Take Your Humanity Back From Engagement Metrics
- Branding warps your personality into a marketable product—kill it before it kills your creativity.
- Engagement metrics are hollow dopamine traps, not measures of real human connection.
- Raw, imperfect, and honest content builds genuine relationships; perfection is performative.
- Stop optimizing for virality; start posting like a flawed, evolving human being.
- You're not a startup—ditch the persona, disappear when you need, and touch grass.
If you're the type of influencer that wakes up to Wim Hof method meditation and mushroom tea while thinking in clickbait terms--then this is your intervention. With all due respect, reader: fuck that shit. You're a person not a product. Let's take this closeted humanity outside the box and draw some dicks on it. It's not on brand for you, I know. And that's the point.
I. Diagnosing Brand Brain: Are You Optimizing Your Personality?
See how I just wrote whatever I wanted without worrying if it's on brand? I just do that. None of us need permission to be ourselves on the internet. If you're constantly filtering your thoughts through what is allowed in your niche, then you're curating instead of living. You're sanitizing your humanity to fit the cookie-cutter shape of a product. But you're not a product; you're a person.
The Starving Artist Myth
Celebrating Creativity Without the Scarcity Complex The Starving Artist Myth0:00/566.0473471× * Romanticizing the starving-artist archetype, rooted in elitist patronage, perpetuates harmful stereotypes and inequities. * Glorifying suffering creates a toxic cycle of exploitation, gatekeeping, and elitism. * True creativity demands communal support and fair compensation, not heroic scarcity. I was
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If you're constantly filtering your thoughts through what is allowed in your niche, then you're curating instead of living.
This is a manifesto for folks who want to touch grass instead of bowing to our algorithmic overlords. For people that accidentally found themselves saying content instead of conversation. For folks that comb through every life experience wondering how they can monetize it. For folks who stopped living in the moment to put a screen in front of their face. For folks who've felt the toxic shock of measuring their self-worth in engagement metrics. News flash: engagement metrics are a superficial measure of human behavior that don't actually gauge authentic human connection. That's something you have to feel from the conversations you have with people.
II. What Branding Does to Creativity (Spoiler: It Kills It)
Let's get something straight. Creativity and branding are diametrically opposed. Branding seeks the shortest paths between two points; a straight line. From the point where you are now to a profitable business. The approach is intended to be efficient and lucrative.
But humanity just isn't like that.
Creativity takes risks that branding punishes as inconsistent. Creativity takes tangents due to personal interest, but branding calls that off-brand. Creativity thrives in the spirit of spontaneous play where branding demands performance.
In reality, you don't want consumers. You want fulfilling relationships with people you care about. In that way, regarding each other's crafts online is a form of mutual aid. All things that engagement metrics can't measure.
Creativity takes risks that branding punishes as inconsistent.
Rekindling the Flame
Restoring Love of Craft Through Self-Compassion Rekindling the Flame0:00/793.5477551× * As adults, we often abandon the spontaneous, joyful creativity of our childhood due to mounting responsibilities, external judgments, and the pressure to monetize or perfect our art. * Social expectations and fears of being “uncool” or “unproductive” push us
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As humans, we're not just selling products or services for the sake of it. We're trying to live. We're expressing ourselves. We're connecting. We're reaching across cyberspace to feel someone out there that bonds with us over mutual interests. Not just some one-way parasocial relationship like some kind of incel supermodel simp. We're not the folks that think the waitress is flirting with us because she's doing her job! And that authentic human connection you're craving to contextualize your ambitions isn't going to happen by conforming to the notion of a personal brand.
III. Steps to Re-Humanize Your Online Presence
So let's say, for the sake of conversation, that you're terminally brand brained. What's the cure? Here's some simple principles to reverse what the internet has done to your humanity.
Raw > perfection
Perfection is performative. Stop polishing your work to instigate virality. On principle, virality is tied to dopamine-addicting algorithms. Don't enable people's social media addictions. Rather feed their human need for connection. If you're real about what you love, you'll draw the right people. Your tribe doesn't need to get hooked on jedi mind tricks to follow you. After they discover you they'll keep coming back on their own as long as you're genuinely providing something society needs.
Perfection is performative.
Even if, and especially when, you're just sharing a process instead of a complete work. Everyone else on the internet is trying to solve their skill issues too. And some raw unfinished work behind the scenes could help others find their own voice. Which immediately makes you more important in their feeds than the rest of the algo-perfected slop.
Find Your Voice Like a Thief
How Stealing the Swag of Artists That Came Before You Builds on Art History Find Your Voice Like a Thief0:00/533.551021× * All great artists, from Da Vinci to Michelangelo, built on the ideas of those who came before them, transforming rather than merely imitating. * Leonardo da Vinci’s
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If it feels a bit cringe, share it. The human experience is full of cringe. We all eat, shit, and takes our clothes off to shower. We all know what unflattering raw human moments in our lives look like. We all know what it's like to feel like a work in progress, or anything short of a Super Bowl advertisement. There's a lot of folks who need to see that. Especially the women and children that we're infecting with self-esteem issues through our curated cyber presence.
Speaking of not being perfect; have you ever tried publicly contradicting yourself? It's a great show of humility. Everyone knows what it's like to change your mind after gaining new experiences or information. That's a part of growth. But few people have the courage to publicly admit they were wrong. It takes a level of humility that comes with courage to bare your soul before the masses with an admission of guilt.
I was wrong.
Sisyphus in the Studio: Finding Joy in the Eternal Struggle of Creation
Why pushing your creative boulder up the hill is the point (not the problem). * Sisyphus’ eternal and meaningless boulder rolling parallels the unending frustration artists experience with creative blocks. * There’s an absurd joy that comes with the steady process of failures that pave an artists road to their masterpieces.
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In the information age we're pummeled with new ideas and events faster than competitors scarf hotdogs at the neighborhood competitive eating event. And no one wants to look like they've fallen behind, or has bad judgement when the entire planet's knowledge and information is in our pockets. But if you're not changing your mind then you're not evolving. And that's part of the human condition. We're experience life one moment at a time. And cursed by that spacetime, we simply can't have instantaneous knowledge of the universe: sue me. I'm not perfect. Acknowledging that fact might help people identify with you by bonding over the human experience: warts and all.
Since we're discussing basics of humanity here's another tip: post without a sales funnel. Not everything needs to have a call to action. Not everything you post on the internet has to be with the intention of getting the reader to do something. Sometimes it's okay just to share things because they should be shared. Whether because it's just true, or it helps someone, or just because someone needs to hear it.
Oh, and don't forget to go dark. There's nothing wrong with disappearing for long periods of time with no explanation. You're a person, not a product. Brands can't risk a sudden absence for fear of losing sales traffic. But you're a human, with needs. And some of those needs include getting the fuck away from the internet to live your life and touch grass once in a while. Your tribe will understand. Anyone who's constantly on the internet without doing anything in real life isn't someone a lot of people will respect anyway. People respects folks with boundaries and self-respect. You don't have to explain to real friends and family why you disappeared for weeks or months on end. And you definitely don't owe that to your fans on social media.
But if you're not changing your mind then you're not evolving.
IV. Final Thought: Your Identity Is Not a Startup
In conclusion: fuck engagement metrics. You're a human being not a value proposition. Unlike products and services, you don't need to start by proving your worth to anyone. People will resonate with you just for being yourself. This kind of feels like the talk you give to a young man on his first date, but it's true. You don't need to get people hooked on a sanitized, processed, and curated brand version of yourself that's exhausting to maintain. That kind of performatively perfect content tastes like high fructose corn syrup. How is your brand going to pivot after you've decided you're tired of the ego avatar you've built for your fans?
You're a human being not a value proposition.
By making your digital footprint about you, instead of some branded sluttery, you're doing something actually helpful for society. Let yourself be seen for the person that you are. Share your authentic humanity. Because in a digital economy algorithmically fixed to exploit human psychology the most subversive thing you can do is retain your humanity.
