Second life

I have realized that everybody sees themselves as a brand and we all go through life building and maintaining it.
It started of course way before Facebook. The first form of "media" we decided to use in order to build our brand and differentiate it from other ones was, of course, our body. We started tattooing our brand equity through self-expression (a medium that proved to be as harmful as successful).
Then as time passed we embraced technology as a form of advertising. We began buying things that made us feel better, younger, more successful or simply different. We got better cars, better phones, more expensive jewelry etc.
Along came social networks and things became ever more intense. We started building two separate brands. Our online brand and offline one. We used our online life to take our brand even further, and opened it to an international market in order to make it go viral.
The problem began when our online brand surpassed our offline one, and even worst, we started believing our campaigns even though we knew it's just advertising and isn't portraying a real product. But what can we do? We can't go back, we will all be branded liars and fakers.
So some of us tried getting off the grid or at least purchasing less media and published fewer campaigns.
Lucky for us, the web may keep everything stored and has a great memory, but it also has a very short attention span.
And in the end, I believe a good and honest brand will survive almost anything you through at it.