Is getting a little coffee embarrassing now?

When everything is branding, life becomes a performance.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

In my experience, having a boyfriend is not embarrassing, but only because having to say “husband” is way worse. —Kate

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If I ever want to get a little coffee by my office, I must confront an existential crisis. A Pret-A-Manger, Blank Street, and Starbucks are all within eyeshot of the building’s front lobby, but each one requires weighing what kind of person I’m okay with being perceived as that day.

Starbucks, for instance, has long been the target of boycotts for union-busting and taking legal action against the union for expressing solidarity with Palestine. Pret-A-Manger is also named in the Israel Boycott Guide. And Blank Street is a VC-funded shell of a coffee shop whose cost-cutting business model, including automated coffee machines, is considered a threat to independent coffee shops. I believe it is important to push back against all these things, and I know the best way to do that is with my dollar.

But once every few months, I just need a coffee, and whichever brand’s coffee cup I decide to carry that day doesn’t just mean I’m promoting their branding—it also means I’m branding myself as someone who is okay with shopping there.

In case it isn’t already clear, I have a mental illness. A significant part of my OCD is rooted in an extreme fear of people finding out that I am, secretly, a very bad person. And let’s just say social media is not helping. “Girl, the boycott” has become such a common comment underneath videos of people who happen to have a Starbucks cup in the background of their shot that it became a meme. To me, and anyone else with similar anxieties, these small but consistent instances are confirmation that not only am I always being watched, but also, I’m always being assessed.

While not everyone may be experiencing genuine anguish over which corporation to allow the honor of making them a PSL, personal brand anxiety is something that’s starting to affect more than just the chronically online. Take this excerpt from

Chanté Joseph

’s viral Vogue essay, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”

“There’s been a pronounced shift in the way people showcase their relationships online: far from fully hard-launching romantic partners, straight women are opting for subtler signs—a hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone’s head. On the more confusing end, you have faces blurred out of wedding pictures, or entire professionally edited videos with the fiancé conveniently cropped out of all shots. Women are obscuring their partner’s face when they post, as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them.”

The piece explores a number of reasons for this, but the one that stands out most to me is this: heterofatalism is in, and to post against the grain of that is at best embarrassing, and at worst inconsiderate of single people who are in the trenches of a horrible dating landscape. Either way, the consequences are what people think of you. While that used to be none of our business, now we have numerical, public-facing proof. As Joseph writes, “When author and British Vogue contributor Stephanie Yeboah hard-launched her boyfriend on social media, she lost hundreds of followers.”