Refuse To Be A Human Billboard

I lost my job and maybe that's a good thing.

I had my first fancy job with healthcare and a salary. I was the creative director and brand ambassador of a program called Revolution of One, funded by its parent organization, the Foundation for Economic Education, a well-respected libertarian non-profit.

I loved my job; I had funding for culture-shifting projects that brought the concept of freedom—both political and psychological—to new people in new ways. I hosted a conversation with free thinkers Africa Brooke and Ayishat Akanbi on owning your voice amid collective pressure to conform. My video with Kimi Kaititi reached left-leaning viewers and helped them consider why minorities like Kimi and I found social justice stifling and how we realized it wasn’t what it claimed to be. I wrote content for social media that encouraged people to defend their values, believe in their individual ability to improve their lives and communities, and be honest even when a culture of groupthink makes it hard.

That program is dead now because it lost funding and I’m back to my scrappy self-employed roots. Losing a job that paid me to create what I wanted to is an objective loss, but I also gained a reminder of something I’ve always valued: not being a human billboard. When people are solely focused on how to get others to look at them, they become billboards. My job required getting people to look, but instead of looking at outrage bait or lies, I showed them how to develop self-empowerment and overcome destructive collectivism. Human billboards are only interested in what gets attention and with the majority of my income gone, I’m painfully aware of why—it’s easier. This is partly why “grifter” has exploded into a common accusation: the collective can sense some people believe more in getting ahead than they do in their own words.

It’s absurd to accuse everyone you disagree with of being a grifter, but the impulse to question what motivates a person isn’t. People have turned themselves into brands on social media and changed before our eyes, and it’s not the kind of change that begets growth. People like Pearl Davis and Hasan Piker seem guided by something that isn’t fully inauthentic, but is designed to attain the short-term reward of attention at the expense of long-term rewards, like growth and authenticity.

I don’t think Pearl and Hasan are grifters—they likely believe what they believe, while a grifter believes in nothing but what’s convenient. However, I do think they’re less like advocates and more like billboards. 

While an advocate will talk with you about their cause, a billboard talks at you. While an advocate will try to educate and empathize with you, a billboard just tries to make you look.

Even better for a billboard is if you talk about it, and it doesn’t always matter whether that talk is positive or negative. The same incentives that influence billboards are influencing humans on social media; as with a billboard, the more views, the better. A billboard is effective at its goals, but humans are meant to achieve more.

I’ve always been protective of my attention for that reason: I don’t want to spend my life looking at billboards or becoming one. My job was great because the subjects I paid attention to were the ones both my employer and I wanted to focus on, but I still watched myself with suspicion for evidence I was letting my attention be driven by someone other than me. I’m the first to shout down strangers demanding I “speak out” about the latest thing for the same reason: self-ownership starts with owning your attention.

If you don’t own your attention, someone else does, and that means they own a part of you. If you want to become the truest version of yourself, you need to own yourself.

I’m paranoid about being influenced, not because any influence is bad, but because not every influence is good. For example, I could share my insights from my personal experience of once being held back by feminist beliefs… or I could become an anti-feminist billboard. I could make this viewpoint my entire persona, post selfies in shirts that say “This is what an anti-feminist looks like,” and make my social media profiles a log of insult matches.

When you watch people become robotic pundits rehashing the same talking points every day or pushing increasingly unhinged opinions, you’re watching the influencers be influenced. Social media loves one-dimensional figures who offer predictable, superficial messages. But this influence deprives them of something greater: the freedom to be themselves.

If you look closely, you’ll see the tragedy of human billboards: the gilded cage that keeps them from making choices that won’t yield enough attention.

The freedom to follow your whims—like sharing poetry instead of politics or going silent online for weeks—is a subtle proxy for the freedom to direct your life. And that’s why, despite having less income and ease today, I will always savor more freedom to follow my whims. 

Being a black sheep has given me a reserve of resilience because I’ve learned to love the road less traveled. Where my whims take me may not make the most money or get the most attention, but those aren’t my goals, they’re extras along the way to self-transcendence and the self-ownership needed to obtain it. Self-transcendence is the process of growth that keeps us moving ever closer to our potential. The recurring pattern in pursuing self-transcendence is the freedom to follow a whim that hints at something you need to learn. There’s a reason some people are fascinated by ghost stories and others by gardening. Our whims are moments of curiosity that call out to us because they harbor something that can evolve us through engaging with it. That’s why I’ve long been resistant to becoming a “brand.” I only took the role of “ambassador” because I was an ambassador for the freedom to direct our lives.

Sometimes it’s worth disobeying the “Stay On Trail” sign while hiking. If you’re looking for something uncommon, it won’t be found where most people are looking.

Losing my job put me back in a familiar position: self-employed and keenly aware that becoming a billboard would fix my financial position faster than anything besides OnlyFans. But the truth is, I’d rather struggle than be boring and lose money than freedom. I’m following my whim to build The Black Sheep and create a corner of culture where people feel free to question, disagree, and follow their whims to unpopular places. Sometimes I joke about my decision to start this business: “Great idea—our customer base will be the dwindling minority of people who value hearing ideas they disagree with.” But perhaps surprisingly, there are lots of you. People are tired of having their curiosity and quirks beaten down by a culture that demands conformity, purity, and predictability. The Black Sheep is a haven for both the weirdos and the normies who appreciate the weirdos.

It won’t be easy or a quick cashout, but my focus is fully on building a place for anyone who’s looking for the path to something uncommon.