The Brandification of America

Losing our humanity to become a brand.

It is 4 am and I hear a scratching sound inside my brain.

Scratch. I’m sleeping and I know it. I’m very happily sleeping. Our window is open, and the room is cold. But everything beneath the down blanket is warm. But there is a scratching noise. I wake up. It’s still pitch dark. And there are words in my head.

“We are being inundated with branding.”

This is often the way it goes for me, with regards to things I want to write about, be it a short essay for Substack, an ad for Black Coffee, or a novel. I wake up with an idea, and know that if I don’t get my ass out of bed to write it, it will likely be gone.

But with my head beneath a pillow, and my body stretched long under my cozy blanket in a frozen room, with my warm bride laying quietly snugged next to me, getting out of bed doesn’t sound worth it. I repeat the words in my head hoping to regain them in the morning at a more sane hour for writing. Something about brandifcation. If I get up, I could write the whole thing. But dang it, I’m so comfortable, and tired.

I’ll fall back asleep and hope it’s still there in the morning. And if not, it doesn’t feel like the end of the world. I have a lot of ideas, some I decide to pursue, others fade into the ether. One more in the ether won’t matter.

But then the scratching is back. It’s a light and distant sound, like something on glass. Now I’m awake enough to know that it’s not in my head. It’s Acre. He’s at the front door. He wants out.

He got sick the night before, and even if he isn’t now, which he might be, I hate the idea of making a dog stay in when he’d like to go out, though most often when this happens it’s because there is a deer, bear, or raccoon in the yard that he’d like to have words with. But I pull myself out of bed, bare feet to the cold floor, go downstairs, and let him out, and quickly grab my journal off the table and scribble this sentence, so I have it to think about in the morning.
We are being inundated with branding.

I’m not willing to stay up for this, I’m too tired and the bed is too inviting, but I’ll get to it in the morning.

It’s morning now. I’ve got coffee. My brain is working now even if interrupted a few times during sleep, first to let Acre out, then later to let him back in. As I suspected, he gave away his true motives when after being let he out set off around the middle of the night yard with a bark and a chase into the darkness. Probably a raccoon. He hates those devils.

Branding. Why was my brain thinking about it?

Why wouldn’t it be? I spend half my days thinking about branding. I own a coffee company. We compete not only with thousands, yes thousands of other coffee brands scattered around the country, but also with some of the largest multinational corporations around the globe. From Folgers, to Nescafe, Green Mountain, Starbucks, Pete’s Intelligensia, Stumptown, and Dunkin’, branding, along with quality of product, is all we can hope will set us apart from the rest of the players in this massive arena in which the big players don’t really even know many of us small players are even playing. They go about knocking each other in a battle to be Goliath, while thousands of us smaller players pretend we are David, slinging tiny pebbles in our slingshots, hoping someone in the audience will notice we are here. Branding is how we get noticed.

Branding in this sense makes sense to me. Millions of consumer products use branding to gain attention and attraction. It is a critical part of running a business (I’m working on a longer piece in the next few weeks on why I consider starting and/or supporting small businesses to be one of the most important things we can do in this modern world; more to come on that.) But in recent years we are seeing a potentially dangerous, or at minimum just sad component of branding…

“You are your brand.”

We are now trying to sell ourselves. And with tragic irony, we are doing so all while being played by the largest of the global technology…

We are the product.

No branding required. They are selling us ourselves.

It’s the internet age. I’m not fully on board or happy about it, yet I’m fully plugged in. Reluctantly, but still very much at play in the arena. I try to make it work for me and not the other way around, though I still feel like a chump from time to time when I dwell on the fact that in actuality, I am the product being sold. I hate that. I also hate the level of censorship this whole complex has become, with it’s emphasis less on available information and more on what we are supposed to think about what limited information it provides us. But we work with what we have, so onward we go, sharing ideas, thoughts, and work. But more and more what I come across on these mediums is low level marketing, and not much more. Everyone has gone from sharing their work to just “branding,” and in doing so, many are forgetting that they are not some anonymous package to be sold on a grocery story, vying for attention.

What is it people are doing? It is like everyone is trying to package themselves up for sale and in doing so, greatly minimizes their own potential, their own inherent value. Humans, above all products bought and sold in the commodity market, should not be sold so short as to think they need a branding kit. Trying to make the random passerby pause to look, like, and follow. Everyone hoping to get the strangers to stop and take hold, grab off the shelf, put in the cart, and carry on. Another bag sitting right behind.

How many people can we possibly consume? And what’s the point?

It all has to do with functional permanence, with performative definition, with the idea that even we, like bagged grocery products, have a concrete resoluteness that needs to be told and shown to the world at large, on stage, displayed, defined, and portrayed. The internet mind requires a statement. And frequently! (Link in bio.)

And why in the wold would anyone actually care about what lives on and goes on within the internet?… it’s because in the last 15 years we have reduced so many of our social interactions to nothing more than a digital display of ourselves. We’ve quit going out. We’ve quit calling. We’ve quit showing up. We’ve quit going for walks. We’ve quit gathering. Gather. A word we could all focus more on.

In the digital age so many feel it necessary to portray something more than they see in themselves. As if the portrait is the life. As if the portrait makes the story of our lives. In years past, the portrait was made of the person who lived the life. It was not the definition. Now it is the definition, even if there is not much of substance that actually passed.

I grew up going to a private school. My dad was a doctor of the old school variety. He wore a pressed shirt and pants, and a sport coat and tie, at a minimum, every day. My school required collared shirts, and as the result, I was fairly good at dressing up. But I hated ironing. I didn’t want it to be part of my life and fought the notion of pressing shirts, even if they were severely wrinkled. Perfection in the imperfection sort of thinking, I’ve always had it. It likely sparked from this very situation. I laughed at the notion that people spent their perfectly good and free time pressing their cloths, and that a well pressed shirt and pants were some sort of symbolic definition representative of the man or woman sporting them. But what that represented was someone putting a little extra effort in ensuring that inevitable initial impressions accurately reflected certain characteristics that those people wished to portray to the world… “You look good, you do good,” my dad would say. A sort of minimalism branding perhaps. Fewer and fewer people now put so much effort in. Now the time is spent curating something altogether different and with exponentially more time than required to iron a shirt. Now the time is spent curating a feed, a digital representation, a day to day, full life story. A Brand. And for what? To sell yourself. But what are most people selling? A look? A single idea? An affirmation? A dream?

We’ve become lost in brands. We’ve come to the point where we feel like if we don’t have something to sell, no problem, we sell ourselves. Products, more than experiences, have come define our lives. This is sadly an obvious direction for consumerism to have reached, where we’ve all but forgotten the point of living, and replaced it with commodity culture. We are all told we all need to sell something to strangers, when in fact what we could all really stand to do is to quit playing in a world of strangers, and be part of the world outside our doors, and just go about life in our neighborhoods, in our work, our offices, our day jobs, our theaters and restaurants. Society needs more than ever for us to connect face to face with strangers and friends alike, rather than spending our time focused on garnering the attention of strangers on the other side of a digital globe. “I’ve met real friends on social media.” Yes, me too. But I’ve wasted more far more time than I’ve garnered from social media.

Branding is important for products in a competitive marketplace, but not for personal lives. Human life is far more intricate, nuanced, and interesting to be packaged and sold. We can’t let consumer culture convince us that we are personally reduced to our own personal Brand. We are far too complicated and interesting to ever be so minimized.

You see it vividly out in the world. So and so stands for this. And not much more. Once clearly packaged, those individuals are no longer individuals. They are another product on the shelf, for Purpose X. And rarely can they get beyond it ever again. Oh, you do this thing. That will be your thing for good, unless you are a one in a million that can successfully redefine yourself, ie, rebrand.

And I get how it happens. There are people that seem like they are a Brand. But in the past that happened not because they set out to create that image, but because they created a body of work in some form that eventually is so accumulative that it makes a mountain, and people see that mountain from afar… and thus the brand is created. Cormac. Rogan. Martha Stewart. Oprah. Beck. Trump. Huberman. These people have created empires, and only because of that are recognized as a brand. But now everyone wants to be a brand, even if there is nothing making the mountain. And it’s not only silly, but threatens to limit and reduce not only how others see them, but how they view themselves. It’s apparent from five minutes of scrolling any of the social media sites. It seems to particularly affect young people who find quickly that their appearance quickly becomes mistaken for a brand. But what happens when the medium changes? What happens when their looks lose their appeal. Do they just fall through the cracks, all the while having forgotten, or missed on what it means to truly live life?

And I think here I am honing in on one of my greatest concerns about this modern era… people are forgetting that you can live a perfect happy, balanced, joyful, and tremendous life without ever selling yourself or a single thing. We only recently became the commodity. As someone that has crossed the internet age from the threshold I can speak to the satisfaction in life that came far more easily and richly before we were all told we need to be on display. I realize that I run the risk of being guilty of everything I speak of; here I am sharing a weekly writing piece on Substack, and hope to someday sell books I’ve written. I am no stranger to irony.

But I’ve strived hard and with clarity of mind to never pigeon hole myself into just one arena. I am by nature a serial creator. And that is not being self congratulatory, and in many regards I sometimes wish I could put down my tools of creation and just go for longer walks or runs in the mountains, but I have an unquenchable desire to make things. Photos, Shapes. Stories. Tones. Bookshelves. Boxes. Books. Someday shoes? (For real, someday I will make shoes I hope.)

So perhaps I’ve circled back here in my thought. Perhaps what I fear is not that people are busy branding their lives, but rather that they are more pursuant of the package than what is inside the package. We can not just put forth an image of what we are, who we are, what we do, what we create, if we do not actually spend time doing the work, making the thing, making our lives better, building relationships, building the art, being in the world. And being in the world is critical to knowing the world, and knowing the world, knowing how people exist, interact, love, fight, cry, worry, cherish, and hold one another is the stuff of life. It is the point of life. The work, whatever it is we do for a living, be it put in time for someone else’s company or our own, that is just work. A necessary part of existence. But to think we need to constantly be working on some digital salesmanship while going about our entire day, after day, after day is not only tiring, it is tragic. If you have a thing to sell, build it. If it sells, great. If it doesn’t, keep moving. Life is too valuable and short to let us worry about packaging every single moment into a sales pitch and catalog.

My cup of coffee is nearly done. The last sip is cold. But still delicious. Acre is asleep on the sofa across from me, tired from a 4 am romp around the yard. He’s snoring as if to rub it in.

I don’t know if I’ll even push send on this one. I started with this non-question thought of branding that entered my brain while the dog scratched the door in the middle of the night, I guess because it’s a thing I seem to see in the world lately, and my brain was trying to make sense of it in sleep. I’ve had the notion itching in my own mind. What is Lawson? Who is Lawson? Am I just a coffee roaster? Am I just a photographer? A writer? A builder of bad boxes and even worse bookshelves? A parent? A husband. A trail runner? Those are all things I do, but trying to sell myself as something feels terribly wrong. I’m just another creature passing through time and space. And I’m not so worried about it myself, but when I see a whole younger generation forever consumed about what they look like and what they might be selling, I worry. I worry that consumerism has reached a new tragic level, in which we are more concerned about selling ourselves than living in this amazing, beautiful world.