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Personal Finance | Reality Check

Five Money Strategies That Absolutely Failed

Proof that content money-making schemes don’t work.

Just Hanging Out

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Photo by Studio Minerva

I was curious about how all the hopeful predictions from positivity gurus actually faired over time, so I took a look back at a variety of articles and posts from 2020 and 2021, that were created by some of the leading “life coaches” and self-proclaimed “personal development experts.”

Spoiler alert, the content didn’t age very well at all.

During that journey through the universe of nauseating optimism devoid of critical thought and facts, I discovered something more troubling than just the simple reality that productivity pushers have been wrong.

What I found was that these very same people are today making very disturbing statements that are outright hostile to knowledge and thinking.

Here are just a few examples:

“Abnormal people don’t watch the news. Staying informed is a mind disease.”

“Fearbait is the number one way to make money online. It’s a form of entrepreneurship. America is going to be fine. Don’t be fooled by these jokers. Politics doesn’t help.”

“Stop having political beliefs, they’re just making you mad

Apparently, being “abnormal” is the new trendy way of describing being successful, or ahead of the curve. Before the pandemic, social media was littered with self-help rants that told everyone to be “uncomfortable,” as that was the purported secret keyhole to success.

Well, guess what, during the pandemic, we all got to be really uncomfortable for at least two years, and it didn’t bring about wild amounts of success for most of us.

Obviously, the tone had to change during the pandemic, so the collective message morphed into “be humble and find your own unique voice.”

This was an easy one to sell because it means absolutely nothing, and so it requires no further explanation beyond the utterance of a ridiculous phrase.

Apparently today, now that the masks are off and people are out breeding in person again, the cool thing to be is “abnormal.”

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