There’s an enormous pressure now to “share your story”. It’s become the currency of connection. It’s the key to being visible, relatable and marketable. I keep being told that people “want to know the person behind the professional”, that I need to tell my story. And yet, every time I hear it, something in me resists: I just don’t want to.

I am proudly Generation X. We are a quiet bunch. We just get on with the stuff of life and work without that much fuss and we are not that bothered about the need for validation. We don’t tend to share that much. In our time, personal and private lives have been separate and that was never seen as cold or repressed, it was simply how we operated. At work, you were professional, competent and friendly but you normally didn’t bring your whole life through the office door. There were conversations you couldn’t and shouldn’t have in the workplace, behaviours that were off-limits and a quiet understanding that keeping some distance was part of mutual respect.

When we did let people in, it was organic. I have a number of life-long friendships that began at work: strong, real friendships that have endured for decades but those were natural extensions of genuine connection, not forced familiarity. I have an even larger number of solid friendships that developed outside of work.  Outside those inner circle work relationships, though, you knew only the basics about your colleagues: whether they were married, had children, where they were from, where they’d worked before. And that was enough. If I think about the offices I shared in the 90s and early 2000s, I remember the details of such people:

Person 1: married male with two children, father a GP, lives about a mile from where I grew up, a fan of Newcastle United. A really nice person that I admired.

Person 2: Project manager from Birmingham, three children, second marriage, Aston Villa fan. A good guy but sometimes took credit for work he never did.

Person 3: Secretary, just married, did a marketing degree, has a crazy commute from Cumbria to Newcastle every day. Has a dog. A really lovely person and never to be underestimated.

That was it.

I remember one job in particular where I became far too familiar with too many people in the workplace, as we were mostly all around the same age. Many of them are still good friends today. At the time, however, it began to feel claustrophobic, as though the walls were closing in. There was no longer any space between my professional and personal self. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t a scandal or a falling-out, just an overwhelming sense of saturation. Too many after-work hours in too many pubs and too many in vino veritas kind of conversations. The closeness had become too much. I needed air.

That was our world. That was how it worked. Eras before us were even more formal. Ours was the generation that relaxed things a little. But there were still boundaries and those boundaries gave structure and safety to our lives.

Then things began to change. It started innocently enough. It was the era of the forwarded emails for lack of a platform. I used to write my own jokes under a pseudonym (I shamefully admit I wrote them on work time as well…). People found them funny and light-hearted (probably ‘cancellable’ these days) but they also blurred the lines. This was at a time when workplaces started to loosen up anyway, a flattening of hierarchies, formal office wear becoming a rarity. People became more casual, more “human”. Shortly afterwards came the first social media and the boundaries did not just loosen, they dissolved.

When Facebook first appeared, it happened in my last year of my first company that I co-founded in Leeds, UK. It horrified me that co-workers and even employees wanted to “connect”. What on earth did they want to know about me? What did they imagine I wanted to know about them? Then there were all the other connections from people from many stages of my life, not all of them sitting comfortably with one another. I joined Facebook for a couple of years, almost out of a strange feeling of obligation. Quickly, however, I started feeling a chronic sense of claustrophobia, irritation and a feeling of being “observed” and “judged”. Why would I care about the lasagne that a fellow pupil from primary school made for dinner? This wasn’t misanthropy; it’s just that my own personal life by then was very full and very separate from work. Everybody else that I know also live like that. We all have rich, busy lives outside of work.

Before social media, we were not sitting around in our lonely rooms, “waiting for the gift of sound and vision”, as in the David Bowie song. It was not like that at all. We were out living: working, socialising, building, doing. Not performing.

I cannot get my head around the erosion of privacy or the merging of the private and the professional. I don’t understand the compulsion to display oneself constantly, to take endless selfies, to live one’s life through the front-facing camera. I have seen, with my own eyes, people climbing up higher and higher onto the frame of the Brooklyn Bridge to take that perfect shot of Manhattan behind them. Someone, eventually, will die doing that. Elsewhere, they already have. We have seen the emergence of the “death by selfie”, people falling off cliff edges or hotel balconies or hit by trains while taking a photo of themselves.

The ”duck face” was the first symptom. I have actually seen people pull that bizarre grimace. I had thought it was just another urban legend. Then came the filters. But now, a decade or so later, the selfie generation whose same faces, when they do the duck face pose now, display more pronounced forehead wrinkles, crow’s feet, eye bags and early signs of turkey neck, just like what happened to our generation around 2011 and the boomers around the mid-90s. The selfie was never designed to be kind to the glorious imperfections of the aging face, was it? I suppose now AI can make you look forever 22. Perhaps that is the next step; the eternal, digital version of ourselves, perfectly lit, endlessly young. Just do not agree to any in-person meetings, ever.

All of this coincides with another shift: the changing face of professional identity. Even LinkedIn – which took me years to warm to – has transformed and is undergoing a kind of Facebookisation. Once it was a straightforward platform: you needed a regulatory affairs biotech specialist in Paraguay or a patient recruitment company in Singapore and it gave you several possibilities. Now, it is filled with deeply personal content: wedding photos, family portraits, illness narratives, confessions of burnout or bereavement or general self-righteous slop. None of this is bad in itself, but none of it should be on the first date, for Pete’s sake. In many cases, I’m sorry to say, it all feels a bit needy. Do I have to follow this? Do I have to do the same as them? I don’t want to but why do I feel this pressure to post something similar?

For years, my company operated quietly, mostly by word of mouth. For 11 or 12 years, we did no active selling whatsoever and we started becoming rather choosy about who we worked with. We simply did the work, delivered what we promised and invoiced. There was no need to “tell our story”. I did not even have a photo online for well over 10 years. The company just did what it said on the tin. That used to be enough.

Recently, however, people started telling me that I needed to “share my story”. That was, as it happens, an interesting moment because I did feel a parallel urge to share knowledge, to write, to speak, to make videos about work and related subjects. I want to get information out there, to pass on experience, not as a sales tactic but because I felt I have something worth sharing. That is how my articles, podcasts and videos have come about.

Apparently, though, that is not quite what they mean by “sharing my story”. I have had more than a few self-styled marketing experts, life coaches and lead-generation “strategists” tell me that I need to make it personal, that I need to open up about me and that I should make it cinematic. Their version of storytelling is not about knowledge but about exposure. And drama. They want the person behind the professional, the “vulnerability”, the revelation.

Well, here’s mine: I have no social media outside of LinkedIn. I live a full, interesting, dull, small, vast, quiet, loud, ordinary, extraordinary, happy life. It is completely my own, out of view. I’m surrounded by people who love me and whom I love very much. I do not suffer from FOMO. I don’t feel envy all that much. I’m not curious about the smallest details of another’s life. I don’t deal in gossip. My happiness is not dependent on public validation. Beyond my professional know-how, this is all the personal story anyone needs to know.

And here’s another point that often gets lost in all this: we now work in an international environment. We operate daily across borders, time zones and cultures. And - shock and horror - not everybody around the world views oversharing in the same way. In fact, there are cultures that take a dim view of this. It is not seen as authentic or being “open”, but as indiscreet and even unprofessional. Not everybody prizes self-disclosure. In much of the world, restraint is still regarded as a form of respect.

So, perhaps the new orthodoxy of “tell your story” is not as universal as it pretends to be. It is very arrogant to believe otherwise.  Maybe it is time to remember that discretion, modesty and professionalism still have currency, even in a (Western) world obsessed with personal narrative.

I disagree deeply with the notion that the personal and the professional must merge. We can control what we share. Privacy is not an old-fashioned hang-up; it is a choice. A strength. Not everything has to be said. Not everything has to be shown. Not of you or of your dog being shampooed.

Let your talent and your unique offering do the talking. Let your work speak for you. It always used to and it always will. This “personal story” phase will just be a blip, a cringeworthy one at that.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, October 2025