Personal branding is becoming less about followers and more about making your work visible. There was a time when your résumé was supposed to do most of the talking. Your degree, job experience, skills, and a few carefully chosen bullet points were enough to tell a recruiter who you were. Now, people are doing something different. They are posting projects on LinkedIn, sharing what they learned, documenting their careers, starting newsletters, making videos, and talking publicly about the work they are doing. LinkedIn is probably the clearest example of this shift, moving from a place to simply search for jobs toward a platform where professionals build visibility and personal brands. And it's not only influencers. Students are doing it. Developers are doing it. Designers, marketers, founders, freelancers, and even people with full-time corporate jobs are doing it. So why is everyone suddenly obsessed with personal branding? The internet has made professional reputation visible The easiest way to understand the change is to compare two candidates. Candidate A: Has a good résumé with Python, SQL and data analytics listed under skills. Candidate B: Has a similar résumé, but has also shared three projects, explained how they solved a problem, posted a dashboard they built, and written about something they learned. Neither candidate is automatically better. But Candidate B has left behind something Candidate A hasn't: proof of activity. LinkedIn's 2026 research found that 22% of GenZ are building apps, websites, or other projects to showcase their skills. LinkedIn itself recommends documenting these projects, including what was learned, what problems were solved, and what the outcome was. That's a big shift from simply saying, “I know this.” You can now show it. Personal branding isn't only for getting followers This is where the term gets confusing. Personal branding sounds like something reserved for creators who want millions of followers. It isn't. For someone looking for a job, it might simply mean making their work easier to find. For a freelancer, it could mean letting potential clients see how they think before hiring them. For a founder, it can mean building familiarity with the person behind the company. For a creator, the audience can eventually become customers. The path can look something like this: Share useful work → become familiar → build trust → create opportunities And those opportunities don't always look like a product sale. They can be: A job interview A freelance client A collaboration A speaking invitation A business lead An investor introduction A customer LinkedIn's 2026 research also found that 44% of Gen Z consider not having the right network their biggest barrier to landing an entry-level role. At the same time, 21% say they are creating their own opportunities through side hustles or businesses. That makes being discoverable more useful than it used to be. People are starting to realise that audiences can become customers This is probably the biggest reason personal branding has moved beyond LinkedIn. A founder can spend years trying to convince strangers that their company is worth paying attention to. Or they can build an audience around their expertise first. Someone follows a founder because they explain an industry well. Another person follows a fitness creator because the advice is useful. Someone else follows a designer because they enjoy seeing how projects are created. Eventually, some of those people may buy something. That's why the line between creator and business owner has become increasingly blurry. The audience isn't necessarily the product. Sometimes it is the distribution channel. And the platform you choose can change how that audience grows. But there is an important catch. Followers don't automatically become customers. An audience can get people to try something. It can't make a bad product good. That's why personal branding works best when there is something real behind it: expertise, experience, a useful product, or an opinion worth listening to. But now everyone is starting to sound the same There is a strange irony here. Personal branding is supposed to make you different. Yet scroll through LinkedIn for long enough, and you'll start seeing the same posts everywhere. “Three lessons I learned...” “Here's what nobody tells you...” “I'm excited to announce...” “5 things every founder should know...” AI has made this even easier. You can now turn a basic thought into a polished professional post in seconds. Which creates a new problem. If everyone can look professional online, looking professional isn't enough anymore. People need something more specific to remember. Maybe you're the person who explains complicated technology simply. Maybe you share unusually honest lessons from building a business. Maybe you post useful data-analysis projects. Maybe you have a strong point of view about your industry. The topic doesn't matter as much as having something that feels like yours. Your personal brand can actually be quite small This is probably the part people forget. You don't need 100,000 followers. You don't need to become a LinkedIn creator. You don't need to post every morning at 8:07 AM with a carefully engineered hook. A personal brand can simply be the reputation you build around your work. A recruiter remembers the student who consistently shares interesting projects. A potential client remembers the freelancer who explains problems clearly. A founder remembers the person who keeps writing thoughtful things about their industry. A customer remembers the person whose advice helped them six months earlier. That's enough. Because personal branding isn't really about becoming famous. It's about becoming memorable for something valuable. So, why is everyone suddenly obsessed with it? Because the internet has changed the distance between what you can do and who knows you can do it. Your résumé still matters. Your qualifications still matter. Your actual work matters even more. But now you have another option. You can show people what you're building, what you're learning, and how you think before they ever meet you. Some people will use that to get a job. Some will use it to build a company or to turn an audience into customers. Others will simply make sure their work doesn't disappear into a pile of résumés. Maybe that's the real reason personal branding has become so popular. People aren't necessarily trying to become influencers. They just don't want to be invisible. Keep reading such interesting stories on The ScreenLight.

Social media can inspire us to explore the world, but it can also change how we experience it. For a generation that grew up watching their parents spend most of their lives working, saving, and postponing things for later, the idea of “I'll travel when I retire” doesn't sound particularly attractive. Why wait? Life is short. Work will still be there when you come back. So will the emails. That mindset is one reason travel has become more than a holiday for many young people. It is a break from routine, a chance to see something unfamiliar, meet new people, try different food, or simply spend a few days somewhere that doesn't look like the view from the office window. But there is a strange part of modern travel. We leave our everyday routine behind, only to carry a smartphone that records almost everything we do. So, has travel become more about creating content than experiencing the place itself? We’ve explored a similar question before: has travelling lost its meaning in the social media-crazy world? We don't just discover places anymore. We discover them online. Before social media, you might hear about a beautiful destination from a friend, a magazine, or a travel show. Now, you can see the hotel, the mountain viewpoint, the café, and even the exact angle for the photograph before booking the ticket. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Delta's 2026 global Connection Index found that 73% of travellers had taken a trip specifically to see something they first discovered online. At the same time, 79% said that experiencing something in person feels more meaningful when so much content can be generated or altered digitally. That contradiction is worth noticing. Social media can make us want to leave the screen and experience something for real. The screen can actually become the reason we travel. The rise of the “hidden gem” traveller There is another change happening. A lot of young travellers aren't interested in visiting only the obvious tourist attractions. Travel itself is changing too, from set-jetting and coolcationing to noctourism and wellness trips. They want quiet beaches, lesser-known villages, small cafés, mountain trails, and places that don't already look like everyone's holiday album. The phrase “hidden gem” has become almost a travel category of its own. And social media is very good at finding these places. A creator discovers a quiet viewpoint and posts it. Thousands of people saved the video. A few weeks later, the “hidden” location may be sitting on hundreds of travel itineraries. Research backs up the influence of this content. A 2025 study examining travel influencers found that influencer content can affect how people process information and make destination choices across different stages of the travel journey. Another study focused specifically on Indian Gen Z found that the perceived authenticity of influencer content can influence attitudes and intentions around sustainable travel. So yes, people are being influenced by what they see online. But that doesn't mean they're travelling only for Instagram. A photo can be a memory, not a performance This is where the conversation often becomes unfair. Someone taking photographs during a trip isn't automatically showing off. Maybe they want to remember the place. Maybe they want a video of their friends laughing five years from now. Maybe they know that life changes quickly and want something tangible from a particular moment. There is a difference between documenting a memory and performing a memory for an audience. But what does travel look like from the creator's side? This video explores the reality of creating travel content, including the part that viewers don't always see. The first one can make an experience more meaningful. The second can sometimes take us away from it. Imagine standing in front of an incredible sunset. You could take a few pictures and then put the phone away. Or you could spend the next 20 minutes changing angles, checking the lighting, recording another take, choosing music, and wondering whether the final Reel will perform. The sunset is the same. But your relationship with it isn't. When the camera becomes the reason for going The real problem begins when the content becomes more important than the trip. A destination gets popular because it looks beautiful online, so people go there mainly because they want the same photograph. A restaurant becomes a must-visit because everyone has posted about the same table. A hotel room becomes desirable because of one particular mirror selfie. At that point, travel can become less about “What will I experience here?” and more about “What will I post from here?” And there is a quiet pressure behind that question. If everyone else's holiday looks incredible online, your own trip can start feeling like it needs to look incredible too. That can turn travel into another form of performance. Maybe young people are actually travelling more for life, not likes This is the part that gets missed. Young travellers aren't necessarily choosing travel over real life. For many, travel is part of real life. They've watched parents spend decades working around responsibilities. They've seen how health, family commitments, and age can eventually make spontaneous travel harder. So, they don't necessarily want to wait for some perfect future version of life. They want to see the mountains now. Swim in that sea now. Eat that food now. Take that road trip with friends now. And if they also make a Reel from it, that doesn't automatically make the experience fake. Research from Delta's 2026 report supports this broader desire for real-world connection. 84% of surveyed global travellers said they felt a strong desire to travel and connect with new places and people, with the feeling particularly strong among Gen Z and Millennials. The content may simply be the record of something they genuinely wanted to experience. So, has travel become more about content than experiences? Sometimes. But not as much as the question might suggest. Social media has changed how we discover places, choose destinations, and remember our trips. It has also created a temptation to turn every experience into something shareable. But taking a picture doesn't mean you weren't present. Posting a video doesn't mean the trip was for attention. The better question is what came first. Did you travel to experience the world and create a memory from it? Or did you choose the destination because you already knew it would look good online? Maybe the real luxury in travel today isn't visiting the most expensive place or finding the most Instagrammable view. It's being somewhere beautiful and, for a moment, not feeling the need to prove that you were there. Keep reading The ScreenLight for more travel stories.

Amit Kilhor has built a large social-media audience by questioning the UPSC ecosystem. For millions of Indian students, UPSC preparation becomes a way of life. Years go into coaching, test series, current affairs, mock papers, and repeated attempts. Social media then adds another layer, with topper interviews, study routines, and motivational videos constantly reminding aspirants that the next attempt could be the one. Amit Kilhor has spent enough time inside that world to understand it from both sides. He is a UPSC educator, mentor, and public speaker who has taught subjects including Polity, Ethics, Environment, and Current Affairs. StudyIQ's own course material lists him as having appeared in six UPSC CSE Mains and three interviews, along with other competitive-exam interviews. His journey is also part of why his commentary attracts attention. Public material around his career describes years of UPSC preparation before he moved into teaching, including a period associated with StudyIQ. He later developed his own educational initiative, ResolveIAS, which describes itself as an Amit Kilhor initiative focused on UPSC preparation, mentorship, and simplifying the examination process. But today, calling him simply a UPSC teacher doesn't really explain his online presence. His YouTube channel has grown to more than 700,000 subscribers, while the social profiles available in recent searches show roughly 1.2 million Instagram followers and close to 100,000 followers on X. Those numbers put him well beyond the traditional coaching-class audience. He is now speaking to a general internet audience that may not even be preparing for UPSC. From Teaching UPSC To Questioning the UPSC Culture What stands out when you actually watch Kilhor speak is his manner. He doesn't always sound like someone trying to make every viewer comfortable. When he believes something is wrong, he tends to say it directly. Sometimes that comes across as blunt, sometimes as provocative, but there is a noticeable lack of hesitation. That style fits the audience he has built. His content isn't restricted to "how many hours should I study?" or "which book should I read?" He has increasingly discussed bureaucracy, government decisions, education, social issues, and the pressure surrounding competitive examinations. A recent long-form conversation with Prakhar Gupta, for example, covered topics ranging from bureaucracy and India's growth to Gen Z, social media, and public outrage. His own UPSC experience gives that commentary another layer. Someone who has gone through multiple Mains attempts and interviews knows what prolonged preparation can look like from the inside. It isn't difficult to understand why his content sometimes questions the idea that every aspirant should keep pushing indefinitely simply because UPSC is considered one of India's most prestigious examinations. That is where our headline's use of the word "cult" becomes interesting. It isn't suggesting UPSC is literally a cult. It describes the culture that can form around the examination, where clearing it can become so important that students start measuring their intelligence, career, and even self-worth against one examination. Kilhor's social media presence increasingly asks people to step back and examine that mindset. The Videos That Turned Him into More Than an Educator One of the clearest examples is his video “What is the UPSC certificate controversy?” The video has crossed roughly 269,000 views and 12,000 likes on YouTube, showing that this isn't a small discussion happening inside a coaching classroom. The subject itself is sensitive. Kilhor has discussed allegations around the use and verification of reservation and disability certificates and questioned whether some candidates may have benefited from irregular documentation. Those claims need to be described as allegations rather than established facts about individual candidates. The larger issue, however, has received official attention too. The Department of Personnel and Training ordered verification of complaints involving alleged irregularities in reservation certificates used by the civil-service officers in 2025. His content also taps into another frustration that UPSC aspirants understand very well: unpredictability. After the 2026 Prelims, his criticism of the paper became part of a much wider online discussion about whether the examination had become excessively obscure. A Reddit discussion around the paper mentioned his viral criticism and attracted more than a thousand upvotes, with users debating whether the exam was testing administrative ability or simply increasingly specific trivia. That is an important reason his videos travel. He doesn't always introduce a completely new problem. Often, he gives a public voice to frustrations that aspirants are already discussing privately. What His Audience Actually Thinks About Him The reaction to Kilhor is far from unanimous, and that may actually be one of the most interesting things about his profile. Some viewers see him as someone who says what other people are afraid to say. In discussions around his certificate-related content, supporters have argued that questioning possible corruption is necessary and that his failure to become a civil servant doesn't automatically disqualify him from criticising the system. Others strongly disagree, calling his approach biased or suggesting that some of his conclusions go beyond what the available evidence proves. That split tells us something about his influence. People aren't simply watching him for notes anymore. They are forming opinions about the issues he raises. His videos become discussion points, his clips move across social platforms, and his name appears in conversations that have little to do with conventional UPSC preparation. There is also a sizeable group that simply finds his style too aggressive. Some Reddit users describe him as someone who has turned into a constant critic, while others defend him precisely because he is willing to criticise institutions and public figures. And that is probably the most human part of his social-media story. Watch him for a while, and you can understand why some people trust him. He speaks with the confidence of someone who has already spent years inside the system he is talking about. But that confidence can also make people question whether he sometimes becomes too certain about issues that deserve more evidence. Why Amit Kilhor Matters Beyond UPSC The bigger story here isn't really one educator or one YouTube channel. It is the changing role of online educators in India. A decade ago, a teacher's influence largely depended on classrooms, coaching institutes, and printed study material. Today, an educator can become a commentator, interviewer, creator, and critic at the same time. Kilhor's career reflects that shift. He moved from being known primarily for UPSC preparation to building a much wider digital identity through YouTube and other social platforms. ResolveIAS itself now presents its educational work as a student-focused platform built around focused preparation, simplified explanations, daily plans, and mentorship. But his personal social presence has moved beyond selling the idea of simply clearing an exam. He talks about what happens around the exam too, including bureaucracy, public institutions, social pressure, and the choices young Indians make. There is an obvious danger in that model. The larger the audience becomes, the more carefully every claim needs to be checked. Kilhor has himself faced scrutiny over content he shared. BOOM previously fact-checked a video he posted involving police officers and Khan Sir and found that the footage was old and unrelated to the claim attached to it. The post was subsequently deleted. That doesn't erase his broader criticism, but it is a useful reminder that the person questioning the system must also be questioned. Perhaps that is what makes Amit Kilhor worth following, even for someone who has no intention of appearing for UPSC. He isn't simply telling young Indians how to enter one of the country's most prestigious institutions. He is asking them to look at the culture surrounding that institution, question what they are being told, and decide whether spending years chasing one examination is actually the life they want. Not every criticism he makes will necessarily be right. Not every controversy he discusses will have a simple answer. But his willingness to raise uncomfortable questions has made him more than another UPSC educator on YouTube. He has turned the UPSC classroom into a much bigger public conversation, and social media is where that conversation is now happening. Keep reading The ScreenLight to know more about such interesting social media personalities.