Being, Not Branding
The world no longer asks who are you?
It asks what value do you create?
We’ve become entrepreneurs of our own existence.
Our worth measured not in virtues, but in returns,
on attention, on skills, on self-optimization.
They call it “specific knowledge,”
but too often it’s just specialization without soul.
A man perfects his niche and loses his nature.
They say: build leverage, scale yourself,
But leverage also multiplies emptiness.
A hollow man scaled is still hollow, only louder.
Thoreau once wrote about an Englishman
who sailed to India to make his fortune,
so he could return home and live the life of a poet.
He could have just lived in a cheap room somewhere
and started writing.
That’s the tragedy of our age.
We chase freedom through accumulation
instead of subtraction.
We spend the best part of life earning money
to enjoy a questionable liberty
in what’s left of it.
They say train your mind like a muscle.
But the mind is not a biceps.
Strain sparks the change.
Recovery lets it take root.
The mind learns in the rhythm of effort and ease.
It strengthens in stillness,
not in struggle.
The old philosophers trained for freedom,
not productivity.
They sought detachment, not optimization.
To be whole, not efficient.
True being begins when the growth charts stop.
When you stop branding even your wisdom.
When you can sit still, unscaled, unseen,
and still feel infinite.
The modern disease isn’t poverty.
It’s perpetual self-improvement.
And the cure is what the ancients already knew:
to stop becoming someone,
and start being no one.