Coaches
Of our five children, none of them have a personal brand and none of them have goals of becoming an influencer.
Now, before you think this is a post about parenting or some self-congratulatory thing where we’ve kept our kids sheltered from the “big bad world” of being online… it’s none of that. This is an indictment of the coaching industry and creating a life online in general.
We have never sheltered our children. If they want to do something, we support it. Without hesitation. Sure, we investigate for safety and all that – but if they want to do something and it’s legal and it won’t kill them… go for it. We’re here to help.
And not one of them wants to be an influencer.
They’re not alone.
The next generation is – in very large part – ambivalent or outright disdainful of being online in the capacity that so many coaches and influencers and alpha bros have made their living being… and selling that you must be.
COVID was the best thing that has ever happened to the “coaching” industry and the worst thing that’s ever happened to marketing.
Every idiot who was bored or broke (or bored and broke) and sitting at home decided that they could hop online and make some money.
And for a while – they did.
People were so bored and so worried that they’d buy almost anything – often just to have people to talk to and cry with.
Then things came back to “normal.” Yes, it’s stilted and weird – but normal.
People got back to work. Businesses started doing business things.
They stopped being online perpetually.
The kids who were in their teens when the Wuhan Flu popped off are adults now – working, voting and becoming an increasingly important part of the buying public.
They’re still online – but they’re interested in entertainment and groups of like-minded people.
They’re massively distrustful and outwardly mock influencer culture. They don’t want to buy into a culture they don’t trust, want or – in a lot of cases – see a need for.
And they’re also keenly aware of the negative effects of what being perpetually online has on a human being. They watched their parents go through it – and watched plenty of people twist themselves into the ground pursuing it. They learned from the mistakes and they learned that most online marketers only sell participation in… more marketing.
Coaching – especially after the COVID mess settled down – has started to eat its own tail.
It became people selling courses, masterminds, communities, consulting and coaching… about how to sell courses, masterminds, communities, consulting and coaching.
How to “be authentic.” What happens after that? What have you actually been taught?
Nothing.
You paid to participate. You paid to be sold to.
And the upcoming generation? The people entering the workforce, voting and becoming the next major generation of consumers for all the shit these coaches are trying to sell… they see it because they saw it being built.
Somewhere along the way, marketing stopped meaning “make something useful, find the people who need it and give them a good reason to buy it.”
It became performance.
You weren’t supposed to just run a business anymore. You had to become a personality. Build a personal brand. Post every day. Share your journey. Tell your story. Be vulnerable. Be authentic. Make videos. Build an audience. Become a “thought leader.” The plumber, the accountant, the designer, the guy pouring concrete and the woman running a bakery were all suddenly supposed to become minor celebrities in addition to doing the thing they actually went into business to do.
And a massive flock of self-appointed experts and grifting nitwits arrived on the scene to teach them how.
The mathematics of it all is where it starts to get really fucking stupid – because all of this was sold as a business model!
Build an audience. Monetize the audience. Sell your knowledge. Create a course. Start a community. Charge for access. Develop some “passive income” and, at least theoretically, you could eventually escape the drudgery of having a regular job or running a regular business and dealing with regular people.
Except somebody still has to buy all this shit.
For every person making six figures selling a course about making six figures selling courses, there has to be a much larger group of people on the other side of the transaction paying them, hoping to make six figures themselves.
For every coach bragging about a $50,000 launch, there HAVE TO BE customers whose combined bank accounts are now $50,000 lighter.
The money isn’t being created by the system itself.
Eventually somebody at the end of the line has to sell something to someone who has absolutely no reason or right to become another coach, creator, consultant or thought leader.
To maintain, there has to be an actual fucking customer.
Otherwise the money just keeps moving around inside an increasingly ridiculous and furiously shrinking ecosystem where everyone is simultaneously the expert, the student, the product and the prospect.
Eating itself.
And the people who reliably make money regardless of whether any of it works are the platforms, the software companies, the payment processors, the advertisers and, naturally, the people selling you another fucking course about how you’re doing it aaaaaaaaaaaaalllll wrong or you’re just not being cute n’ sassy enough online.
And that’s the part I think is finally starting to fall apart.
Exposure isn’t a product.
Attention isn’t a business.
A follower isn’t a customer and an audience isn’t a market just because a little number next to your name keeps getting bigger.
You can have 100,000 people watching you and still have absolutely nothing of value to sell them.
You can call yourself a founder, a coach, a creator, a thought leader or the CEO of whatever fucking thing you registered last Tuesday, but eventually somebody has to exchange money for something that has value beyond helping them get more people to look at them.
Otherwise it’s just optics and optics can look an awful lot like success for a while. That’s the whole trick.
The rented backdrop looks like an office. The podcast appearance looks like expertise. The follower count looks like demand. The mastermind looks like a business meeting. Revenue screenshots look like a functioning company.
Everybody involved agrees to behave as though everybody else is wildly successful because the illusion works considerably better when nobody asks where the money actually comes from.
But eventually somebody does.
The generation coming up behind us is asking that question a lot earlier.
They’re not abandoning the internet. That’s not my point. They’re online all the fucking time. They use it to talk to their friends, find people who like the same weird shit they like, learn things, watch things, make things, buy things and entertain themselves. Would they want to be TikTok stars? Sure. Easy money for goofing off. But…
What they don’t seem particularly interested in doing is turning themselves into the thing being sold.
They watched us do that. They watched adults turn breakfast into content, vacations into content, children into content, marriages into content, hobbies into side hustles and personalities into brands. They watched people spend years feeding a machine because somebody convinced them that enough attention would eventually turn into a business.
And they watched a lot of those businesses disappear the second the attention moved somewhere else.
So, no – I’m not particularly concerned that none of my five kids wants to be an influencer.
I’m increasingly relieved.
I hope they build things. I hope they make things. I hope they start businesses, write books, make art, fix cars, teach people, invent something ridiculous or spend forty years doing something they’re extraordinarily good at and never once feel compelled to tell strangers what they had for breakfast.
And if they use the internet to help them do any of those things, fantastic.
That’s what it’s for.
It’s a tool.
It was never supposed to be a life.
And certainly not a life you need a fucking coach for.
