Column: Think outside the brand

Sometimes it can seem that public empathy can go farther — can almost make more sense projected into social media, dissected in op-eds — than even the most personal, private grief.

I attended a lecture last week on “branding” yourself. I appreciated the importance of projecting your values onto online appearances.

The goal was to look at your mentions online like you were a curator assembling some kind of thematic exhibition from a vault of a thousand paintings. You pick your “brand.”

You then ensure that everything you highlight online runs through the Instagram-esque filter of that brand — that your take on even the most ubiquitous debate reflects that underlying flavor.

“Don’t post about politics,” he warned, “Unless that’s your thing.” He counseled us to then make sure that our political footsteps on the web followed the trail we wanted to pursue. As someone who dabbles in that world and writes incessantly, I was admittedly daunted by the need to react appropriately to current affairs in a way that would somehow both build my brand and be judged well by the search-engine navigating politicos of the future.

Jokes aside, it also clicked with me. I understood that I saw the most successful public figures these days curate their messages, but also that even the most normal friends and family in my life curate their reactions to current affairs.

We can’t all care about everything, and it makes sense to be choosy with our empathy, especially in an environment where we are bombarded with information. And, of course, that choosiness is going to reflect what we find important; this becomes our brand.

But I think that our selective empathy, or “branding,” for issues holds the potential for a more corrosive effect, particularly for people that straddle the line of being a public figure with a duty to represent real people and complicated issues.

A couple of days after that class, I received some difficult personal news.

News that really matters often has a ring of unreality, an element of dissonance with the “real” constructed, curated world of our everyday lives.

When we engage in private grief or confusion, we often turn to the arts and humanities — often the only outlets to properly make sense of the complexity of the human experience. I know I did this week. And yet when we talk about events that deeply impact our public psyche, our vocabulary and our reactions don’t draw from the human, but rather the “branded.”

We sort and make sense of the senseless in line with our preconceived notions, tossing aside issues that we deem to be outside our scope of empathy.

This week, I saw a harsh contrast between the tools the modern world affords me to make sense of my private grief and the tools our world offers to publicly make sense of similar human events. I just hope that our increasingly public conversations can create more space for us to pause and reflect before we opine; very little in politics is simple enough to fit seamlessly into all of our brands.