Just before university admissions, I learned to be a self-promotional person, so I am guilty of this.
Firstly, you spend a ton of time doing that selling. It takes away from actually doing work. It is also just distasteful. I hate constantly fiddling with my bio.
Second, you end up altering the work you are willing to do simply because some work is easier to sell than other work.
I completely get why people do this as I do it as well, but what is all this costing society?
Absolutely true, absolutely a valid criticism, but it's sort of a 'first level selling'. If you look into people who are REALLY good at what they do, things start to look real different and the value system you're concerned about goes out the window.
Read some of Guy Kawasaki's stuff. That guy is stupidly good at selling, had much to do with introducing the Macintosh back in the day, but it is anything but a burden to him, and if he found he was grinding away selling junk because it was easier, he'd jump out the window.
There is NO substitute for being able to try and convey your excitement about something you're REALLY good at and REALLY care about, and when you are able to bring that to bear, everything is different. I make my living on Patreon 'selling' open source audio stuff I make, and one of my PRIMARY arguments there is, 'this is amazing! Because it is completely liberating! Getting paid this way I get to make weird stuff that maybe only one person will like better than anything, because I NEVER have to hold back and alter things to fit in with what I think the market will bear!"
And it's true… but there is also a market for people who want stuff off the beaten path. I never spend anything on advertising or marketing, and it costs me quite a lot in discoverability, but there is also a market for people who want someone that will not SELL to them in the normal sense, who seems to be out there just doing, and never comes knocking expecting to make 'a sale' or hyping their latest nonsense.
It's not as big a market as the mainstream. But the mainstream simply does not serve everybody.
The bottom line is, if you expect to sell stuff, the most enduring way to do that is to be yourself and then hope like hell there's a market for YOU… because you can fake it, but you can't really get away from who you are. But, if you're prepared to just go full tilt and be consistently who you are, the connections you build are not disposable and don't require trickery to maintain.
When everybody got hit with coronavirus lockdown and were facing great financial risk and the loss of their livelihoods, I worked out an arrangement where I declared that I cut the price of everything more than half, and told all my people on patreon that they should cut back or cancel what they were giving. And I braced myself, certain that I could withstand it: I'd run the numbers and I'd be able to tough it out.
And of course they all did the opposite and gave more, and I got upset and had to be told to allow people to be generous when they wanted to. Because I'd really meant it, it wasn't a 'bit'. And because that was who I really was… yeah. So I got the opposite of hurt, and had the opposite of being out of work. And now I'm trying not to overwork like a madman, knowing that people cared, but also that they wanted me to be well.
If you can be yourself as hard as you can, and it's a self worth being, the idea of 'selling yourself' seems pretty ridiculous ;)
Just before university admissions, I learned to be a self-promotional person, so I am guilty of this.
Firstly, you spend a ton of time doing that selling. It takes away from actually doing work. It is also just distasteful. I hate constantly fiddling with my bio.
Second, you end up altering the work you are willing to do simply because some work is easier to sell than other work.
I completely get why people do this as I do it as well, but what is all this costing society?