Today, both online and offline, we are encouraged to market ourselves constantly — to polish our identities, perform productivity, and maintain a presence, not just to express who we are, but to justify our worth. This demand for visibility, I’ve come to believe, is less about authentic expression and more about maintaining participation in what I would call a capitalist attention economy.

Courses, coaches, and influencers routinely sell the idea that we must make ourselves visible or risk being irrelevant. But this visibility is not neutral; it is commodified. What we are encouraged to make visible is not our humanity, but our usefulness — our market-ready, branded selves. This dynamic generates anxiety, particularly among younger professionals, who are taught that their employability, credibility, and even self-worth depend on their ability to perform value in public.

It leads me to ask:

Has modern culture replaced belonging with branding?

In a healthy relational culture, we seek connection through shared understanding. We ask:

• Who truly sees me?
• Who understands the worth of what I contribute in context?

In contrast, under the logic of performative capitalism, we ask:

• How many impressions did I generate?
• Why didn’t my visibility metrics increase?

This shift has ethical and psychological consequences. It encourages self-surveillance, discourages introspection, and elevates form over substance. The value of a person becomes less about trust, depth, or context — and more about optics. Even in professional settings, platforms like LinkedIn often become arenas of subtle self-commodification, where one’s narrative must be streamlined, promotable, and strategically engaging.

Perhaps most disturbingly, I’ve noticed how even rest and private life are absorbed into this visibility logic. We are encouraged to optimize downtime, to track and gamify our habits, to transform even leisure into something “productive.” It’s as if we are running on a hamster wheel, not in pursuit of meaning, but of relevance — unaware that what we’re really being sold is a repackaged version of ourselves, customized for consumption.