A lot happened for me in 2017. I quit my first salaried job (it was awful), started freelancing full-time, realized I was living below the poverty line, took a new salaried job (awful but in a more tolerable way), and moved from Kentucky to California. That's a lot for one year, but to be fair, the freelancing-to-need-a-job pipeline was pretty fast.

As a freelance writer, if a client knew what they wanted or could hand me a brief, I did great. But if I had to coach them through the process or otherwise work with them on the strategic side of the content creation process? That was a different story. I didn't yet have the business chops to handle all the work outside of writing that came with the territory. From finding new clients to figuring out what to charge, I was pretty much in the dark and didn't know who to turn to for insight or advice.

Ultimately, I ended up doing what I always did: going to a bookstore. After some Googling and trying to figure out what questions I should even be asking, I came across a book called You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero that seemed to have an active and vocal following. Since making money was exactly what I was struggling to do, I bought into the book's promise right away and started reading. I don't recall what I expected, but what I uncovered was a book built on new-age talking points and vagaries that, if fully embraced, would somehow lead to wealth.

At the time, I thought there was something exciting about the book. I wanted to believe that I, too, could actually start making money, and I found myself trying to figure out how to apply the book's concepts.

In the intervening years, I haven't revisited or thought much about that book. Until today. Today, I was scrolling Instagram and got an ad for a tool that claims to make it possible to create a "$250,000 offer" in a matter of minutes. Did it say what kind of offer or for whom? No, silly! Just create the offer! Ambiguity be damned.

What I realized is that the formula of "our tool makes it possible for you to get rich in a matter of minutes" has become so commonplace that I didn't even bother to take note of the brand's name or dig into what the supposed methodology they use entails. Without even clicking into the ad's landing page, I knew what I would find… a totally unique AI tool that collects information from you (usually it's an idea or topic or audience), followed by a lofty promise of cutting-edge proprietary validation technology that ultimately leads you to having some kind of professional-looking asset you can slap a label on and start selling today.

I work in tech. I worked on developing AI applications that hold patents for their utility. I'm unimpressed with ads like the one I scrolled past because I know how they work under the hood, and I could probably build you a better one in a couple of days. They're so unremarkable that I've started largely tuning them out.

And yet, here I am remarking on it. You see, the thing is, even as I was scrolling and acknowledging how dumb that tool is and making assumptions about how overpriced it probably is, there was a part of me that thought, "Oh, an easy $250,000 would sure help right now." Nearly as soon as the thought popped into my head, so did Jen Sincero and You Are a Badass at Making Money. What clicked for me in that moment is that our current AI oversaturation has led to a surplus of vaporware that's fundamentally no different than the surge of hollow self-help books we've seen over the last decade, in which lofty promises and good feelings sell books faster than the quality of the content. Let's break it down.

Despite the 2010s onslaught of sweary self-help books that might make you think it's a relatively recent phenomenon, hollowly motivational self-help books have been around for quite a while. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich was originally published in 1937. In it, Hill purports that success is a matter of desire, a clear mind, and a plan. Like the thousands of self-help books that would come after, he tries to create and demonstrate a simplistic framework, which he boils down into 13 Principles of Success and an easily repeatable 6-step process for converting desire into gold.

Hill was also a grifter. While he presented his work as a distillation of wisdom from some of the world's most famous industrialists– most notably Andrew Carnegie, who he claimed to have interviewed in 1908– there's little evidence that his writing is backed in research. Or, well, anything. Historical investigations by journalists such as Matt Novak have revealed that Hill's life was defined by a series of fraudulent business practices, fabricated narratives, and outright scams. There is no evidence whatsoever that Hill ever met Andrew Carnegie. Hill only began making this claim after Carnegie died in 1919, ensuring the industrialist could not refute the story. Furthermore, Hill fabricated claims of advising U.S. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, even falsely claiming he coined FDR's famous phrase, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself". Hill's actual business ventures included a lumber scam where he bought materials on credit and fled, a fraudulent "Automobile College of Washington" that promised to make anyone an expert car builder in six weeks, and a deceptive oil company (General Oil Company) that drew charges from the Federal Trade Commission in 1919 for using his Golden Rule magazine to lure investors into a swindle.

But hey… the book makes you feel like you can succeed, right?

Over time, more and more authors would follow in Hill's footsteps. Getting into recent decades, we see an incorporation of many of Napoleon Hill's same rhetorical devices coupled with pseudoscience that dresses itself up as genuine modern scientific thought.

For example, in 2006, we get the Oprah-endorsed The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Heavily influenced by Wallace Wattles's 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich, the core premise of The Secret is that thoughts act as literal magnets: positive thoughts attract wealth and health, while negative thoughts attract poverty and tragedy. The book went on to sell over 30 million copies worldwide and was translated into 50 languages. So if you're reading this and thinking you're not as healthy or wealthy as you ought to be, I'm sorry to tell you, but it's entirely your fault for not thinking the right thoughts.

While texts like The Secret traffic in mysticism, Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad operates by cloaking motivational vaporware in the language of financial literacy. Kiyosaki contrasts the advice of his highly educated but financially struggling "poor dad" (his biological father) with the entrepreneurial wisdom of his friend's "rich dad" (a figure whose actual existence is highly contested and widely believed to be a composite or outright fabrication).

The book is celebrated by its defenders for introducing basic, accessible concepts, such as the difference between an asset (something that puts money in your pocket) and a liability (something that takes money out). However, a rigorous analysis of the text reveals that it is dangerously devoid of actionable, responsible financial mechanics. Instead, Kiyosaki advocates for extreme risk-taking under the guise of "boldness." He explicitly encourages readers to avoid mutual funds (dismissing them as vehicles for the mediocre), heavily leverage themselves through debt to acquire real estate, engage in insider trading-adjacent behavior in penny stocks and IPOs, and invest heavily in high-risk 16% tax liens.

But it makes you feel good, right?

It's on the shoulders of books like these that we get the sweary, corporate, girlboss self-help books of more recent years. Jen Sincero's You Are a Badass series that I've already mentioned thoroughly embodies this tradition. In it, Sincero relies heavily on the concept of "Source Energy" (which I am pretty sure is just an idea she made up, but haven't found a definitive answer yet) and vibrational frequencies, arguing that individuals remain in poverty because their subconscious minds harbor limiting beliefs about wealth, planted during childhood.

The text exemplifies the fatal flaw of vaporware: a complete absence of practical utility. Critics note that while Sincero speaks endlessly about visualization, high-frequency vibrations, and adopting a positive mindset, she provides zero substantial advice on how to actually generate revenue or structure a business. Moreover, the advice she does provide is often wildly irresponsible. She explicitly advises readers against saving money, encouraging them instead to take massive financial leaps of faith—such as buying a luxury car they cannot afford or going into debt to hire a life coach—under the delusion that the universe will "move for you" and provide the funds afterward. She argues that debt can be "good" if it forces the universe to back you up.

Sincero– like her contemporaries Rachel Hollis, Mark Manson, and plenty of others– manages to convince readers that by reading their books, they're already on track to living a better life, even without putting in any actual work. Their books are full of feel-good fluff that has a sheen of positivity and pleasantness on its surface, but doesn't actually say much of anything. For example, this is a real quote from You Are a Badass at Making Money:

Note that this totally deep excerpt is in the same book where she talks about manifesting $85,000 to appear so that she could participate in a life coaching program just with her mindset alone when, in actuality, she already had access to a network of ultra-high net worth individuals and a mega-rich friend just gave her the money. As for how it was framed in the book: she was just really bold and had the right mindset, so the universe caught up with her.

This oeuvre of motivational vaporware has a consistent central mechanic: it emphasizes self-determination and always comes back to persistent positivity. That's by design.

Let's go back to Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich for a moment. When it was published in 1937, the American economy was still reeling from the Great Depression and was in the midst of facing a new economic dip after government spending on New Deal programs was cut back. At its worst, the Depression saw unemployment rates of over 25%, mass homelessness and evictions, and significant wage cuts. When people are desperate or barely keeping it together, hope is almost as welcome as a full belly.

Think and Grow Rich was the blueprint for this genre of books, not just for its content and framing. The way it leveraged a cultural backdrop of uncertainty to make its unfounded premise more compelling is also something that has consistently been emulated.

The demand for these books typically surges during periods of severe economic instability, job market volatility, and macro-level crises, such as the 2007-2008 financial crash or the COVID-19 pandemic. As traditional social contracts—such as lifelong employment, pensions, and robust welfare states—have eroded and been replaced by the gig economy and at-will employment, workers face immense economic anxiety.

Sociologist Micki McGee refers to this modern condition as "belaboring the self". As the labor market becomes less secure, the continuous labor of self-improvement becomes a frantic coping mechanism for the stability that institutions no longer provide. When people face job loss, inflation, or stagnant wages, a book promising financial control and boundless wealth through "manifestation" offers an immediate, albeit illusory, sense of security and psychological relief.

Politically, this genre serves as the ultimate cultural expression of neoliberal ideology, which advocates for deregulation, privatization, and shifting the burden of success and survival entirely onto the individual. Sociologists Eva Illouz and Edgar Cabanas argue that the self-help and positive psychology industries effectively act as instruments of social control. By insisting that success is purely a matter of personal mindset and grit, these books rebrand systemic political failures—such as poverty, racism, unequal distribution of care labor, and a lack of healthcare—as personal psychological deficits.

If citizens are taught that their poverty or burnout is caused by their own "limiting beliefs" or a failure to maintain a positive attitude, they will turn inward.

This individualization of systemic issues effectively neutralizes political unrest. They are encouraged to buy self-help books, meditate, and hire life coaches rather than organize for labor rights, demand corporate regulation, or push for social reform. As social critic Barbara Ehrenreich noted, enforcing a culture of mandatory optimism pacifies dissent, discourages critical thinking, and preserves the political status quo.

But, again, these kinds of books are all about selling a feeling, not anything substantive. In many ways, it's like oil companies pushing for individual consumers to calculate their carbon footprints. You get the feeling that you're doing something meaningful while intentionally looking away from the bigger picture and the root of the problems you're trying to avoid.

Earlier, I mentioned that what sparked this reflection for me was an ad on Instagram for an AI product that promised to deliver $250,000 offers to users in ambiguous, lofty language.

To bring things full circle, I see significant overlap between the kind of feel-good self-help motivational vaporware I've spent the last however many words grilling and the proliferation of AI-powered software that carries with it lofty promises of success, idea validation, or big-ticket sales.

Like the books I've been discussing, these tools can't really back up the claims that they make, but they can create the sense that you're doing something meaningful. If a tool is claiming to make you a $250,000 offer that you can sell, what it's actually doing is calculating the statistical average of:

And then packaging that up into a neat package for you, while reinforcing the idea that you're on the right track because it is incentivized to do so. Even if it did manage to come up with a compelling offer for you to sell, it can't tackle the biggest parts of entrepreneurial success on your behalf: having a platform, being trusted, being liked, understanding effective distribution, and having the confidence to sell and promote yourself.

Yet even as someone who understands how these tools work– and the effort that goes into entrepreneurship and trying to launch something from scratch– as I mentioned, I still found myself drawn to the idea of an easy $250,000.

I suspect that it is because none of us are impervious to the economic and cultural forces at play around us. Even as someone with a senior tech professional salary who lives in an area without senior tech professional costs of living, my condition would be greatly improved by an extra quarter of a million dollars. As would anybody who isn't among the ultra-wealthy! We have an incredibly uncertain economy with the absolute dumbest individuals possible at the helm of our political and economic machinery, meaning we're in an ecosystem where wealth equates to security. It creates certainty and confidence to have surplus cash on hand when you're fully aware that a rogue social media post could wipe out your 401k.

People buy motivational vaporware books when they're scared, desperate, or feeling uncertain. I suspect people will buy motivational vaporware software when they're scared, desperate, or feeling uncertain, too.

But not you. You, dear friend, are a badass at resisting vaporware.

Until next time,
Blake