these same constrictions online or if it is a particular experience of the generations that have grown up with the internet.

Building a brand online is deeply engrained in the millennial way of life. Before there was the personal brand on steroids that we know now, there were bloggers and people who became known for their quips online.

It’s always been there. I sense it has intensified over the past years, though, especially with the pandemic.

Now, personal branding is the standard operating procedure across the internet. Substack offers a nice pocket of resistance to some of that. Even here, though, writing is divided into neat pockets along demarcations of interest like fashion, creative writing, art, or personal development. From my quotidian observations, people largely stay inside these lines.

The tendencies from the rest of the internet have followed us here, too, irrespective of how many people write thought pieces on quitting Insta these days. Copious takes and comments on leaving social media remind me of the logic of the rest of the internet: derivative content, hopping on a trend to gain attention.

You can’t fault people for that. It’s been working like this for years. We all want to eat and meet our goals. The cultural and internal shifts through social media and algorithms are palpable in every aspect of our lives.

And yet, it leaves a stale aftertaste. Can’t we figure out a different way?

Freeing Creativity From Branding

More than ever, I want to decouple my creativity from the imperatives of branding.

The internet is awash in a deluge of junk content precisely because so many companies and personal brands seek to attract customers through content. Individuals do this, too.

It’s time we redefine our relationships online as people.

The tradeoff for consuming creative work on the internet in the past has been to either be sold to or have your data stripped from you. There’s got to be a different solution for this.

I’ve resolved to do this: Instead of succumbing to branding imperatives, I give myself permission to write about what and when I want to. Across time, creatives have wrestled with deadlines.

In the present, we’re dealing with the residue of scheduled creative output that were and are set by algorithms. I don’t want to write because we’re now used to the neat format of posting on Monday - Wednesday - Friday algorithms trained us to follow.

I want to send you a newsletter because I have something to say. 

In my personal time, I don’t want to make content. I just want to write. The good, old-fashioned job description of writer, not content creator or solopreneur, feels more appealing than ever. I have nothing to market to you through my content and no interest in your data.

The paid subscription I set up supports that goal. Ultimately, this makes my work, thoughts, and inspiration for you the product, not the vehicle to sell you something or build a brand.

I like that. What it will look like and how often, we’ll discover together.

At this point, I can’t offer you a cadence for my writing. While my mind tells me I should, I find it freeing not to. It’s a more open-ended way to build relationships online. It leaves more room for our humanity that can be so unpredictable – in the best way.

We’re people meeting online, let’s create room to meet each other as such.

Johanna