Kahlil Greene’s father works as an accountant,
and his mother does something involving “administration”, though he does not
know the details. His parents rarely spoke about the goings-on of the office
when he was growing up. His mother sat in a cubicle farm — he remembers this
from Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day — and then she or his father
picked him up from the Boys & Girls Club and they talked about other
topics, like “Judge Judy” or Serena Williams. Their work never bled into their
personal lives.
اضافة اعلان
That made it
tricky for Greene, 22, to explain to his family why he had turned down a job
offer from
McKinsey to build his online brand as “the Gen Z historian”. He has
drawn more than 500,000 followers on TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram to his
posts about history and politics; his money comes from brand deals and public
speaking. To Greene, it seems natural for his source of income to be something
all-consuming, something he thinks about while falling asleep and talks about
nonstop with friends.
“There’s no
clear delineation between my work life and my personal life,” he said.
“Sometimes it can be exhausting.”
Greene, in other
words, finds his job and self inextricable. Like many other millennial and
Gen Z workers, he is his brand. This can feel freeing. It can also feel grueling.
A blurring divide
In interviews with more than a dozen people who have built lucrative
personal brands, they shared that nothing made the benefits and drawbacks of it
clear like the pandemic did.
Since 2020, many
workers have had the chance to redefine their expectations of employers. More
than 40 million Americans quit their jobs last year; most hopped or swapped
roles, seeking higher pay. Remote work helped some to prioritize their needs
outside the office, while a tight labor market allowed many to assert bolder
workplace demands. For many people, leverage meant the ability to create
emotional distance from their employers, to draw stricter lines between who
they are and what they do.
That also meant
a new set of challenges for those who work for themselves: It is tough to find
boundaries when employed by “Me Inc”.
For the millions
of people who monetize their online presence in some form, the downsides of
this type of work are becoming clearer, especially in a moment when so many are
rethinking their careers. Building a personal brand blurs the divide between an
identity and a job. It puts pressure on families. It demands that every
intimate experience is mined for professional content.
“It’s very hard
to disconnect when you are building something that is personal and also a
necessary component of your economic life,” said Katie Sullivan, associate
professor of communications at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
“It’s ‘I will co-opt my own self in service of this labor.’”
‘Me inc.’
Unlike other professional phenomena, personal branding announced its
formation loudly and clearly (on brand). Tom Peters, a management writer,
popularized the term in a 1997 Fast Company article, later linking the idea of
brand building to the all-American entrepreneurial spirit of
Benjamin Franklin
and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“We are CEOs of
our own companies: Me Inc.,” Peters wrote 25 years ago. “To be in business
today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
When everything is
content
Modern interpretations of the “brand called you” present a trade-off of
sorts. Workers are no longer reliant on the fecklessness of an employer that
could at any moment pivot, downsize, or cut wages. There are heaps of corporate
data pointing to those possibilities: Over roughly the last four decades,
typical hourly worker pay rose 17.5 percent, while productivity rose by nearly
62 percent and CEO compensation by 1,460 percent, according to the Economic
Policy Institute.
But with
personal branding, the line between who people are and what they do disappears.
Everything is content; every like, follow, and comment is a professional boost.
“It sort of
shifted the responsibility for those kinds of disruptions from particular
companies to the person themselves,” said Dan Lair, an associate dean at the
Metropolitan State University of Denver who studies the troubles of personal
branding. “It’s sort of, ‘Now you are the one who’s supposed to solve this
problem.’”
And many of the
workers whose careers were shaped by the rise of personal branding are feeling
its growing pains.
Kanchan Koya,
43, has seen the pressures that her brand breeds for her family, for example.
Koya’s brand, Chief Spice Mama, which has more than 230,000 Instagram
followers, offers nutritional tips that draw from her history of
gastrointestinal illness. She knows that her followers engage excitedly with
her more intimate captions, so she mines some of her own experiences for
content.
But recently,
she has begun to bristle at the responses that evokes. She received direct
messages asking her why she is taking photos of her baby daughter instead of
focusing on mothering. Her husband has asked her not to include him on her
Instagram; he is part of her personal life but does not want to be part of the
public brand.
“I’ll be super
honest right now: Where I’m at with social media — if my business wasn’t
intertwined with my social media presence, I would be on it 90 percent less,”
Koya said. “I just don’t feel like it’s natural for us as humans to have so
many people in our business.”
‘Me, not my work’
Plenty feel that public exposure is not worth the toll. Sadhbh
O’Sullivan, 29, a British-Irish journalist, stopped using her Twitter. The
chance to boost her writings did not justify the revulsion of selling her
personal life, Carrie Bradshaw style, and she has made peace with the twinge of
envy she feels for friends trumpeting their talents to land flashy new jobs.
And some are tempering
their exposure by sharing with social media followers more thoughtfully. Maybe
not every breakup and depressive episode warrants public translation.
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