Yeah this just in: they’re actually freaking miserable. Yep, the people who’ve been trying to convince us we need to optimise ourselves into oblivion are admitting, one by one, that they’re living in their own personal hell. Alex Hormozi, who’s built a massive $200M empire on the premise that suffering leads to success, sat down with Tony Robbins and genuinely asked for help on his podcast. Productivity guru Tim Ferriss just wrote a blog about the trap of self-optimisation. So, is the beginning of the end for the hack-your-way-to-success industry (and the creators behind them)?

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

I’ve been writing a little bit recently about how our lives are too damn frictionless, too easy. We’ve optimised the living hell out of everything and it’s making us soulless and unhappy. You see, tech companies succeed in making us think of life itself as inconvenient, something we need to escape from, into digital straight jackets and padded rooms. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Moving is tiring. Reading is boring. Hell, so are movies nowadays if they’re too long.

Frictions, we can eliminate. And we do. Jason Farman, a design professor who built his career on usability principles says that was a big mistake.

“We’re detached, alienated, and disconnected. The smooth, frictionless surfaces of user-friendly design haven’t delivered the satisfaction that we were promised. Instead, they’ve made it easier to stop paying attention to what’s happening behind the scenes. While usability and UX design have given us tools that were meant to empower us—translating complexity into beautiful and intuitive interfaces that put us at ease—too often they have, in the end, trained us only to disengage.” Welp.

You also need to be whimsymaxxing. Especially if you’re looking for love. According to The Times, Whimsy is the buzzword for dating in 2026. You’ve all been taking things too seriously. It's time to frolic in a field or some sh*t. This represents a new trend that encourages daters to lean into their playful side in the pursuit of love, and embrace their uniqueness, quirks, and weirdness. In the last six months, Hinge said the number of dating profiles mentioning the word has risen 143%. It’s nice to see our culture move away from sameness and seriousness tbh.

One thing we are not doing is AImaxxing. But Meta is. Shock! Tens of thousands of people have been paid by a company part-owned by Meta to train AI. How, exactly? By combing Instagram accounts, harvesting copyrighted work and transcribing pornographic soundtracks.

Scale AI, 49%-controlled by Meta, recruited low-paid “taskers” to scrape social media and label disturbing or ethically questionable content to train AI through a platform called Outlier. The workers report deception, surveillance, and psychological harm. Of course, this raises concerns about exploitation, privacy violations, and the hidden human labour powering supposedly automated AI systems. Another shock! 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

I listened to him spout on about "f*ck happiness” and “I build businesses because I don't know what else to do." Alex Hormozi is a 36-year-old American businessman who made his fortune in the fitness industry, accumulating a net worth of US$200M. He is the current founder and CEO of Acquisition.com.

Tony Robbins is well, Tony Robbins. This seemed like two men at the top of their field about to shoot the sh*t. But it wasn’t. Hormozi, famously known for his deeply ingrained belief that suffering is required for success, was almost… vulnerably asking for help.

Then, on March 4th, Tim Ferriss, the guy most famous for his book on self-optimisation, recently posted a blog called "The Self-Help Trap: what 20 years of optimizing has taught me," with a picture of an ouroboros eating its own balls.

Yeah, Ferris was finally admitting that the entire pursuit might be making people worse; comparing it to a dog chasing its own tail.

The people we've been worshipping for life hacks and self-help advice are admitting they're unhappy, they don't have it figured out, and the endless grind that disregards your feelings, life, and energy is - guess what - making them miserable.

Anyone who dared challenge this narrative in the past got called lazy and broke.

I look at David Goggins and, I say this with all due respect, see a traumatised man literally inflicting pain on himself and calling it discipline. His entire brand is suffering as virtue. And millions of people watch him run ultramarathons on broken legs thinking that's what success looks like.

The self-optimisation trap works like this: you're not productive or disciplined enough. There's always another morning routine to master, another hack to implement, another metric to track. Sleep optimisation, productivity systems, biohacking supplements, cold plunges, morning pages, evening reviews.

You turn yourself into a performance machine. Except the performance never ends. The metrics keep moving. And suddenly, you realise you've optimised yourself into a life that feels like work, even when you're not working. You've gamified existence until there's no space left for actually living.

The "rise and grind" mentality got major pushback and people started talking about work-life balance, setting boundaries, recognising burnout.

But this is different. This isn't just rejecting the grind. This is the gurus themselves admitting the entire framework is broken. Hormozi saying he builds businesses because he doesn't know what else to do isn't hustling. That’s avoidance—using productivity as a shield against dealing with actual human emotions.

Tim Ferriss spent 20 years teaching people how to optimise their lives and he's finally saying maybe that was the wrong question entirely. Maybe the problem isn't that we're not optimised enough. Maybe the problem is treating ourselves like systems that need optimising.

The entire creator economy around self-improvement depends on you feeling inadequate. If you felt competent, if you trusted yourself to figure things out, you wouldn't need their courses, their coaching, their frameworks, their morning routines.

They need you to believe you're doing it wrong. That you're not disciplined enough, not optimised enough, not hustling hard enough. They need you to outsource your decision-making to their systems, because that's the product.

This is institutional infantilisation – but for the productivity crowd. Keep people feeling incapable of basic life management without expert guidance —> monetise their learned helplessness —> build platforms on the foundation of other people's insecurity.

And it worked brilliantly until just now… when the people selling the optimisation started admitting it made them miserable too.

The answer isn't another framework. PLEASE, I promise you it's not "mindful optimisation" or "sustainable hustle" or whatever the next rebrand will be.

The answer is learning to do things without creators telling us how to live.

What if you just... tried things? What if you figured out your own morning routine through trial and error instead of copying someone else's? What if you trusted yourself to know when you need rest without consulting a productivity guru? Hello. These are simple things... we can totally do them???

This terrifies the creator economy because competent people don't buy courses. People who trust their own judgment don't need frameworks. The entire system relies on you believing you need to be taught how to live.

Some will pivot, I guess.

Some will admit what Hormozi and Ferriss are starting to say - that they built empires on foundations that made them miserable. Some will double down and insist you're just not optimising correctly.

But the ones who've built platforms on your perceived inadequacy will likely struggle. Because once you realise you don't need to be taught how to live, their entire value proposition evaporates.

We optimised ourselves into hell, and the people who sold us the map are finally admitting they're lost too. It’s time we stop treating yourself like a system that needs debugging.

Maybe trust that you're competent enough to figure out your own life without turning existence into a performance optimisation problem. Because it’s exhausting.

The gurus already tried that and look where it got them, babe. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

This trend uses the trending sound "Take Me Home Tonight" and plays on the idea that all you need to fix your life is a very specific combination of things. In the first slide, creators write “I just need…” followed by a list of oddly specific requirements that would supposedly solve everything. Think medication, a walk, a niche lifestyle change, or a very particular environment.

Then comes the punchline. The second slide cuts to a photo of the creator as a child, usually paired with the text “girl wtf”, reacting to the very adult list of coping mechanisms their future self apparently needs to function.

The humour comes from the contrast between the calm, self-aware list of what you need now and the confused judgement of your younger self who absolutely did not see this coming.

Start with a photo or video of yourself. Add onscreen text beginning with “I just need…”, followed by a list of oddly specific things that would supposedly fix your life right now. Then switch to a childhood photo of yourself for the second slide with the text “girl wtf”.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Georgia Russell, Intern

😲WTF: Is this Ai
✨Daily inspo: You're never too old, or young?
😊Soooo satisfying: If you want to fall asleep, watch this
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Fresh, quick, healthy, yummy

Hey Ross!

If you're starting out, think of this as your information gathering phase. You don't know what your audience wants to see from you, so there's no point spending days or weeks trying to create the perfect piece of content. Instead, you should go for quantity at this stage. Try stuff and figure out what content style resonates. Then pay attention to your engagement.

What kind of reach are you getting? Are those people turning into followers? Where do they drop off in watching your content? Use this data to refine what you're doing. Eventually, you'll want to make incremental changes to improve the overall quality of your content. But for now, you are trying to figure out what content style will work for your brand, so go for volume. As we like to say, quantity leads to quality.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.