Original Publish Date : September 5, 2025ON : CREATIVEFUTURESTHE SOUNDTRACK: WORLD OF IMAGINATION - TMPLEOn : LETTING THE WORK
NAME US
I saw a post the other day lamenting yet another self‑described multi‑hyphenate, and I was struck by the fact that what used to feel like liberation — a way for creatives who didn’t fit into a neat box to claim expansion — has now become a joke.
And I can’t argue.
It’s true.
Overwhelmingly, the term “multi‑hyphenate” has followed the same vicious cycle so many well-intentioned things that start honestly do these days, and now it has collapsed into another personal branding buzzword.
A creative culture trope, referring to a specific type of performative personal branding that includes a résumé headline stacked with titles, a bio strung together with hyphens, a carefully curated list of skills lined up like product on a shelf.
With it, a caricatured persona whose main defining feature is that the work rarely backs up the hyphens, and even if it does the absurdity of this type of self-proclamation now culturally takes away from it.
What once felt like a way to quietly refuse to sit in one small identity box has been ground into a way to posture. And it’s sad. Because this once gave so many of us permission to define ourselves differently.
These are all 100% real, and collected from a quick stroll through LinkedIn and Instagram:
Strategist – Futurist - Visionary
Storyteller - Innovator - Changemaker
Cultural Alchemist - Experience Designer - Visionary Leader
Brand Whisperer – Image Architect - Worldbuilder
Artist – Technologist – Branding Guru
Wizard of Light Bulb Moments (?)
Since this stroll, I’ve been thinking about our modern obsession with titles, self-descriptors, and the endless search for the perfect way to explain who we are and what we do.
Why does it matter so much?
Why do we care so deeply about the label, instead of letting the work speak for us over time?
Why do so many of us spend more energy trying to describe ourselves as interesting than actually becoming it?
I’ve felt the pressure to define or redefine before someone else does it for you. In transition, I’ve struggled with how to accurately describe myself and the work I’m now doing and pursuing.
I’ve looked for the nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and every time I landed on something almost right - - - but not quite.
It’s hard to describe yourself in the middle of becoming something new.
And then I realized:
why am I trying?
Who cares?
I don’t.
Not really.
This is for others.
And that doesn’t seem right, does it?
What I said then still STANDS :
Multi‑hyphenate is about collecting skills and fragmentation.
It’s about adding more hyphens and ultimately turns into
“look at everything I do.”
It’s blending, mixing, and delivering
an original result.
It’s : “everything I do comes from the same place.”
Multi‑dimensional is about integration
and creating from a whole.
I’ve written previously about focusing on being multidimensional instead of multi‑hyphenate.
Not because I consciously saw “multi‑hyphenate” sliding into cultural parody, but because I became more interested in creating work that, across time and space makes sense as coming from a whole rather than doing work that adds up to proving or stacking skills like Lego bricks.
The former isn’t inherently wrong, but this may be where it gets the most uncomfortable: there are so many of us today doing work and stringing words together to describe ourselves without even really wanting to be those things.
Not truthfully.
When the hyphens become more about performing or designing a character, this is where the joke begins and ends in the opposite of what we’re aiming for. Because a stack of labels doesn’t equal depth, a clever headline doesn’t equal coherence, and that emptiness is easier than ever to clock.
There’s a difference between doing “many things” because that is who we are at our core and doing (or pretending to do) many things because we want to appear interesting or fit into a persona.
The first is coherence.
The second is costume.
And the mask will always fall off eventually.
No matter how it seems now or what the internet tries to convince us, the future doesn’t belong to the longest LinkedIn headline or the most curated skill‑stack designed to impress.
It belongs to the ones more focused on the work and creating things from their whole, rather than getting the hyphens right.
It belongs to people whose work is undeniable, because it is coherent, alive, and anchored in something centered. You can feel it and you know it when you see it. That should be the goal, not landing on the perfect description before we even really become it.
We have a choice: we can search endlessly for the perfect combination of words and hyphens, or realize it doesn’t matter because you don’t need to convince anyone who you are when you’re more focused on truly living it.
That’s where I find myself now. Not trying to prove or explain how many things I can do, but learning how to live and create from the same place and letting that be the source of what I do and why I do it.
Not chasing adjectives, but letting coherence shape the output and trusting that the work, in time, will name me.
xT
I’m not writing this to judge or give strength to another meme on instagram that leaves creatives looking for another made up title.
I’m writing this because I see clearly now how silly it is to spend any time trying to find the perfect way to satisfy the illusions created by personal branding culture at all.
© 2025 / 2026 | all rights reserved | Teodora NicolaeNEXT → MORE ESSAYS
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