You Can’t Brand a Real Life

I’ve spent a lot of time scrolling lately. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. Somewhere in there between the cat videos and ads for Ozempic, I started to notice a trend.

“Authentic”

The word is everywhere. I’ve seen it in bios, brand pages, captions, product descriptions.

But I don’t think it means what they think it means.

The word gets used like a shortcut. A way to make something feel true, honest, real. But the more I see it, the less it seems to describe anything at all. It feels more like a signal than a description, and the more I see the word, the more I wonder why it’s become necessary to use it at all.

I was on a media trip with Realtree back in March to cover a collaboration with the brand and Crown Royal. On the second morning of the trip, I pulled up to the Realtree Farm packed in a bus of lifestyle and fashion journalists from big cities and big publications. The long drive wound through big loblollies and around food plots to a timber-frame clubhouse. A bunch of Realtree execs were leaning against their Silverados, just shooting the shit while they waited for us to get there. They were wearing ballcaps and camo, like they’d just rolled in from a hunt.

One journalist leaned forward and said, “Wow. These guys really live their brand.”

For a second I didn’t know what she meant.

Then it hit me.

She wasn’t complimenting them. At least not exactly. She was surprised that the people behind the brand looked like the people in the ads. As if they’d gotten dressed that morning to match the logo instead of the other way around.

But I’d sat with those Realtree guys at dinner the night before, and we’d chatted about turkey hunting and swapped trail cam photos over fried fish and cornbread.

Which is why her comment made me raise my eyebrows just a little.

No, I remember thinking. They just live this.

Now, after I’ve sat with it a while, I think it never occurred to her that the brand had grown out of the life instead of the other way around.

That’s the thing about Realtree. The camouflage came later. The company exists because Bill Jordan was a hunter long before he was a businessman. The company grew from that life. It didn’t invent it.

I can’t fault her really. She was just seeing exactly what her world had taught her to see.

I’ve been rolling her comment around in my head for months now, and I don’t think it was about Realtree at all. It just showed how often lived life gets interpreted as performance these days. Maybe because so much of what we’re shown really is performance.

Once I noticed it, I started seeing it in every scroll. A brand posts a dog hopping into a truck bed, and I wonder if it’s real or staged. An influencer captions a picture of a back porch and a glass of sweet tea with the word “authentic,” and suddenly I’m wondering if she even drinks sweet tea. I’m guessing how many takes it took to get the sweat just right on the Ball jar.

Was that thirty-second video life?

Or was it content?

And do they have to be different things?

The strange part isn’t that some of it is staged. Advertising has always existed. But I’ve started to look at everything in my feed like it’s advertising. And that bothers me because when enough content tries to look like an ordinary moment, then the ordinary moments stop looking ordinary. I quit looking for the beauty and start asking what it’s trying to sell.

That might make sense when you’re scrolling past everything in thirty-second clips. It feels different when you’re looking at a life that isn’t trying to be anything other than what it is.

No one ever called my dad or my uncles or my grandparents authentic. They didn’t call the old fishermen, carpenters, or mechanics I grew up around authentic either. Not because they were perfect, but because the label never seemed necessary.

You used to learn who people were by watching them over time. Not by reading their Instagram bio. You noticed how they treated a cashier, whether they returned borrowed tools, whether they stopped to help someone on the side of the road. If they gave you their word, you believed it because they’d already proven it a hundred times before.

Authenticity wasn’t something they shouted from the rooftops. Partly because they were too busy living their own honest lives to worry about it. But mostly because if you spent enough time around them, you already knew.

Somewhere along the way, authenticity stopped being something other people noticed and became something we started claiming for ourselves. Maybe that’s why the word keeps showing up everywhere. It’s trying to do the work that a life used to do.

We’ve replaced reputation with branding.

But the more someone insists they’re authentic, the less interested I become in the label. I’d rather watch how they live.

A life has always been better proof.