Your Public Persona Doesn’t Define You

Breakdown! Breakdown!

Joe joe reference- Ahem anyways, here’s the gist. Your public persona is nothing but the collective opinions of fallible humans who don’t know you, they know what you’ve done for society, and came up with their own definition of who said person is based on that. Attaching your self-worth and value to that is like attaching your self-worth and value to a pack of wild dogs.

Looking for such external forces to define you, is recipe for discontentment, unhappiness, and utter sorrow. Including crippling anxiety. Your fame, social status, is fleeting and fickle. If you’ve attached happiness and fulfillment to it, what do you think will happen when it’s stripped in a petty controversy or as it inevitably will, fade away? True fulfillment can’t be found in the fleeting opinions of others, nor in the whims of an open-edit platform like Wikipedia or other websites that feature biographies.

In doing otherwise, you surrender your autonomy, and enslave yourself to said whims, bringing about constant unhappiness and maybe even chronic stress. And what for? Absolutely nothing but an inconsequential, and untrue illusion of superiority or prestige. But apart from this external circumstance not defining you, there’s also another factor that comes into place in most people’s mind with fame.

Death

After your death, it doesn’t matter if you’re remembered or not, you no longer exist, at least physically. And the public will not remember you, they will remember your public persona, a very misconstrued idea of who you actually were. You live for you, not for others. Your name and or work will be all that’s in their memories, not your character. Plus, what tangible, real impact will any scenario involving your remembrance amongst the general public have on your life?

Absolutely nothing. When it comes to you as a person, all that truly matters is being remembered amongst family and friends, the people who knew you and will extensively, passionately speak about you and the memories you may have shared. All the media will spew about you is how much you’ve accomplished, the lives you impacted, legacy left behind, etc. Now of course that’s amazing, meaningful, and significant, but the media will not capture the entire essence of your existence after your passing like your friends, family, and anyone else you personally knew would, so don’t expect them to.

it’s another contribution

Human existence and everything we do is ephemeral, temporary from birth to whatever date after death, whether immediate or a few centuries. The memory of you, and all your achievements, contributions, will fade away as if they never existed. This is simply a natural part of life, nothing is permanent. The point of making an impact on humankind isn’t to quite literally immortalize you and your work, that’s impossible. Nor for personal remembrance, that’s worthless, you’ll be dead; and will have wasted your life doing what you do, solely to be remembered.

Sacrificing the present for a future you will never see. The point is to align yourself with a higher purpose, meaningfully contribute to the well-being of others, and find fulfillment and happiness in the virtuous pursuit of making a difference. That’s to focus on the intrinsic value of your work and mission. Appreciate the external recognition and validation you or your work may receive as a byproduct, but don’t attach the value of you or your work to said external recognition and validation. As that’s not where the true value, and fulfillment lies.

The pursuit of external validation is like a dog chasing its tail. It’s a never-ending pursuit, perpetual cycle. One external validation point, or achievement, leaves you wanting more & more. One after the other, you will never be truly satiated or content. Your public persona should be looked at like another contribution to human knowledge, rather than a source of personal validation.

Your self-worth and value can’t be attributed by external sources, only you can attribute that, and that’s where true contentment comes from. What does you being historically documented validate about you? It validates the impact and achievements you’ve been able to create, through your public persona, not you as a person.

Just like a scientific achievement, the documentation and preservation of your story is another contribution to human knowledge, educational, as all encyclopedias or other repositories of human knowledge always emphasize. Not a medium for self-promotion, aggrandizement, or validation. But another contribution to human knowledge that people all over the world can learn from and garner inspiration.

Through this perspective, you free yourself from the trappings of fame, external validation, because it’s not you, it’s another one of your works in that sense. It doesn’t make you better than anyone else, more significant, or inherently superior. It simply means through your public persona, and its story, you’ve added more to human knowledge, and that’s intrinsically, remarkable.

Thanks for reading

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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