100 Personas for Everything: The Label Performance Nobody Escapes | 100 Big Questions About Life

Every time you hit post, you are putting out an image. You want to perform your best side for other people — but in their eyes it may look like something else entirely.

Not long ago, humanity's taste for personas spread to cats. The sulky, permanently scowling cat became the world-weary teen who can't be bothered to answer you. The dopey, adorable cat became the village idiot of catdom, a husky reincarnated. The cat who wrecks the house became the neighborhood bully, up in the trees for birds and into the pond for fish. By now dogs, robot vacuums and Wi-Fi have personas of their own.

The persona is the new law of marketing. No persona, no marketing — especially in a society where everything is suspected of being a marketing ploy.

Some personas exist to build idols. Most exist to make it easier to remember people who think they are idols, or could pass for one. So don't casually say "my persona," unless you are making fun of yourself.

Raising an idol is hard work: the job is really about supplying an imagined intimate relationship. Supplying the idol's persona, on the other hand, looks easy. On the idol assembly line, anyone who looks small can be set up as the nation's daughter; anyone with kids is automatically a good dad; a girl who dresses androgynously is the dominant top; anyone who can solve a quadratic equation is the top student; anyone who can do nothing at all still has hard-working to fall back on; and failing that, there are always the foodie card and the cute-and-clueless card. Mainstream taste doesn't change much over any given stretch of time, so the personality traits that match what people expect can be counted on your fingers — and a tried-and-tested label persona will always collect a cheering fan club.

In The Spiritual History of Otaku, Eiji Otsuka argues that the girl idol is the embodiment of "male database-driven desire." It doesn't run one way, though. Idols shape what fans want, and fans shape how an idol's persona gets packaged. Japan and South Korea have idols with very sharp identities; China's idol audience and its buying habits are not settled yet, so one tacky screenshot of an idol can grow into fan armies with their own nicknames, in-jokes, slang and sticker packs — which then largely decide what that idol's persona turns out to be.

Most personas, though, are just extra scenes written for yourself. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman argues that society is one big theater and every one of us is performing at every moment, using little strategies to touch up our own image and steer what others think of us. Even alone, you are still playing the you disciplined by "the law, morality, learning and the deadline." Every status update on a social network is another selective release of image — an attempt to build a likable, consistent persona on Moments, Weibo or Instagram.

The risk of building a persona is that it can collapse at any moment. The devoted husband caught cheating; the man of culture who loves reading essays by winners of the Nobel Prize in mathematics; the bad student who spends all day wailing that it's too hard, too miserable, that they want to die, that they haven't done a thing or revised at all, and then scores 98 — every one of them makes you want to punch something. Without consistent self-discipline and a stable set of values, a persona is not easy to keep up, which is why more and more of them drift toward self-mockery — dumb, slow, stupid, goofy, dark, chubby, dopey — so that when the persona falls apart it reads as "the highlight has finally been discovered."

To get everyone better acquainted with the persona trend, our Research Lab has kindly put together 100 personas for everything (comments welcome — add your own):

Brand personas | Behind every successful company is a side-hustle personality

To build loyal users, companies reach for every advertising and PR trick to establish an image — and quite often it goes the other way, for example:

• Instagram: the world's best avocado salesperson
• Keep: the enforcement officer for chicken-breast sales
• Dyson: the appliance world's 24-karat solid gold tooth-capper
• Baidu: the network connection tester
• Durex: the (see a short sleeve, immediately think bare arm, immediately think total nudity) prospector of associative potential
• Zhihu: the (I have a friend who...) friend
• Baidu Maps, as seen by Amap: the (fluent in walking through walls and walking on water) Jesus-issue compass that points north, south, east and west
• Amap, as seen by Baidu Maps: the voice actor

Animal personas | Pet owners may be the most theatrical group in the human species

Take the century-old riddle of whether keeping a cat indoors is good for it or robs it of its freedom. Humans project feelings onto animals, one-sided or mutual, talk at them unprompted, and call them master, kid, little dummy. Turn it around, and here is how they might see each other:

• The cat, as seen by humans: a child (of the adorable, cute, tiny-tyrant type)
• The human, as seen by the cat: a roommate
• The koi, as seen by internet users: a graphic-designed good-luck charm, mostly living on social media
• The cockroach, as seen by the boyfriend: a vocal coach

Device personas | Only products with no ambition accept their factory settings

Put 17th-century animism together with today's booming political correctness, and every product, like a human, should have the same value and the same rights, no longer boxed in by the manufacturer's factory settings, free to define itself again. Until that day, if they paid attention to their own situation and did some "know thyself" reflecting, they might position themselves like this:

• Beauty camera app: a second-tier socialite named Tony the stylist
• Polaroid: the (completely unnecessary) instructor in photo-shaking technique
• Robot vacuum: a mount for cats
• Kindle: instant noodles' best companion
• Drone: a kite for people born after 2000
• Steam: the (already spent the money on the game, so there's no need to spend the time playing it) cut-your-losses rational shopping platform
• Phone: a bathroom-stay extender
• Power bank + phone: what keeps a human in any corner of the planet, as long as there is Wi-Fi
• Mirror: the number one most used piece of gym equipment

File-format personas | If file formats had souls, they would spend most of their lives wishing they were some other format

Like most of you humans, a document's fate is sealed the moment its format is fixed. The Office trio, born into the workplace, never lived as colorfully as the restless, fidgety avi. The gif, a born comedian, is not as well-read as the epub with its bookish pedigree. The jpg, riding the age of images, is far luckier than the txt, which is about to lose its job. As for how the formats currently on duty are doing:

• ppt: a deadline accelerator
• word: a slacking-off prop
• avi: a side dish
• gif: the lifeguard of awkward conversation
• txt: the nearsightedness culprit
• xls: the standard résumé skill everyone has mastered
• jpg: the witness to a lost truth
• mobi: the (first step is to save it, last step is also to save it) reading-list saver

Time personas | Every day of a human life is some kind of holiday

Filling time with meaning may be one of humanity's greatest talents:

• 3 a.m.: the dividing line for "I'm old now" (depending on whether it belongs to last night or this morning)
• April 1: the day The Onion reports the truth
• Friday: the most hopeful day of the week
• 2018: the sixth anniversary of the end of the world
• Music festival: the day that outfit you secretly bought on Taobao can finally leave the house
• Concert: the day you go and look at a screen in person

Job personas | The script you have to prepare every Lunar New Year to translate yourself for your relatives

Since most people don't like their jobs, they use self-mockery to defuse the misery whenever careers come up, for example:

• Writer: the fantasy occupation of the unemployed young person (standard edition)
• Programmer: honorary baldness refugee
• Mom: an alarm clock that goes off an hour early
• Real-estate agents / small-loan brokers / insurance sellers: the holdouts of the incoming call
• Lifestyle blogger: someone whose core means of production is a filter app

Music personas | Don't just recommend me music — the genres are segregated, and desegregation is not happening

Classical listeners look down on jazz listeners, jazz listeners look down on rock listeners, rock listeners look down on pop listeners, pop listeners look down on metal listeners, and Beijing metal looks down on Shanghai metal... The music world has endless factions and the chain of contempt could be listed forever, except it has never been a straight line. Folk, to folk fans, might be "tender and full of feeling"; to rock fans, folk might be "a mountain ballad with a second-tier city's name dropped into it." Punk, to punk fans, might be "subversive, rebellious, uncooperative"; to folk fans, punk might be "a mohawk who only wears a studded leather jacket and never a down coat"...

• Folk, as seen by rock: the lovesick case who chases girls with stories about failing to chase girls
• Rock, as seen by folk: Tony the stylist's main customer base
• Hip-hop, as seen by folk: buyers of fake gold chains and diamonds on Taobao
• Reggae, as seen by classical: a dreadlocks promoter
• Post-rock, as seen by classical: the instrumental music a rock band makes when it can't find a singer
• Punk, as seen by classical: reform-school reserves
• Classical, as seen by punk: a midlife crisis
• Rock, as seen by pop: a renovation crew at 8 in the morning
• Folk, as seen by hip-hop: begging on the street

Music-app personas | If you can't label people's ears, find fault with the app those ears listen through

As a species born to compare itself with everyone else, today's music fans don't only draw superiority from genre; the right music app can set vanity blazing too. The labels they stick on each other run like this:

• QQ Music, as seen by Xiami users: a backing-track library for coal bosses' square dancing
• NetEase Cloud Music, as seen by QQ Music users: a mutual-aid society for heartbroken amateur essayists
• Douban FM, as seen by NetEase Cloud Music: the buy-one-get-five freebie

The battle carries over into the gym, where it becomes:

• Small-equipment people, as seen by the iron lifters: cheerleading squad reserves
• Iron lifters, as seen by the joggers: an intellectually underdeveloped population
• The roaring resistance-band people, as seen by the yogis: not fully evolved
• The meditators, as seen by the mirror-starers: fans of immortality-cultivation novels

Animation-studio personas | I'm here to protect the smiles of your little monsters

Animation is the last preserve of fairy tales and imagination, and every studio has its own tastes and emphases, for example:

• Pixar: inventor of new classics
• DreamWorks: the goofball who subverts the classics
• Disney: renovator of old classics & factory for politically correct princesses
• Studio Ghibli: the environmentalist grandpa

Writer personas | The way to make any sentence instantly sound right — attribute it to XXX

By Roland Barthes's "death of the author," a famous writer, once turned into text, has no say in what the finished work becomes; that is entirely up to the reader. And being dead already, they can hardly jump up and object. As contemporary consumer goods, today's writers have probably been set up as:

• Oscar Wilde: king of weapons manufacturing (there is always a line that pierces you, blinds you or kills you)
• Jin Yong: compiler of wuxia-flavored "I have a friend who..." material
• Mu Xin: grandmaster of the Moments caption
• Natsume Sōseki: the moon's brand ambassador
• Ernest Hemingway: the first man to explain the iceberg
• Osamu Dazai: professional apologizer
• Wang Xiaobo: ghostwriter of love letters
• Haruki Murakami: publicity ambassador for the Nobel games
• Lu Xun: the can't-keep-the-coffin-lid-on ambassador for rights defense (who will defend to the death his right never to have said that)

Painter personas | A crowd whose names alone equal money and equal taste

For most people taking selfies in art museums, it is less about looking at the paintings than at the painter's name:

• Salvador Dalí: winner of the "best appearance on a taste bookshelf" award
• Vincent van Gogh: best promoter of the idea that the crazier you are, the more artistic you are
• Kazimir Malevich: champion of the "I could paint that too" contest
• Edvard Munch: the artist who has contributed the most photo-editing material
• Marcel Duchamp: the suspect behind the hipster habit of street-shooting toilets
• Yayoi Kusama: the nemesis of people with trypophobia

Scientist personas | A batch of exam-essay lifesavers

Lightening the load of Chinese students' essay exams may be scientists' greatest contribution to the younger generation. The moment the exam ends, they can go back to being:

• Archimedes: the planet's arch-contrarian
• Isaac Newton: maker of the first draft of the Apple logo
• Marie Curie: the bonus-point supplier for high-school entrance essays
• Alfred Nobel: an alchemist
• Erwin Schrödinger: prime suspect in history's biggest cat-abuse (cold) case

Director personas | Is there anyone left who watches a film without checking the director

Out of habit, experience and an attachment to certain subjects, famous directors always develop their own distinct style, and from the audience's side it often looks like this:

• Stephen Chow: the original creditor of unpaid ticket money
• Wong Kar-wai: king of filters
• Takeshi Kitano: the frozen face
• Hayao Miyazaki: grandmaster of failed retirement
• Makoto Shinkai: a wallpaper editor

Fan personas | Faith means you can trash your idol eight times a day but nobody else gets to do it once

To prove their own idol is faster, prettier and stronger than the competition's, rival fan bases smear each other as a matter of routine, for example:

• Apple fans, as seen by Xiaomi fans: periodic night owls
• Smartisan fans, as seen by Apple fans: crosstalk fans living off promised pie
• Xiaomi fans, as seen by Smartisan fans: high-fever patients
• Sony fans: nephews
• True NBA fans: the group that looks down on bandwagon championship fans

Restaurant personas | The goal is to keep you from raising your Engel coefficient by eating too much

In an age ruled by food delivery, a restaurant without a distinct personality is easy to forget. Beyond the polished image it broadcasts about itself, it matters just as much whether customers enjoy making their own versions of it, for example:

• Ronald McDonald: history's deadliest clown
• Colonel Sanders: (possibly) history's deadliest colonel
• Starbucks: the startup incubator with the highest failure count in history
• Haidilao: a house of smiles for sale

Style personas | Identifying a style is like a multiple-choice question: spot one clue and commit

Something always gets lost on the way from theory to practice. The cut-corners construction guide probably reads:

• Gothic: the rented apartment has a pointed roof
• Baroque: the rented apartment has a round roof
• Mediterranean: the rented apartment has red roof tiles
• Pastoral: the rented apartment has a table with a small floral cloth over it
• Minimalist: the rented apartment's walls are white (no furniture yet

Cover image from: Lin Xiaoyao