At some point in the last decade, being good at life was no longer enough. It wasn’t enough to have a job, or a family, or hobbies. You had to be crushing it. You had to be maximizing. You had to be making six figures on the side, preferably through some convoluted scheme that involves zero actual work and a lot of generic platitudes about “leveraging” and “scaling.” And as soon as you start questioning why this all feels suspiciously like a scam, some smug, aggressively confident guy in a rented Lamborghini pops up in your feed to tell you that you just don’t want it bad enough.
These are the new-age preachers of Monetized American Delusion. Their commandments are simple:
- Time is money. If you’re not monetizing your passions, you’re wasting your life.
- Debt is a tool. But not for you—for them, because they need you to buy their overpriced course.
- Wealth is a mindset. If you’re not rich, it’s because you didn’t manifest hard enough.
And the modern hustle cult has many prophets. Some preach the gospel of real estate flipping, where success apparently comes from “thinking bigger” rather than having actual money to invest. Some push coaching programs that exist purely to teach you how to sell coaching programs to other suckers. Some swear by network marketing, where you can become your own boss—as long as you can convince enough friends and family members to buy into a collapsing financial Ponzi scheme disguised as a lifestyle brand. And then there’s the crowd who promise online riches, convincing you that if you just follow their simple (but expensive) blueprint, you too can be making $50,000 a month while doing absolutely nothing.
But none of them are really selling wealth. They are selling hope—a mirage of financial freedom that only seems to move further away the closer you get. You won’t get rich from their system, because their system only works if you keep giving them money. If their blueprint actually worked, they wouldn’t need to sell it to you in the first place. They’d just be quietly making money, instead of screaming into a handheld microphone in front of a rented yacht.
The genius of these grifts is that they never sell you the thing you actually want. They don’t sell money. They don’t sell success. They sell the illusion of control. The idea that if you just follow their steps, you can transcend your boring, middle-class existence and become a self-made millionaire. Never mind that they got rich selling you this lie. Never mind that their biggest flex is selling a course about how to sell a course. The important thing is that you, too, can be free—right after you send them $999 for “coaching.”
And what happens when the dream doesn’t materialize? When the five-step plan turns out to be bullsh*t? When you realize that the only people making money in dropshipping are the ones selling you the course on dropshipping? Well, it’s not their fault. It’s yours. You weren’t dedicated enough. You weren’t relentless. You should have hustled harder. And so the cycle continues, with the desperate clinging to the hope that the next webinar, the next mastermind, the next “exclusive Discord” will finally be the thing that unlocks it all.
Here’s the truth: you are not a failure if you’re not rich. You are not a failure if you don’t have a passive income stream or a side hustle or a real estate portfolio before 30. But these guys need you to feel like a failure, because your desperation is their business model. And business, unfortunately, is booming.