What does life look like when you spend your energy in reputation management? It’s a life constantly on edge; constantly monitoring; never able to really speak or feel freely, but instead just dipping your toe in the water of authenticity to see whether the winds are flowing favorably in your direction at a given moment. This is the life of reputation management.

These are the days of the platform. And everyone has one.

For most of us, that platform is small. It’s an online persona on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. It’s our outward facing self; the projection of a version of us we want people to see… and to like. “Liking” is not just an emotion or feeling in the days of the platform; it’s a measurable quantifiable action.

Back in the old days, the ones before the days of the platform, “liking” was much less visible. You sensed you were liked by how many people wanted to have lunch with you, how long the signatures were in your yearbook, and whether you were included in the vote for class favorite. But now, “likes” are social currency. They’re the means by which we justify our own existence. And for many, they are in truth the ultimate goal we are shooting for in life.

Consequently, we spend a ton of time an energy in reputation management. We carefully craft the picture, and then the caption, and then we monitor it to see whether it’s resonating or not. If it is, then we have a pattern we can replicate. If it’s not, then we can change one of the variables to make this version of ourselves more palatable to a greater number of people. Of course, the opposite is also true. The last few years show us no shortage of examples of people who have not done a good job at reputation management. They have misstepped in their platform, and they’ve gotten killed for it. So much so that it’s nearly impossible to recover.

That shows us that these are dangerous waters we are swimming in. The fickle sharks of the internet can smell blood a mile away, and the only thing more fun than liking is hating. So here we are – seeking likes, and fearing dislikes, so we spend our energy in managing our reputations.

I feel the tension. Perhaps you do as well. And our children feel it even more acutely than we do.

What does life look like when you spend your energy in reputation management? It’s a life constantly on edge; constantly monitoring; never able to really speak or feel freely, but instead just dipping your toe in the water of authenticity to see whether the winds are flowing favorably in your direction at a given moment. This is the life of reputation management.

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