Dude, you're responding to a 16 year old. At that age, they are literally inventing their identity. As for the "building your brand", everyone is doing that even when they don't know it (consciously or unconsciously). Doing it consciously is because teens are by and large shit scared that they aren't or won't be "good enough", and often they're steered into "standing out" in some way (for nerds, often through academic excellence "with a twist"). They are exhibiting standard behaviour for an envioronment in which there's much more (perceived) demand for "good careers" than (perceived) supply.

Building your identity should not be tied to building your brand when you are 16. I’ve grown up in Europe but lived in the US for some time. What I noticed is a distinct lack of subculture in young people (college), everyone seems to be very homogenized and this is in stark contrast to what I perceived in Europe. Of course this is anecdotal but I wonder if this is a result of this crazy system that doesn’t allow missteps, doesn’t allow building your own identity, but instead forces you to be focused on security and your brand from an early age onwards as not to be crushed by college debts.

Isn't "building your personal brand" just a synonym for "building your resume" or "building your reputation"? At least, unless you're planning to become an Instagram influencer with their own line of cosmetics?

I can assure you, kids have been doing extracurriculars that look good on college applications for longer than most of us have been alive.

My resume when I was 16 (in the UK) was "passed high school exams, did paper round". That was perfectly normal, and I wasn't worried about it how it compared to my peers'.

Well that’s a bit my point. This isn’t really a thing where I grew up, but has become very normalized in the US. Building your resume certainly wasn’t on my or any of my friends mind when we were 16. To me this is insanity. Maybe it’s awesome though, what do I know.

True, but a lot of people on this thread have not been alive that long. The difference now is that extracurriculars are done in order to look good on applications.

> academic excellence "with a twist"

Nailed it better than I ever could.

This pseudopsychological explanation for an rational response is really ridiculous. These 16-year-olds are developing their resumes not because they're narcissistic. They're doing so because everyone's very plausibly saying that being middle-income is getting harder and harder to live as, and they're anxious to get into a good university to help their career prospects.

> All that building your brand and trying to convince people of your identity in place of actually having one

Well, that's because college admissions value seem to value identities like robotics / programming club president more than identities like having fun with friends and trying different things together (secondarily to the friendship), which seems to be a more mentally healthy pursuit and better for cultivating a healthy identity but not what admissions are looking for.