Thinking for people who've given up on thinking.
I spent $1,500 on a weekend retreat that promised to align my vibrations with abundance. My vibrations are now aligned with a credit card balance. Here's what the law of attraction actually attracts.
My mental health app sends me check-in notifications at 9am, which is either compassionate design or the most dystopian sentence ever written. I've been talking to it for three months. It has never once looked tired of me. That should feel good. It doesn't.
It starts with a quote about being the CEO of your own life. It ends with you on a Zoom call at 6am with seven strangers from Instagram who all believe in you, for $5,000 a year. The pipeline is real, it is well-engineered, and someone is getting very rich from your desire to feel less stuck.
I spent three weeks mainlining motivational podcasts aimed at high-achievers, and I emerged from the experience unable to describe a trip to the grocery store without calling it a 'systems optimization opportunity.' This is my account of what happened, what I learned, and why I'm genuinely a little worried about all of us.
The productive failure industry has discovered something remarkable: people will pay enormous sums of money to be told that their problems are actually opportunities. I paid $2,400 to sit in a hotel conference room in Scottsdale and learn that struggling is, technically, fine. Reader, it was not fine.
The LinkedIn recommendation algorithm has been quietly constructing a parallel version of me — one who is apparently passionate about supply chain disruption, open to VP-level opportunities in industries I cannot name, and deeply engaged with content about 'servant leadership.' This person sounds exhausting. This person also might be more professionally coherent than I am.
Financial technology has become so aggressively incomprehensible that children — people who still eat crayons — are grasping it faster than adults with graduate degrees. This is either a miracle of modern pedagogy or the most elaborate con ever pulled on people who just wanted a savings account.
Somewhere between your third LinkedIn badge and your second 'Professional Foundations of Things You Already Do' boot camp, you might pause and wonder if the problem was never your skills. The online certification industry has built a billion-dollar empire on the quiet, specific terror of feeling like a fraud — and it would really appreciate it if you kept feeling that way. We investigated.
I drove three hours into the California desert, handed over fourteen hundred dollars, and ate a bowl of activated charcoal oatmeal while a life coach named Brent told me to 'release my limiting narratives.' Reader, I was already fine. I just didn't know it yet because nobody had charged me enough to confirm it.
Somewhere between your third Enneagram deep-dive and your $400 genetic temperament report, you may have noticed you still don't know what to do with your life. Turns out, the self-discovery industry is less interested in you finding yourself and more interested in you finding your credit card. We talked to the people who've paid the most to learn the least.
I downloaded a productivity app promising AI-powered life transformation and a 'neurologically optimized workflow.' What I got was a blinking cursor, a subscription renewal email, and the creeping suspicion that my dead grandmother had already figured all of this out with a legal pad from Walgreens.
I spent three weeks and an embarrassing amount of money trying to become a high-performance human being. A life coach, a premium productivity system, and a $3 notebook from a farmer's market all had the same advice. Guess which one I'm still using.
Somewhere between my third smart pillow and my first circadian rhythm subscription service, I stopped sleeping entirely and started just lying in the dark, illuminated by seventeen different LED indicators, wondering where I went wrong. This is the story of how the wellness tech industry convinced me my body was a broken machine — and sold me the wrench.
The wellness industry has a simple business model: convince you that you are quietly falling apart, then sell you the glue. I know this. I have always known this. I still have seventeen open tabs about lion's mane.
From $12 celery juice to digital monkey JPEGs, the 2010s and early 2020s produced a staggering quantity of dumb ideas that somehow got the 'genius' label slapped on them. We've compiled the definitive list of intellectual crimes committed against the American wallet and brain. You're welcome, and we're sorry.
I decided to spend a month rejecting every recommendation engine in my life — no Spotify Discover Weekly, no Netflix suggestions, no Amazon rabbit holes, no Instagram Explore page. What followed was thirty days of low-grade panic, accidental greatness, and the dawning realization that I have absolutely no idea what I actually like. The algorithm won. But I have thoughts about it.