My conversation this week with Leslie Castro-Woodhouse has thrown me back into questions about identity and purpose that I’ve been grappling with ever since I left academe. Most of us who pursue academic careers are driven by a powerful “why.” The examined life. An abiding service ethic. Deep love for a particular discipline.
The asymmetry of power between employer and employee makes it hard to be perfectly aligned, and capitalism almost always gets in the way. Part of the problem too are leadership models that seek to manage people rather than empower them to help achieve common goals.
I myself have a tentative essay brewing, along the lines of "what am I doing here?". For what it's worth, I think it's important to stay as true to one's own values as possible, to treat oneself with consideration, and to be honourable towards others. Sorry if that sounds trite.
I’m so glad our conversation has resonated with other scholars out there, Josh! I reject hustle culture, and refuse to play that game. And I’m just Gen X enough to find “personal branding” icky, as well. But there are several entrepreneurial thinkers carving out space for “slow” business practice, like Mark Silver (“Heart of Business”), Kerstin Martin (Calm Business, https://mycalmbusiness.com/) and -- here on Substack! -- Emma Gannon, author of The Success Myth. I think “moving slow and not breaking things” is what will save us in the end. 🙏🏼
So everything here, every comment, is way above my pay grade. But hey, I'm going to wade in and say what I can about academe, and leaving it all behind.
First of all, I'm not very academic. Anything I've learned about life has pretty well been self-taught in the school of hard knocks. I worked in a sawmill my entire life. I started there when I was 19. The only reason I didn't start at 18 was that my parents gave me a year off to be a writer. They asked me what I was going to do when I go out of school (1975-76), and I said I wanted to write. I had all those dreams of riches and fame. The one thing I learned was that economics are important, but not everything. I had a good job, and made a lot of money. There were times I was making more money than most academics, bringing in 80-90,000 a year, with a lot of overtime. And then there would be a strike and you'd lose everything you had, and have to start over again. I went through that about 7 times. No biggie, that's life.
Through it all, I've always written. It was my saving grace, so to say. I never sent anything out, thinking I was never good enough. When I did finally submit my stories, I never made any money at it. I never questioned my role in life. The one thing I had to do was provide for my family. That was it. Anything that I wanted, anything that I needed, was put on hold for the needs, and wants, and desires of the kids we had. They were all that mattered. And it should be all that matters. Your life as a parent should be about the kids.
I came here under strange circumstances; I left work under traumatic circumstance that resulted in the death of one of my best friends under the wheels of the machine I was driving. I was, to put it bluntly, a little "fucked up". I look at life differently now. Life goes on, I always say, until it doesn't. And you never know when that will be. Okay, we all get that. My way through it all was Milton: "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a Hell of Heaven, or a Heaven of Hell..." or something like that. When I started my'Stack, it was to reinvent myself. All of what happened before, all of what I'd done and been through, all of the drugs, the drinking, the screwing around, meant nothing. They were stepping stones to where I am today.
I don't write essays. I suppose I could if I put my mind to it; I write fiction. I write stories that appeal to me. I have a lifetime of experience just the same as everyone else, and I put it to good use. I ask myself one question: What if? That's it. That one question has led me to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya; the independence of Congo. The one thing I learned about working and living, is that living is far more important than working; family is the only thing that matters; and everything that you want to make of yourself after all of that is over, is possible. People ask me what I want to do now that I'm retired. Okay, I want to write. I want to see if I can succeed at this, not for my wife, or my family, but for me. I am doing this to show myself that I belong here.
I try not to overthink life. I take things one day at a time. I don't make plans for the future because "here is a name writ in water..." Don't be too hard on yourself because you can't figure it out right now. You're not supposed to. Life is a mystery. It's meant to be enjoyed. I put my stories out, and look to the next one. I look for things that excite me, things that challenge me as a writer. I sometimes succeed, and I sometimes fail, but my readers see things differently. What I see as a failure, they don't. And that, my friend, is the answer. You can only do as you do, and what you do. Nobody is going to know the inner turmoil we all face.
Reading your interview with Leslie Castro-Woodhouse, and this follow up post, prompted me to upgrade my subscription to paid. Thank you for creating such a wonderful resource and community!
I left the Harvard PhD program in history in 1996 for reasons similar to what you and others have discussed. I hope it isn't too depressing to say so, but I'm still looking for a workplace that feeds the "why," after all this time. But I haven't given up! I worked in administrative support at a university for a while as I sporadically pursued freelance writing on the side. Then I became an environmental attorney. Then I suffered a career crisis and burnout and left the legal profession. Now I'm in my third year of trying to figure out what comes next.
I'm deeply drawn to stories like yours and Leslie's, of former academics trying to carve out a niche as individual practitioners, applying academic expertise to build problem-solving relationships with individual clients who need and hope for one-on-one attention, using emerging electro-digital-network-y tools like Substack. Having experimented with Substack just a bit, the potential for individual connection and community building is clear.
Anyway, reading this post and your interview with Leslie have helped encourage me to think more deeply about what my specific expertise is, who could benefit from that, and how to reach them. In my case, I have an interest in topics that are hot button political and cultural issues (e.g. ideological polarization and its costs in personal and professional life), which are causing controversy and strife not only in academia but in workplaces and public discourse more generally. I think I have some personal emotional baggage around those topics, and I'm currently working on those, among other things, with an excellent career coach and wise human being.
I wish I had answers to the issues around idealism that you raise in this post. In the decades since I left Harvard, my experience taught me that even in the best organizational setting, we have to set aside our personal emotional needs and values to at least some extent, for the sake of just getting s*it done and making the organizational machine hum along. I can see where the same kind of conflicts between personal values versus the needs of the work (often totalizing needs) could arise in working-for-yourself settings. I fear that there may be a deep contradiction between the hyper-individualist celebration of personal autonomy and actualization in US professional culture and the very real, necessary demands of a twenty first century economy based on economies of scale and constantly changing technology. I worry that in any conflict between the personal and the economic, the economic has to come first.
I have a vague fantasy that tools like Substack may allow the formation of something like intentional economic communities able to live something close to their preferred lives, at a slower and more deliberate pace, more connected to transcendent, irreducible personal values shared with others, in an alternative space connected to but distinct from the larger, hyper-fast, technology intensive economy. But it is just a fantasy. If I were a graduate advisor reading what I just wrote, I would say: uh, yeah, that needs some fleshing out. Glittering generalities, etc.
Anyway, please pardon the long comment. Thank you so much for creating this space.
So much wisdom and insight to gain from all these wonderful responses. Thank you Joshua for starting and facilitating this conversation. I wish I had more to offer here than just a public acknowledgement of my gratitude, but the fact is I’m just now working through all of these questions. When I went back to school at 23, I spent the next decade or so building an academic identity even though I realized early on in graduate school I didn’t want to do research or become a university professor, but there’s no way I could let myself quit and leave the program. I’d feel too bad about myself, so I kept going and found comfort in my “why” of helping students and pursued my goal of getting tenure at a community college (where I went). Then, of course, I found myself in the world of adjuncting, and that was no good either. And while I’m happy with my transition to full-time academic staff and part-time teaching, I left this whole process not having a clue about who I am as a writer and thinker outside of the university. I still cling to my professional identity as a teacher, to my degree for some type of validation. And while Substack has proven to be a wonderful and supportive place to figure all this out, I still find myself feeling self-conscious about writing essays (or comments) that my colleagues would approve of. In other words, I still feel like I carry the brand of the university with me even in my personal pursuits (like this). Anyway, apologies for the ramble. All this just to say I’m invested in these questions and looking forward to figuring them out with you and your community. Thanks!
“I have no trouble leaning into the grindstone. I’m actually too good at doing that. I just want to know that I’m doing it voluntarily, sharpening tools that I know I’ll use to good purpose, not being held there...”
Have you ever read Brooke Erin Duffy's Not Getting Paid to Do What You Love? Most of the book is about the aspirational labor of creative and cultural workers, i.e., the viability labor creatives do for free in the hopes that we'll one day be paid at a full-time rate. In her conclusion, she says that she thinks the modern academy functions in the same way. There, she quotes Ros GiIll--also a good source on this--"Consider academic labour as a species of cultural work, beset by many of the same challenges and experiences that characterize work in the cultural and creative industries." I have Duffy's conclusion on my desktop right now, and I can send it to you if you email me. I'm also talking about similar issues in my post coming out on Tuesday.
Your questions prompted me to think about means and ends. Not in the usual moral way, but in a practical sense. And to focus on means and where there is clarity and efficiency.
It's not just governments and academic institutions, but any organization that can lose their ability to have tolerably efficient and productive means.
Let's stipulate that the end goal is consistent with your values. And that there is nothing immoral about your means. Then I think means should be evaluated as to whether they are efficient.
I'm not sure what personal branding is, but if it's reputation and if you seek a wider reputation consistent with what you believe your abilities to be, then I don't see anything amiss.
Oof. I relate to this more than I want to. The profession I separated from several times before the final “divorce” I’m contemplating now was nursing. My ideals were not only unrealistic but rooted in a savior complex I am still trying to unravel. What happens to people when we make them solely responsible for the health (education, government, etc) of others?
The responsibility can be crippling. And those to whom we feel responsible disempowered and dehumanized.
I can also relate to the call toward the current cult of branding. As a primarily non-fiction writer, what I’m “selling” is essentially myself and when that doesn’t sell, what does it say about my value and worthiness? How can I comfortably try to earn an income away from the institutions that don’t align with my values without joining the ranks of the performative?
I certainly don’t have the answers but I’m glad others are asking the questions.
I'm thinking -- head swirling -- about things like "...a continued partnership will do us real harm" (Dolezal, above) and the concept of hustle, grind, branding, identity, purpose. On my very best days, which are few and have a lot of "far" between, I think, "Well, nothing mysterious here about my 'why.' There is no purpose/why. Just don't be an asshole, laugh at what's funny, and love my people. Death will come, no worries."
The rest of the time, I think about things like the implications of trading my time for money; the realities of introversion; philosopher Byung-Chul Han's work on "burnout," accomplishment society, and idleness; current-day Marxist and Weberian thinking regarding the transformation of 'work' into a set of imperatives, where our souls and 'purposes' are colonized.
Is 'everything' in the middle-class United States just marketing? Has 'the Internet' bullied us, insisting that we are truly just objects (to others and to ourselves), that we need to persist in representing ourselves as objects, constructions, identities, items to be branded with "merch"?
"A continued partnership will do us real harm," Josh, yes. In this case, the partnership is...me + hustle, me + grind, me + 'why,' me + 'purpose,' and me + capitalism, generally.
I haven't figured all this out--especially about aligning one's why with an employer, which I think is mostly about finding a workable compromise--that is a compromise that doesn't compromise one's values. I have much to say about the academic's transition into office environments, but that is not what motivated me to want to comment.
Instead, it's the personal branding thing you were talking about as a self-employed person/entrepreneur. When I was freelancing, I found it important to be myself and not try to be everything to everyone. For me, the term "personal branding" borrows so much from advertising and positioning that I find it offputting from the outset. It's also a potentially damaging way for me to look at it because I already struggle with authenticity. Instead, over time I learned to speak well about what I have to offer (as an editor) and what makes me different from someone else. This comes from within, but obviously is put in perspective and context with the world. (This not unlike some of the work of teaching.) But "personal branding" makes it sound like it's an exterior process. Our culture is heavily bent toward these kinds of exterior processes (and is in fact a powerful way that our consumer capitalism works). Resist those tendencies and think about what excites you and tell people you want to do that. Excitement and enjoyment are catching. Be you.
You can always rebrand if the first one doesn't work out. Like Coke Classic. Joshua Classic? I don't mind branding. The only time it's tough as a writer is if you are pigeonholed by it. I write humor.... but so much more... but mostly humor. I guess "mostly" is the key.
One of the things I admire about you, Josh, is your characteristic questioning of yourself and your situation. Here's a question: what's the difference between branding and expressing who you are?
I've been here almost a year and I want to stay so am starting to think about the why's and wherefores, and how I want to stay. I know I don't want to limit myself and I know I don't want to 'do' anything that isn't absolutely me - that includes unnecessarily 'branding'. Does 'integrity' work as branding do you think?
"Many colleagues on LinkedIn tell me that personal branding and authenticity go together, that I’m falsely dichotomizing the two." I agree that I don't think I agree with that sentiment. Not with social media, anyway. Too many of us know people who post a synthetic version of themselves on Instagram or some other site.
Professionally, I guess I agree with Jason: but then it's not personal branding, is it? It's just branding. One doesn't need to know if a plumber is a superstar individual when the reason he's there is to fix a pipe. But I guess when the product is ourselves, blending the two is inevitable. But is a refined chocolate bar the same as the original cacao?
As we embrace homo deus, we increasingly cannot appear unsavory and "human." At least not the definition of human that conveys a flawed being. Many will benefit from this: but just as many, if not more, will be driven mad.
The asymmetry of power between employer and employee makes it hard to be perfectly aligned, and capitalism almost always gets in the way. Part of the problem too are leadership models that seek to manage people rather than empower them to help achieve common goals.
I myself have a tentative essay brewing, along the lines of "what am I doing here?". For what it's worth, I think it's important to stay as true to one's own values as possible, to treat oneself with consideration, and to be honourable towards others. Sorry if that sounds trite.
I’m so glad our conversation has resonated with other scholars out there, Josh! I reject hustle culture, and refuse to play that game. And I’m just Gen X enough to find “personal branding” icky, as well. But there are several entrepreneurial thinkers carving out space for “slow” business practice, like Mark Silver (“Heart of Business”), Kerstin Martin (Calm Business, https://mycalmbusiness.com/) and -- here on Substack! -- Emma Gannon, author of The Success Myth. I think “moving slow and not breaking things” is what will save us in the end. 🙏🏼
So everything here, every comment, is way above my pay grade. But hey, I'm going to wade in and say what I can about academe, and leaving it all behind.
First of all, I'm not very academic. Anything I've learned about life has pretty well been self-taught in the school of hard knocks. I worked in a sawmill my entire life. I started there when I was 19. The only reason I didn't start at 18 was that my parents gave me a year off to be a writer. They asked me what I was going to do when I go out of school (1975-76), and I said I wanted to write. I had all those dreams of riches and fame. The one thing I learned was that economics are important, but not everything. I had a good job, and made a lot of money. There were times I was making more money than most academics, bringing in 80-90,000 a year, with a lot of overtime. And then there would be a strike and you'd lose everything you had, and have to start over again. I went through that about 7 times. No biggie, that's life.
Through it all, I've always written. It was my saving grace, so to say. I never sent anything out, thinking I was never good enough. When I did finally submit my stories, I never made any money at it. I never questioned my role in life. The one thing I had to do was provide for my family. That was it. Anything that I wanted, anything that I needed, was put on hold for the needs, and wants, and desires of the kids we had. They were all that mattered. And it should be all that matters. Your life as a parent should be about the kids.
I came here under strange circumstances; I left work under traumatic circumstance that resulted in the death of one of my best friends under the wheels of the machine I was driving. I was, to put it bluntly, a little "fucked up". I look at life differently now. Life goes on, I always say, until it doesn't. And you never know when that will be. Okay, we all get that. My way through it all was Milton: "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a Hell of Heaven, or a Heaven of Hell..." or something like that. When I started my'Stack, it was to reinvent myself. All of what happened before, all of what I'd done and been through, all of the drugs, the drinking, the screwing around, meant nothing. They were stepping stones to where I am today.
I don't write essays. I suppose I could if I put my mind to it; I write fiction. I write stories that appeal to me. I have a lifetime of experience just the same as everyone else, and I put it to good use. I ask myself one question: What if? That's it. That one question has led me to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya; the independence of Congo. The one thing I learned about working and living, is that living is far more important than working; family is the only thing that matters; and everything that you want to make of yourself after all of that is over, is possible. People ask me what I want to do now that I'm retired. Okay, I want to write. I want to see if I can succeed at this, not for my wife, or my family, but for me. I am doing this to show myself that I belong here.
I try not to overthink life. I take things one day at a time. I don't make plans for the future because "here is a name writ in water..." Don't be too hard on yourself because you can't figure it out right now. You're not supposed to. Life is a mystery. It's meant to be enjoyed. I put my stories out, and look to the next one. I look for things that excite me, things that challenge me as a writer. I sometimes succeed, and I sometimes fail, but my readers see things differently. What I see as a failure, they don't. And that, my friend, is the answer. You can only do as you do, and what you do. Nobody is going to know the inner turmoil we all face.
Reading your interview with Leslie Castro-Woodhouse, and this follow up post, prompted me to upgrade my subscription to paid. Thank you for creating such a wonderful resource and community!
I left the Harvard PhD program in history in 1996 for reasons similar to what you and others have discussed. I hope it isn't too depressing to say so, but I'm still looking for a workplace that feeds the "why," after all this time. But I haven't given up! I worked in administrative support at a university for a while as I sporadically pursued freelance writing on the side. Then I became an environmental attorney. Then I suffered a career crisis and burnout and left the legal profession. Now I'm in my third year of trying to figure out what comes next.
I'm deeply drawn to stories like yours and Leslie's, of former academics trying to carve out a niche as individual practitioners, applying academic expertise to build problem-solving relationships with individual clients who need and hope for one-on-one attention, using emerging electro-digital-network-y tools like Substack. Having experimented with Substack just a bit, the potential for individual connection and community building is clear.
Anyway, reading this post and your interview with Leslie have helped encourage me to think more deeply about what my specific expertise is, who could benefit from that, and how to reach them. In my case, I have an interest in topics that are hot button political and cultural issues (e.g. ideological polarization and its costs in personal and professional life), which are causing controversy and strife not only in academia but in workplaces and public discourse more generally. I think I have some personal emotional baggage around those topics, and I'm currently working on those, among other things, with an excellent career coach and wise human being.
I wish I had answers to the issues around idealism that you raise in this post. In the decades since I left Harvard, my experience taught me that even in the best organizational setting, we have to set aside our personal emotional needs and values to at least some extent, for the sake of just getting s*it done and making the organizational machine hum along. I can see where the same kind of conflicts between personal values versus the needs of the work (often totalizing needs) could arise in working-for-yourself settings. I fear that there may be a deep contradiction between the hyper-individualist celebration of personal autonomy and actualization in US professional culture and the very real, necessary demands of a twenty first century economy based on economies of scale and constantly changing technology. I worry that in any conflict between the personal and the economic, the economic has to come first.
I have a vague fantasy that tools like Substack may allow the formation of something like intentional economic communities able to live something close to their preferred lives, at a slower and more deliberate pace, more connected to transcendent, irreducible personal values shared with others, in an alternative space connected to but distinct from the larger, hyper-fast, technology intensive economy. But it is just a fantasy. If I were a graduate advisor reading what I just wrote, I would say: uh, yeah, that needs some fleshing out. Glittering generalities, etc.
Anyway, please pardon the long comment. Thank you so much for creating this space.
So much wisdom and insight to gain from all these wonderful responses. Thank you Joshua for starting and facilitating this conversation. I wish I had more to offer here than just a public acknowledgement of my gratitude, but the fact is I’m just now working through all of these questions. When I went back to school at 23, I spent the next decade or so building an academic identity even though I realized early on in graduate school I didn’t want to do research or become a university professor, but there’s no way I could let myself quit and leave the program. I’d feel too bad about myself, so I kept going and found comfort in my “why” of helping students and pursued my goal of getting tenure at a community college (where I went). Then, of course, I found myself in the world of adjuncting, and that was no good either. And while I’m happy with my transition to full-time academic staff and part-time teaching, I left this whole process not having a clue about who I am as a writer and thinker outside of the university. I still cling to my professional identity as a teacher, to my degree for some type of validation. And while Substack has proven to be a wonderful and supportive place to figure all this out, I still find myself feeling self-conscious about writing essays (or comments) that my colleagues would approve of. In other words, I still feel like I carry the brand of the university with me even in my personal pursuits (like this). Anyway, apologies for the ramble. All this just to say I’m invested in these questions and looking forward to figuring them out with you and your community. Thanks!
“I have no trouble leaning into the grindstone. I’m actually too good at doing that. I just want to know that I’m doing it voluntarily, sharpening tools that I know I’ll use to good purpose, not being held there...”
Yes. 💯
Have you ever read Brooke Erin Duffy's Not Getting Paid to Do What You Love? Most of the book is about the aspirational labor of creative and cultural workers, i.e., the viability labor creatives do for free in the hopes that we'll one day be paid at a full-time rate. In her conclusion, she says that she thinks the modern academy functions in the same way. There, she quotes Ros GiIll--also a good source on this--"Consider academic labour as a species of cultural work, beset by many of the same challenges and experiences that characterize work in the cultural and creative industries." I have Duffy's conclusion on my desktop right now, and I can send it to you if you email me. I'm also talking about similar issues in my post coming out on Tuesday.
Your questions prompted me to think about means and ends. Not in the usual moral way, but in a practical sense. And to focus on means and where there is clarity and efficiency.
It's not just governments and academic institutions, but any organization that can lose their ability to have tolerably efficient and productive means.
Let's stipulate that the end goal is consistent with your values. And that there is nothing immoral about your means. Then I think means should be evaluated as to whether they are efficient.
I'm not sure what personal branding is, but if it's reputation and if you seek a wider reputation consistent with what you believe your abilities to be, then I don't see anything amiss.
Oof. I relate to this more than I want to. The profession I separated from several times before the final “divorce” I’m contemplating now was nursing. My ideals were not only unrealistic but rooted in a savior complex I am still trying to unravel. What happens to people when we make them solely responsible for the health (education, government, etc) of others?
The responsibility can be crippling. And those to whom we feel responsible disempowered and dehumanized.
I can also relate to the call toward the current cult of branding. As a primarily non-fiction writer, what I’m “selling” is essentially myself and when that doesn’t sell, what does it say about my value and worthiness? How can I comfortably try to earn an income away from the institutions that don’t align with my values without joining the ranks of the performative?
I certainly don’t have the answers but I’m glad others are asking the questions.
I'm thinking -- head swirling -- about things like "...a continued partnership will do us real harm" (Dolezal, above) and the concept of hustle, grind, branding, identity, purpose. On my very best days, which are few and have a lot of "far" between, I think, "Well, nothing mysterious here about my 'why.' There is no purpose/why. Just don't be an asshole, laugh at what's funny, and love my people. Death will come, no worries."
The rest of the time, I think about things like the implications of trading my time for money; the realities of introversion; philosopher Byung-Chul Han's work on "burnout," accomplishment society, and idleness; current-day Marxist and Weberian thinking regarding the transformation of 'work' into a set of imperatives, where our souls and 'purposes' are colonized.
Is 'everything' in the middle-class United States just marketing? Has 'the Internet' bullied us, insisting that we are truly just objects (to others and to ourselves), that we need to persist in representing ourselves as objects, constructions, identities, items to be branded with "merch"?
"A continued partnership will do us real harm," Josh, yes. In this case, the partnership is...me + hustle, me + grind, me + 'why,' me + 'purpose,' and me + capitalism, generally.
I haven't figured all this out--especially about aligning one's why with an employer, which I think is mostly about finding a workable compromise--that is a compromise that doesn't compromise one's values. I have much to say about the academic's transition into office environments, but that is not what motivated me to want to comment.
Instead, it's the personal branding thing you were talking about as a self-employed person/entrepreneur. When I was freelancing, I found it important to be myself and not try to be everything to everyone. For me, the term "personal branding" borrows so much from advertising and positioning that I find it offputting from the outset. It's also a potentially damaging way for me to look at it because I already struggle with authenticity. Instead, over time I learned to speak well about what I have to offer (as an editor) and what makes me different from someone else. This comes from within, but obviously is put in perspective and context with the world. (This not unlike some of the work of teaching.) But "personal branding" makes it sound like it's an exterior process. Our culture is heavily bent toward these kinds of exterior processes (and is in fact a powerful way that our consumer capitalism works). Resist those tendencies and think about what excites you and tell people you want to do that. Excitement and enjoyment are catching. Be you.
You can always rebrand if the first one doesn't work out. Like Coke Classic. Joshua Classic? I don't mind branding. The only time it's tough as a writer is if you are pigeonholed by it. I write humor.... but so much more... but mostly humor. I guess "mostly" is the key.
One of the things I admire about you, Josh, is your characteristic questioning of yourself and your situation. Here's a question: what's the difference between branding and expressing who you are?
I've been here almost a year and I want to stay so am starting to think about the why's and wherefores, and how I want to stay. I know I don't want to limit myself and I know I don't want to 'do' anything that isn't absolutely me - that includes unnecessarily 'branding'. Does 'integrity' work as branding do you think?
"Many colleagues on LinkedIn tell me that personal branding and authenticity go together, that I’m falsely dichotomizing the two." I agree that I don't think I agree with that sentiment. Not with social media, anyway. Too many of us know people who post a synthetic version of themselves on Instagram or some other site.
Professionally, I guess I agree with Jason: but then it's not personal branding, is it? It's just branding. One doesn't need to know if a plumber is a superstar individual when the reason he's there is to fix a pipe. But I guess when the product is ourselves, blending the two is inevitable. But is a refined chocolate bar the same as the original cacao?
As we embrace homo deus, we increasingly cannot appear unsavory and "human." At least not the definition of human that conveys a flawed being. Many will benefit from this: but just as many, if not more, will be driven mad.