Brand Before Self

On the strange performance of being a person in your twenties right now.

There’s a specific kind of sentence that’s everywhere now, and once you notice it you can’t stop noticing it.

It usually starts with a phrase like “late-stage capitalism,” or “the dopaminergic loop of,” or “as someone who values radical honesty.” It’s said at parties. It’s posted on Tuesdays. It’s the kind of sentence that’s technically saying something but is really doing something else. It’s wearing a uniform. It’s telling you which kind of thoughtful person the speaker is before they’ve actually said anything thoughtful.

The people saying these sentences aren’t stupid. A lot of them are genuinely sharp. That’s part of what makes it so strange. The jargon isn’t filling a gap in intelligence. It’s filling a gap in something else.

Figuring out what that something else is has been sitting in the back of my head for a while, and this is an attempt to work it out in public. Fair warning: this is me implicating myself along with everyone else. Nobody gets out clean here.

The Thing You Can’t Quite Name

Take a walk through any slightly-online corner of life right now. Coffee shops in cities where rent costs too much. Group chats of people who went to decent colleges. LinkedIn. Substack comment sections. The kind of party where everyone is 27 and nobody has figured out how to leave early.

You’ll notice something. A tone. A posture. People performing a very specific version of depth.

Someone mentions they’re reading a book, and it’s never just a book. It’s a “framework for thinking about” something. Someone describes their weekend, and it’s filtered through a vocabulary that makes it sound like a case study. Someone is going through a hard time, and they have the therapy language for it already pre-loaded, polished, ready to deploy. Nothing is ever just experienced. Everything gets narrated in the register of someone who has already processed it, written the essay, and monetized the newsletter.

The vocabulary changes depending on the tribe. Therapy-speak. Rationalist jargon. Trad aesthetic. Academic left. Effective altruism. Stoicism bro. Post-rationalist. Whatever. The flavors differ but the shape of the thing is the same. You pick a worldview off the shelf, you learn its vocabulary, and you wear it. And the wearing is doing most of the work.

Something is off. The question is what.

The Obvious Answers, and Why They’re Not Enough

The easy explanations all have a piece of the truth but none of them is the whole thing.

“Attention spans are shorter.” Sure. But short attention spans don’t fully explain why people reach for jargon. You can be distracted without being performative. Plenty of people have been distracted throughout history without developing an entire vocabulary to signal their interiority to strangers.

“Social media did this.” Closer, but still too vague. Social media is a delivery system, not an explanation. You still have to explain why the delivery system made this specific pathology flourish instead of some other one.

“Late capitalism.” This is almost always a phrase that means “I don’t want to think harder about this.” It’s a placeholder that sounds like an answer.

The better explanation, the one that actually does some work, is about infrastructure. Not the internet as culture, but the internet as a physical set of incentives that shapes what a person has to become to function inside it.

Legibility Is the Whole Game

Here’s the move. The platforms that mediate modern life reward legibility. Legibility at scale. And to be legible at scale, you have to be compressible.

You have to be a type.

A genuinely complex person doesn’t post well. A person in the middle of figuring something out, holding two contradictory ideas, unsure of their own position, doesn’t get retweeted. What gets rewarded is the legible shape. The take. The aesthetic. The clean identity that photographs well from any angle. You don’t have to be a real person. You have to be a recognizable one.

Tribalism is just what happens when that compression calcifies. Once enough people compress into the same shape, the shape becomes a tribe. The jargon is the uniform of the tribe. And the uniform is load-bearing in a way that’s easy to miss: it tells other people which kind of extraordinary you are, which saves everyone the trouble of actually meeting you. Two people in matching uniforms don’t have to do the hard work of actually figuring each other out. The uniform does it for them.

This is the thing that makes it feel strange in a way the old version didn’t. Every generation has had its posers. The 1920s had them. The 60s had them. The 90s had them wearing flannel and pretending not to care about anything. What’s new isn’t the impulse. It’s that the infrastructure now requires it. Being a recognizable type used to be optional. Now it’s the price of admission.

The Will to Appear

There’s a Nietzsche thread worth pulling on here, even though pulling on Nietzsche threads is itself sort of the problem this essay is about. Stay with me.

Nietzsche’s will to power wasn’t about social dominance. It wasn’t about being seen as exceptional. It was about the drive to overcome yourself. To shape yourself into something harder, clearer, truer. It was an inner project. Most of the work was invisible because most of the work was being done to yourself, by yourself, for reasons only you could fully understand.

What’s happening now is a kind of degraded cousin of that. A will to appear powerful, interesting, singular. The inner project has been swapped out for the outer one. The hard, slow, mostly-invisible work of becoming someone has been replaced by the faster, louder, more legible work of seeming like someone.

Nietzsche would have had a field day with this. He was brutal about exactly this kind of thing. He called it the herd in costume. The form of the exceptional person without the substance. It wasn’t that he hated ordinary people. It’s that he hated ordinary people pretending to be extraordinary, because the pretending made becoming actually extraordinary harder, not easier. The costume prevented the transformation.

The Apprentice Phase Is Gone

Here’s a smaller piece that connects to something bigger.

For most of history, being young meant being a beginner. You were junior. You were learning. You were allowed to be confused, to not have takes, to be in the middle of becoming someone. The world had scaffolding for that. You were an apprentice. You were in school. You were the new guy. Nobody expected you to arrive with a fully formed worldview because nobody had one at your age.

That phase has basically been erased.

The 22-year-old and the 55-year-old are now posting into the same feed, formatted the same way, held to the same standard of performance. A first-year analyst has to sound like a seasoned operator. A college junior has to have an intellectual brand. A 26-year-old has to have “figured out what they’re about.” There’s no room to just be building. The infrastructure doesn’t have a mode for that.

So people skip the building and go straight to performing the finished product. They take the shortcut. They adopt the vocabulary of people who have done the work and hope nobody notices they haven’t. Most of the time, nobody does. Because most of the people they’re performing for are doing the same thing.

This is how you end up with a whole generation that sounds arrived without actually going anywhere.

The Cost

What gets lost in all this is the thing that can’t be photographed. Interiority. The stuff that happens inside a person when they’re not performing. The half-formed thought. The thing you believe on Tuesday but don’t believe by Friday. The slow, embarrassing, non-legible process of actually changing your mind.

Interiority requires a kind of privacy that’s hard to protect now. A thought you’d share is different from a thought you wouldn’t, and when every thought is potentially the first kind, the second kind atrophies. People stop having them. Or stop noticing they’re having them. The inner life quietly shrinks to match the size of what fits on the platform.

Sincerity becomes a liability. To say something plainly, without the armor of jargon or aesthetic, is to be exposed. You can’t take cover behind a tribe. You can’t signal which kind of smart you are. You’re just a person making a claim, and the claim can be wrong, and you can be judged for it. The jargon protects you from that. It lets you say something without really saying it. The irony is that the protection is exactly what prevents the thing most people actually want, which is to make contact with another person and be understood.

Real depth is quiet. Real depth is slow. Real depth usually doesn’t photograph well. It doesn’t have a brand. It can’t be compressed without losing most of what makes it depth in the first place. And a culture that rewards compression will, over time, produce fewer and fewer people capable of it, because the people who could have become deep are spending all their energy performing the signs of depth instead.

What Revolt Might Look Like

Camus had this idea at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus that the only honest response to absurdity was revolt. Not escape. Not denial. Revolt. You look at the thing clearly, you refuse to lie about it, and you keep going anyway.

There’s a version of that available here, and it’s quieter than it sounds.

It looks like letting a thought stay private for a while before deciding whether to share it. It looks like being willing to be unremarkable. It looks like using plain language when you could use jargon, and tolerating the feeling of being exposed that comes with it. It looks like choosing to build something slowly instead of performing the finished version of it. It looks like being a beginner, out loud, in a culture that treats being a beginner like a failure of branding.

None of this is heroic. None of it is posable. That’s the point. The revolt is in the refusal to turn yourself into a type. The revolt is in insisting on being a person even when the infrastructure is designed to reward you for being a shape.

The hard part is that you’ll be less legible. Fewer people will know what to do with you. You won’t fit cleanly into any tribe. You’ll be harder to photograph.

That might just have to be okay.

One More Thing

A thought to sit with: the hunger underneath all this performance is real. People want to matter. People want to be seen as substantial. People want to feel like their life has weight to it. Those are not stupid wants. They’re among the oldest wants there are.

The problem isn’t the hunger. The problem is that the culture around us has gotten extraordinarily good at simulating the satisfaction of that hunger without ever actually feeding it. The simulation is loud and cheap and always available. The real thing is quiet and slow and requires a lot from you. It’s not a fair fight.

But the real thing is still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just harder to find under all the noise.

Most of finding it is learning to tolerate being quiet for long enough to hear yourself think.