"People always try to put a title or a symbol on you. If you work in a bank, you are a banker. For me, they see a co-founder of Facebook"

People rely on labels to navigate a complex world. Titles are shortcuts: they signal competence, status, and expected behavior. They let strangers coordinate quickly, bankers handle money, doctors heal, engineers build. The convenience is real, but so is the cost. A title can compress a living, evolving person into a single, static symbol, turning biography into branding.

When the title carries cultural weight, the compression becomes extreme. Celebrity and high-profile success create a silhouette so bright that everything else fades into shadow. Being known primarily as a co-founder of a transformative platform fixes someone in a moment of history, as if identity were a museum plaque. Every subsequent action is filtered through that symbol: achievements read as footnotes, mistakes amplified by association, motives second-guessed by the myth rather than understood through the person.

There is also a burden of inheritance. A title like that accumulates the public’s hopes and resentments, the platform’s triumphs and controversies, none of which map neatly onto a single individual’s character or intentions. The symbol becomes a proxy for public debate, and the human underneath becomes hard to see.

Yet titles aren’t merely imposed; they are negotiated. People can widen their own narrative through new ventures, quieter work, philanthropy, or deliberate absence from the spotlight. Still, the negotiation is unequal. Search engines, headlines, and collective memory tend to freeze the earliest, most dramatic chapter. Our era’s information architecture makes first impressions sticky and redefinitions slow.

The deeper point resists cynicism: a plea to recognize that identity is plural, dynamic, and seasonal. One can be a founder and a friend, a learner, a parent, a skeptic, a citizen. The healthiest labels are provisional, useful for orientation, never for confinement. Seeing people as processes rather than positions restores dignity to the person behind the title and returns complexity to lives too often reduced to a single, marketable noun.