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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.