The contemplations of building a personal brand while craving a digital detox

I want to be successful, not searchable

Lately, my father has been telling me to market myself more. Which sounds vaguely taboo, but it’s more layered than that. He isn’t suggesting I plaster my face on billboards or start shouting affirmations into a ring light. He means social media. He means visibility. He means turning myself into something people can consume.

He’s a baby boomer, yet over the last decade he’s delegated a surprising amount of his time to consuming social media content. He watches twenty-somethings become millionaires simply from posting online. From yoga instructors to home cooks, even chiropractors filming their appointments. He sees people build entire lives from content, and to him it looks like opportunity.

He’ll tell me how well these individuals are doing and then ask, genuinely, why I don’t use the same platforms to my advantage. Why I don’t just post more. Why I don’t market myself. I get it. I’m his youngest daughter and he believes I’m capable of conquering the world. Or at least the internet.

I tell him I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I don’t know what my niche would be. I don’t know what unique talent I could confidently present without feeling like I’m performing a version of myself that isn’t quite true.

And yes, maybe this sounds vain or ignorant, but I do have cool outfits. I could probably curate posts around that. But the idea of building a personality out of clothes alone feels oddly dull. Like sanding myself down to something more digestible.

Still, the uncomfortable truth is that he’s probably right.

And yet, at the same time, I want nothing more than to remove social media from my life entirely. I fantasise about deleting everything. About disappearing and becoming unreachable in the way people once were. No stories. No posts. No algorithm deciding whether my work is worth being seen. Just me, my thoughts, and the people who actually know me.

This is the paradox of being a creative now.

Instagram or you are invisible. You can write, paint, design, photograph, think, but if you are not documenting it online, it might as well not exist. Exposure has become the currency, and the price of entry is constant visibility.

There are days when I envy the socialites who seem to do the bare minimum yet manage to launch a New York Times bestsellers. Their books hit the shelves with a concerning amount of anticipation and praise before anyone has even had time to read a word. But behind the envy, I mock them too (clearly lol). I tell myself their work lacks substance, that their influence is shallow, that the passion is missing. But if I’m being honest, that mockery probably comes from jealousy. Or confusion. Or bitterness. Let’s just settle on all three.

Because part of me wonders if they’ve simply understood the game better than I have. Or worse, if the game has nothing to do with talent anymore.

I miss the days when social media was for friends and family. When you posted a blurry photo from a night out or a holiday montage that your camera roll made for you without thinking about engagement or reach. When your audience was people you actually knew, not strangers or potential clients or future employers. I’ve written about this before, yet the feeling still lingers. There was something softer about it all. Something less transactional. Now everything feels like a pitch. Even when it’s casual. Even when it’s meant to be authentic.

We talk about the digital age as if it’s neutral, but it has quietly split us into two types of people. Those who create and those who consume. The creators hope the consumers never decide to create, because attention is finite. The consumers envy the creators while telling themselves they could do it too if they wanted. It’s an unspoken tension sitting underneath every scroll.

Creation now comes with pressure. To be consistent. To be visible. To be palatable. Consumption comes with guilt. Hours lost. Comparison spirals. A quiet resentment towards people you do not know. Both sides are exhausting in their own way.

And somewhere along the way, the idea that an individual can be a brand crept in. Slowly enough that we didn’t notice it happening. At first it was celebrities. Then influencers. Then creatives. Now it’s everyone. LinkedIn profiles read like press releases. Instagram feeds are colour-coded and intentional. Even grief, joy, and anger are packaged neatly for public viewing.

So what actually separates a person from a brand?

A brand is consistent. A person is contradictory. A brand has a message. A person has moods. A brand exists to be consumed. A person exists to live. The problem is that social media rewards branding far more than it rewards humanity. Those messy, quiet, uncertain versions of ourselves do not perform well.

When you turn yourself into a brand, you flatten yourself. You choose a version of who you are and present it on repeat. You trim the edges and edit out the inconvenient parts. Over time, that version starts to feel more real to the outside world than the person behind it. And if you’re not careful, it starts to feel more real to you as well.

This is where the desire for a digital detox creeps in. Not because social media is inherently evil, but because being perceived all the time is exhausting. There is no off switch. No private processing. No room to change your mind without it being documented.

Which raises another question. Are people who have turned themselves into brands entitled to privacy? And if so, how much?

We’re quick to say that public figures chose this life. That exposure is part of the deal. But where is the line between choosing visibility and forfeiting your right to be human? Sharing parts of your life does not mean consenting to all of it. Benefiting from attention does not mean deserving intrusion.

At the same time, a strange entitlement creeps in when your work relies on an audience. Followers feel owed access. Silence becomes suspicious. Boundaries are interpreted as arrogance. You are either overexposed or accused of disappearing.

There is no winning.

This is where I find myself stuck. Wanting to build something that requires visibility while longing for invisibility. Wanting my work to be seen without my life being consumed. Wanting connection, not performance. Honesty, without turning myself into a product.

It’s difficult to explain this without sounding ungrateful. Opportunities come through social media. Communities form there. Conversations happen. But watching the constant demand to show up, to comment, to share, to optimise, you start to see how the joy drains from creating. The work becomes content. The process becomes strategy.

And then there’s the irony. The more we’re told to build personal brands, the more identical everyone becomes. Same fonts. Same phrases. Same vulnerability, carefully curated. Authenticity becomes a trend rather than a truth.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we all stopped posting for a week. Not as a protest, but as an experiment. Would the world end? Would the work still matter? Would anyone notice? Or would we all breathe a little easier?

My father’s advice lingers because it comes from a place of survival. He understands that the world now runs on perception. That opportunities follow visibility. That talent alone is no longer enough if no one sees it. He isn’t wrong. But neither am I for wanting out.

The real issue isn’t social media itself. It’s the idea that our worth must constantly be proven. That silence equals irrelevance. That rest looks like failure. We’re taught to treat ourselves as projects, always in development, always improving, always marketable.

I don’t have a neat conclusion. This isn’t a manifesto against Instagram or a declaration of quitting the internet forever. It’s an observation from someone caught in the middle. Someone who wants to create without being consumed. Someone who wants a life that exists beyond the screen, even if the work occasionally lives on it.

Maybe the answer isn’t a full digital detox or a perfectly curated brand. Maybe it’s allowing ourselves to exist in contradiction. To show up when it feels right and step back when it doesn’t. To remember that behind every profile is a person, and behind every brand is someone just trying to make sense of it all.

And maybe, just maybe, we need to stop confusing visibility with value xoxo