Money Cannot Be Manifested

20 May Money Cannot Be Manifested

By Liz Janowski

5/14/24

Preamble

I tried to leave social media with a dramatic flourish in December 2022. I made a post, a video and a declaration about how social media was nothing but a non-stop ad, the art was all but dead, and any authentic content was nothing but the “free lunch” between a series of self-created infomercials from your old college room-mates who had re-cast themselves as brand ambassadors and coaches.

But the truth was, I was still lurking in the shadows, checking the feeds of people I liked, and haunting the posts of those I hated even more, on a daily basis for almost all of 2023. I started posting again, in ways that were meant to be “cool” near the end of that year, but the truth was I was back in the game … wanting to be “liked”, and spending just as much time scrolling as ever before. I was a cog in the wheel, just as much as ever before, a set of eyeballs fed to the algorithm just consuming content served up to keep me chained to my phone.

And then, something miraculous happened…I got locked out of my Instagram and my facebook. It was for a completely ridiculous reason. I had an old phone number attached to the account and one day, poof, I just got locked out. Without any way to get back in, I lost interest in social media all together. I’d get on my phone, and push the buttons but when I couldn’t pull anything up, my tastes quickly changed, and I found other ways to spend (waste) my time. It was like watching something drift away, and the only thing I can say I missed was some vague notion that I “should” care about what people were up to. I just reminded people that I actually did not know about their vacation or their big news, and to please just tell me in person, which, honestly, is a lot more rewarding, and what I had wanted in the first place.

The Point

Even before my dramatic and then forced social media Exodus, I had been rallying a One-Woman campaign against what I see as the nefarious and poisonous culture of Internet coaches. These are the shiny, often beautiful, young, mostly-white female coaches that operate in a network of sameness and offer to teach you things like “money manifestation”, “embodiment”, “wealth consciousness”, “sex.money.leadership”, “wealth wingwoman”, “earth-based money consciousness”, “somatic embodied wealth”, “sexy mastery of money” and other related nonsense jargon. These coaches’ feeds tend to be filled with photos of mostly themselves gyrating, posing, leading enviable lifestyles, looking sexy, emoting, and posting large quotes that offer quixotic advice about your body, your sex life, your feelings, and money.

The vagueness is part of the appeal, and the overt sexuality and extreme emotionality is all meant to pull at your heart and your wallet strings and make you want to be them, or rather a copy of them, because what they are selling is definitely not a product or skill, but a way of being – or a “mindset”- that is about wishing, believing, masturebating, shadow-working, and dreaming your way in to all the wealth, love, good sex, and life-style-ness that you “deserve”. Shouldn’t you make “six-figures”, just like them, by getting your “love life”, “sex life”, “head space”, “shadow work”, “body issues”, “little girl stuff” all worked out, right? And then, you’ll be rich! And if you’re not making the BIG money, it is because something is wrong with your body, sex life, dating life, and your thinking. It’s because you have not done THE work, babe. It isn’t because of society, the economy, capitalism, your gender, or the profession you picked. You just didn’t manifest right, and something is wrong with you!

Clearly, this is manipulative and demoralizing. But it is just sexy and slick enough to play off what many women consumers want to hear – which is “manifest yourself to wealth”. It’s The Secret retooled as a pyramid scheme for the many. However, what can’t be clearly emphasized enough is that very few people sit at the top of this pyramid, and the way that they do this is by creating new bricks in the scheme. Mini coaches must be created to keep the big coaches going. What these coaches are selling is programs to teach you how to create your own programs. But who is selling actual skills or goods? Where does the buck stop? How many self-empowerment or manifestation or “hot money”, “sexy, wet masterclass”, “pussy energetics”, “empress”, “alchemists of wealth”, “somatics of the dollar” masterclasses can one person pay for before they realize that they have bought essentially nothing?

I am going to say what no one wants to hear. The way that you make money is this: you sell your time for a wage. You learn a skill that people want to pay money for and then you sell your time for performing that skill. If you want to earn more money – because working on a time/wage living is a grind – then you have to find a newer, higher paying skill, or charge more per hour.

Many, many people want to earn a passive income, and that’s awesome. That is where you find something that pays you when you aren’t working, like a rental property or investments (like the stock market). But you need to have money to buy those things. That is how rich people get richer.

They’re really are not many shortcuts to making more money.

You can write in your journal 1000x : I am rich and then masturbate with a crystal wand and post a story about it on Instagram, and maybe some other ladies will pay you to teach them how you did that… but even that is a skill. That is not manifestation… that is a skill called “I am teaching people marketing”. It is really odd marketing if you ask me, but it is marketing to girls on Instagram who will pay me to teach them how to market like me.

You are learning something, but let’s be clear, it isn’t magic, or manifestation, it is a very specific kind of marketing, called marketing to become a coach to other coaches using pyramid scheme-like and vaguely predatory techniques that includes rapid price changes ($999 today and $1222 tomorrow), self-focused branding (all photos of me), sexuality-intensive selling (I am in my bra all the time), non-sequiturs and unproven sales strategies (vague quotes), emotional manipulation (stories about my personal life and successes only and a few testimonials), and hard-sells (work with me or you’ll fail).

My Most Recent Internet Dive Was My Most Disturbing

After my recent break from social media, I was very disturbed to tip-toe back in and see what I had anticipated. However, it was disturbing to see it spelled out so clearly. As early as late 2019- 2020, I had seen the collapsing of the sex and money – as if “how good your sex life is” was equal to “how much money you have”. What a terrible and destructive false equivalency. I assume that the female “embodiment” and “wealth” coaches peddling this were selling this insidious lie for two reasons: (1) sex sells and this allowed them to be sexy online while still talking about money (no one is really hot for Suzy Orman) (2) the coaches needed something to talk about on their feeds … and this gives them fuel to talk about their break-ups and hookups, and new underpants and post sweaty gym selfies, etc..

It is a terrible, unproven message that builds on body shame and sexual shame and fallacious logic – and allows people to be ridiculed for being both underprivileged financially and supposedly sexually non-normative or confused. It’s really a double edged sword of pain that I am sure keeps them in clients. I can heal your sexual issues and your money issues. I find it so despicable and unrepentant that it’s beyond the pale. (As a teacher for many years, I can tell you that almost everyone believe that others are having better or easier sex and many, if not most, women have sexual abuse in their past, and so I find this lie so intensely despicable.)

What your financial status has to do with sex is so illogical, and unkind, that this sort of abusive marketing needs to be exposed for the pain it does to girls and women and these “coaches” brought to moral justice.

However, a new level of logical collapse has overtaken the coaching and instagram world, and I find it to be even more poisonous. This has to do with wellness and the body itself. It seems the coaching industry has now strayed from simply the status of your love life — “how well you love is how well you are paid” (I saw at least 30 of these posts) – to “how healthy you are” // “how well you care for your body” …is how wealthy you are. If you aren’t throwing your laptop or phone down at this point, are you even following me? Would you say that to a child? Honey, one day, how much money you have will be determined by how sexy, how good you are at loving, and how healthy you are? The collapsing of things entirely out of someone’s control, like how healthy they are, or possibly in their control, like their well-being but with something like money, status, capitalism, the levers of power, and class, with the body and health is so viperous and wrong … do I need to say more?

Please do yourself a favor, unfollow every coach. Pull out now. It’s not only wrong, it’s cruel to yourself. Think about “little girl you”… think about your daughter or your niece… are these the messages your body and your soul needs?

Pull any bricks you have in these absurd pyramid schemes out now – and find a safe space to love, to be loved, and to be with people who aren’t trying to manipulate you or extort you for wild sums of money. These coaches themselves have likely been manipulated by coaches bigger and more powerful than them, and they need the pyramids to collapse around them so that they can see the light and find new ways of being.

I am sure this post, if anyone reads it on my outdated blog, on my tiny page, won’t make me popular, but coaches, I love you, too. Let’s get a hug and let this crazy thinking go.