Why Are We So Obsessed With Rebranding Ourselves?
Our generation has a fear of irrelevance. Social media has made us both competitors and stakeholders in today’s attention economy as we fight to stay interesting and interested. One consequence of this? An obsession with branding and rebranding ourselves — and I worry that it’s doing more harm than good.
We all know our friend “Sad Girl.” You know, those who listen to Lana Del Ray and Phoebe Bridgers on vinyl, embody #prettywhenyoucry 2014 Tumblr vibes, and have an air of mystery about them — not in a weird, dramatic way, but in an ironic, self-aware way.
Then, we have the distant cousin “Soft Girl” — pastels-only ultrafeminine in a cutesy, dainty way. And let’s not forget her evil twin “Reputation Era” (an homage to the Taylor Swift album), characterized by a dark and vengeful phase of unbothered energy, power, and self-assurance (while maybe lifting heavy at the gym).
There are more, of course, like “That Girl” or “Indie Girl,” or being in your “Fleabag Era” or your “Flop Era.” We’ve heard them all — these hashtags get millions, even billions of views on TikTok. Why are these labels — these “brands” — so popular? Why do we care?
Honestly, we need them to cope. We are subjects of “reality via social media.” It may sound paradoxical, but in addition to our real-world consciousness, we have literally been confronted with a disjointed, skewed version of reality through discrete images and videos that we post online to be perceived. From social media have come profiles and feeds available for followers to see at any time, and we attach incredible value to them. We’ve all been drilled about how social media is not the whole picture of who someone is as a fully-fleshed human being with emotions, desires, thoughts, and aspirations, and yet there is an unspoken acknowledgment that your social media presence has implications about you.
As we reduce ourselves to images on a screen, we inevitably attach an aesthetic — a brand — to who we are (our obsession with Pinterest doesn’t help either, but that’s an entirely different article). We aestheticize ourselves, cherry-picking which parts of our “brand” — that image of ourselves we want to curate — to highlight and put forward. It nudges us into categories that overgeneralize who we are: this vibe or that vibe, good or bad, valuable or insignificant.
We take advantage of these brands as a way to control how we are perceived by others, which is a dangerously addictive concept. I think this explains why there has been a push to “make Instagram casual again” and why platforms like BeReal have gained serious popularity.
But isn’t this just more nuanced branding in disguise? Now, not only do you have to curate your image, but you cannot look like you are trying too hard to do so. We must walk the fine line of effortlessly casual, vulnerable, and sincere without caring too much or being too messy. It’s exhausting and ironic that if you want to appear unbothered, you have to, in fact, care. Such is the great logic of our generation.
One sad truth of it all is that, in order to even be concerned with perception, we must step outside of ourselves to imagine how other people are seeing us. It’s almost dissociative. Because we are reduced to an image, an aesthetic, a brand, we are constantly evaluating how we look to our audience. The nature of social media and perception is dissociation. And it’s incessant. Not to mention, it can tempt us in our actual reality, in which we inevitably become disappointed when we can’t curate ourselves as living, breathing human beings the way we can a profile of ourselves. We are left to our mediocre-by-comparison existence — dissatisfied, frustrated, and disoriented. Not a good sign for our collective mental health.
What’s more is that one natural consequence of this constant monitoring is ... boredom. As creatures of novelty and short attention spans, we lose interest quickly and search for a more exciting replacement — hence, rebranding. And back to the dissociation piece of it, we are also painfully aware of others losing interest in us, too. Comedian Bo Burnham verbalized this desperation to constantly be noticed when he said, “If my life isn’t viewed, I’m not real. If I’m not seen, I don’t exist.” Social media and branding have reduced us to objects whose value is fleeting and conditional on how noteworthy we are. Burnham continued, poignantly, about today’s attention economy and how kids today are not “bullied as much as they are ignored.” We seem to have outgrown overt insults and opted for a much more insidious weapon — ignorance. It’s not outright rejection but more a lack of attention — not the presence of malice but the absence of admiration. So, we fight tooth and nail to stay relevant and avoid mediocrity.
It becomes even more complicated when you think about the implications of some of the more popular labels themselves. Buzzfeed writer Emmeline Clein writes about the “platonic ideal of the beautiful, depressed woman”: “Sad Girl” borders on glorifying mental illness and disempowers us into learned helplessness, “Fleabag Era” encourages the use of mockery and self-deprecation to cope, “Reputation Era” demands ruthlessness and scoffs at vulnerability, and “That Girl” places productivity and perfectionism on an unattainable pedestal.
Part of the problem of these labels lies in their tendency toward the extreme, which is also at the heart of why brands can be so toxic. They overgeneralize and erase the inherent variation of the human experience as if we are one-dimensional. I don’t blame us, though — it’s become part of our culture as young people on the internet and a way to survive the simulation of reality that is social media. However, it comes at a cost, and I doubt we will ever really be able to escape it. And so we cope.
COURTESY IMAGE // PLANN