I'm sorry. It does.

While looking through my RSS reader today I saw two articles back-to-back talking about developing a "personal brand". I can't explain how angry that phrase makes me. A short list of reasons why I loathe "personal branding"

• It strips away our humanity and turns us into a fictional concept
• It describes something so inherently self-important and egotistical that borders on delusional
• I want to be a brand about as much as I want to be a building
• It's a stupid buzzword created to make something obvious seem more complicated and real

Do we really need to come up with a new buzzwordish term for everything we do as human beings?

It's not your reputation, it's your "personal brand".
You're not talking to friends, you're "joining the conversation".
I didn't just decide to eat an apple, instead "after surveying the competitive landscape, I formed a focus group of one and explored the projected ROI and KPIs of each food candidate and after reading several whitepapers and attending vendor-driven webinars selected the apple as best-of-breed"

Seriously, when did we collectively decide that we should do all we can to turn ourselves into commodities?

I thought the ideas of "social media" and "transparency" were supposed to cut through all the corporate bullshit speak and promote the informal exchange of people using a human voice. Instead, now we're all trying to sound like the corporate voice we were complaining about in the first place.

Is it me, or are people starting to sound like press releases?