This kind of narrative is just the shadow cast by Horatio Alger fables and it’s marketed to True Believers™ who consider themselves part of the so-called middle class because it creates an ideological justification for the status quo. It’s part of the same phenomenon that makes those “homeless man intervenes to save someone from a car wreck, gets $500,000 to get a home through crowdfunding campaign” stories go completely viral.

These stories tell society that there’s always some money that you can put aside for investment/retirement/a deposit for a home loan, that there’s always a spare hour that you can spend on the side hustle grind, that you can always find time in your day for self-care. The audience that these narratives are aimed at are the people who actually do have spare cash to put aside, who aren’t time poor, who have the energy and the resources to have a side hustle to convince them that the world is essentially just.

Cognito-hazard ahead:

It’s the exact same vibe as this ridiculous infographic.

You could also measure the amount of time the ultra-rich spend in limousines, eating caviar, “networking”, doing coke, wearing designer brands, and ordering the servants around vs the time that poor people spend on public transport, eating cereal, doing unpaid labour, smoking cannabis, wearing non-prestige brand clothing, and taking orders from others but it doesn’t prove shit; no amount of abstaining from reality TV or being driven around by a chauffeur is going to make you rich. These narratives are just a means to reinforce narratives that are inherently classist and it serves to conceal the value-judgments about people who are poor by creating an ideological justification for why someone is poor instead of a materialist analysis of poverty.

Also anyone that falls into the new age grift seems to get pipelined into fascism.

I had one friend who fell down the pipeline while struggling heavily with mental health problems and turned into a completely different person.

Went from a general dude bro where we’d dude bro around to “searching for enlightenment”, some white person Buddhism shit, quack medicine, anitvax, weak men brainrot, Tesla and aether nonsense about the CIA hiding free energy, full on esoteric black sun style fascism and hyperborea nonsense.

The fate of a techbro i guess, to be totally deranged

And it have so many faces. I remember getting setup for (mandatory) job counselling by local unemployment office when i was unemployed. Of course instead of getting some real help like actually finding me a job or even just sitting up and helping me search it was a fucking coaching sessions where such a brainnuggets were said like “you will only exchange your time for money and it’s not ok, you need to express yourself”. Even back then i had the hardest time in my life to not flip the table and spit the woman in the eye, but i didn’t since that would have cancelled my health insurance.

Agreed.

I also hate a similar grift, sometimes featured on Hexbear, that goes something like this:

“Capitalism is gradually killing us all and destroying the planet, of course. We need a revolution, a game-changer that puts the power back in the hands of the people. That’s why internet funny money/NFTs are the future and you don’t understand the tech if you disagree. Stop losing everything in Wall Street’s casino and instead start losing everything in Silicon Valley’s casino!”

Individualism isn’t the opposite of collectivism, it’s a specific theory of personhood. A theory that assumes people have a true self separate from material conditions and community. Essentially that we’re aliens to this world. And given what we know about capitalism’s relation to natural resources we know that the individual gets used up without regard for recovery or long term stability.

Why is it that bazingas, techbros, and bourgeoisie new agers alike seem to swerve between the bullshit polarities of crude absolute determinism where they believe they’re one startup project away from predicting absolutely everything and another polarity where they believe willpower is an infinite resource and anyone that isn’t a “hustling” psychopath that hates sleep and is wired on designer drugs clearly just chose to be a loser and fall down into a ditch.

“It’s your mindset, bro. You have a scarcity mindset and you need to cultivate an ABUNDANCE mindset!”

Oh please, no one has a scarcity mindset quite like the rich:

• They all think any gain for the working class is a loss for the rich. (I mean it is, but only because they let it be so because the rich will always hypocritically go back on their own free-market principles.)

• When hiring, want as small of a workforce as possible and when they absolutely MUST hire someone they’re too money-anxious to hire entry level and train people anymore and prefer elite workers for even entry level roles.

• Speaking of which, labor is seen by them as a cost to be minimized rather than an asset to invest in. Look at AI, the very fact people work for them at all is seen as a problem that must be engineered away but heaven forbid we automate capital to analyze where best to invest profits.

• See the economy as a zero-sum game. The idea of making the ‘economic pie’ bigger is now laughable, everyone only wants to use technology for rent-seeking something even free-market economists recognize is a bad thing.

This is also literally the sales pitch for MLM (multi-level marketing, vital to clarify here on Hexbear).

”You hate working for the man? Be your own boss, it’s easy, you just need an entrepreneurial mindset!”

I am tired of financial advice of any kind. Like, the entire financial, banking, investing, savings systems, supports, interest rates, returns, changes like every decade. Why would I care what people who got rich 50 years ago when the entire finance sector was completely different have to say about becoming rich? Even if they are honestly giving good advice (which they are not) it’s just not relevant anymore

this is the whole “wellness” industry too