THE PERSONALITY INDUSTRY: buying yourself into being

Know thyself -> buy yourself

i know you know i know it’s a Rimowa

This weekend I walked and talked with a dear friend, listening as they explained what’s going on with their new relationship (via their partner’s attachment style), updated me on some big career stuff (via their Human Design profile), and rationalised some expensive new shoes (via their love language).

All in one conversation.

My contribution to the chat? "I think I'm a Cool Summer." "My sleep score was 87 last night." "I'm in my villain era."

This is the industrialisation of our personalities.

What used to be the realm of philosophy, therapy, or quiet self-reflection, has become a booming economy of frameworks, assessments, and systems promising to decode who we really are. Often for a small price, of course.

New gold rush

People are getting their auras photographed, their birth charts analysed, their Kibbe body types decoded, their colours done. Everyone's talking about attachment theory. Every fashion influencer is decoding their personal style (and knows their three words). The Artist's Way has resurged as the key to finally unlocking our one authentic true self. There are personal brand coaches all up in the feeds.

And we're tracking everything: meditation streaks, mood patterns, sleep behaviours…looking for truths about ourselves.

The global ‘personality assessment solution’ market’s (I mean, what?) size is valued at $5.62bn, projected to reach $15.95bn by 2033. There aren’t many consumer goods/services categories projecting a CAGR of 12+% right now, lemme tell ya.

Personalised conformity

Unfortunately, it seems like many of these things promising us individuality actually seem to deliver the opposite.

When millions of us get sorted into the same sixteen Myers-Briggs types or the same seasonal colour palettes…that's not radical self-discovery. That's mass categorisation.

We think we're buying self-awareness.
But we’re actually selling behavioural data.

And in trying to make ourselves more coherent to ourselves, we’re actually making ourselves more coherent to those who can profit from us.

So the personality industry isn't failing.
It's succeeding, at making you more predictable.

Unpredictable consumers are much harder to segment, target and solve for.

Know thyself → Buy yourself

The ancient Greeks had ‘know thyself’ carved in marble at Delphi. Self-understanding was a lifelong practice, an intimate, unique, slow process of self-awareness: getting to know yourself.

It feels like our modern-day equivalent mythical temples of self-knowledge and identity-formation are probably our shopping malls (or TikTokShop). Carved in stone over the entrance, maybe…’buy yourself’.

History repeats itself. But louder.

Consumer culture promising self-discovery through consumption/spending isn’t new.

The pattern goes back more than 100 years. In the 1920s, ad pioneer Claude Hopkins was the first to position products as tools for self-transformation. Toothpaste wasn't no longer just about dental hygiene, it now also promised a more confident, successful you. All sorts of empires have been built on this promise of aspirational transformation.

By the 1950s, a progress-boom in psychology coincided with the golden age of advertising. Freudian concepts were applied to consumer desires - Chrysler famously moved on from talking to men about about a car’s features, in favour of how driving made them feel…about their masculinity, their power, their place in the world.

The logic was revolutionary: people weren't buying products, they were buying better versions of themselves. This became the foundation of modern marketing psychology. As Ernest Dichter (the researcher behind that Chrysler work) wrote in The Strategy of Desire [1960]: "the successful advertiser is the one who sells not the product, but the dream."

The 1970s saw therapy culture gradually merging with consumer culture. Luxury department stores began offering not just clothes but image consulting. Personal shopping as a form of self-discovery.

The 1980s and 90s escalated that logic. Nike didn't sell shoes, it sold self-belief (Just Do It). Martha Stewart didn't just sell household products, she sold a vision of your domestic perfection.

So the promise of self-discovery through consumption isn’t new. But the sophistication (and speed/velocity) of the delivery systems is. Where previous generations had magazines and books helping them figure out who they truly were, we have algorithms constantly tracking and inspiring/manipulating us.

As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman alluded to in Liquid Modernity [2000], by the 21st Century a person’s literal identity has become a consumer choice. Not something to discover so much as something to select from an ever-expanding menu of options.

Has the personality industry now reached the complete commodification of what was once considered sacred: the human quest for self-understanding? Prob not!

To me, intriguing as they are, it feels like a lot of personality-deciphering tools and tricks actually make us less coherent, not more.

The more data we collect about ourselves, the less we seem to actually know ourselves. The more we try to become authentically us, the more we become a bit more like everyone else.

But maybe we don’t need to decode ourselves this much, anyway.
Maybe humans were never meant to be that easy to understand.

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself." - Walt Whitman

Thanks for reading/see you next time.

Beth