The Grift That Won’t Die: Common Life Advice from Influencers
by Laurie Ruettimann
The most dangerous advice in your feed right now is coming from someone who believes they’re helping you, charges for the privilege, and never had to verify a single claim they make.
You know the type. The life coach with a course about unlocking your potential. The Millennial feminist who talks about breaking barriers but hasn’t engaged seriously with the history of those barriers. The corporate influencer who posts about authentic leadership but doesn’t mention that three of their last four recommendations were sponsored. They’re all running the same business model and you’re the product. But when did this actually start?
In 1937, Napoleon Hill published “Think and Grow Rich” and handed the self-help industry its founding ideology. Hill argued that poverty is a mindset problem, failure is a product of “stinking thinking,” and the gap between where you are and where you want to be is a failure of personal discipline. Systemic barriers, economic conditions, health, luck, and the circumstances of birth don’t matter. You’re the problem, and you’re also the solution. Hill claimed to have interviewed hundreds of successful industrialists to build this case. Many of them were dead before the book came out. Several have no documented connection to Hill at all.
The ideology survived because it’s useful to anyone who wants to sell you something on the internet. Your fear of failure, your hunger for improvement, your genuine desire to be a self-directed person who takes ownership of their life, all of that is available for monetization. Grifters don’t have to create your anxiety. They just have to show up with a product that promises to fix the thinking problem Hill told you that you had. The unaccredited life coach calls it transformation. The girl boss strips out race, class, and disability and calls it empowerment. The undisclosed influencer collects a check from the vendor they just recommended to you and calls it “insider knowledge.” I’ve been around long enough to see how the packaging updates every few years. The bullshit doesn’t.
What’s different in 2026 is the scale. The person delivering you time-tested wisdom may be generating that content with AI tools built by companies that have redirected enormous resources away from human education, human relationships, and genuine human development toward computation and energy consumption. The advice is older than your grandparents, but it feels new because it’s rolled out on a liquid glass interface.
Want to spot the nonsense for yourself?
Here’s a list of the core content you’re scrolling past every day, and the danger behind the advice if you don’t apply some skepticism. I almost tagged every piece of life advice on LinkedIn and IG, but I didn’t want to be rude and aggressive. So I’m just being passive-aggressive. I’ll own that.
Show up on time. Vince Lombardi said, “Early is on time. On time is late.” Many kids are taught that punctuality is a character issue. As adults, we know it’s a capacity issue. Chronic illness, disability, caregiving responsibilities, and unreliable transit aren’t discipline problems, and a life coach who’s never navigated any of those obstacles has no business presenting this as universal truth.
Never burn a bridge. Oh really? This assumes equal power between parties, which is a bold guess. The thought leaders handing out this advice usually have enough options that burning a bridge carries no real cost for them personally.
Save six months of expenses before you need them. We used to say that Boomers loved to trot this out, but it turns out that Boomers are also broke. This advice is just math that ignores other math, delivered by people of all generations who lack empathy and the ability to read headlines about layoffs and affordability.
Keep your word and do what you say. The principle matters, but only to a point. This advice is used to pressure people into honoring commitments made under duress, with incomplete information, or without real power to negotiate the terms in the first place.
Don’t complain unless you’re willing to offer a solution. I’ve said this myself, and I kind of hate it. The person experiencing harm isn’t always the person best positioned to fix it. This advice silences people with the least access to solutions, which works out well for the people in power.
Never discuss money, politics, or religion at work. I’m taking a class on how my Judaism can inform my pro-democracy work, and I will talk about it to everyone. Unfortunately, keeping your opinions to yourself was advice invented by and for people who could afford to treat these topics as optional. For everyone else, silence about real-world topics protects oppressive systems. It also creates a barrier between people with differing opinions who should really come together and understand one another.
Dress for the job you want. This advice is often turned into a policing mechanism directed at women, working-class people, and people of color who didn’t conform to a default image of professional authority, and almost never at the people who already fit that image. I love fashion. I adore a great outfit. Adding a navy blazer and calling it progress is still the gross girl boss move in 2026.
Finish what you start. This is the first step in the oppressive push for productivity. Depression, ADHD, chronic illness, and legitimate changes in circumstance all produce unfinished things. Also, some things suck. Stop doing them, please. Treating completion as a moral imperative ignores that sometimes completion is overrated, and also not as important as we think it is.
Call your mother/father. I think the “no contact” movement is problematic, but I also think that letting people walk all over you is wrong. For a lot of people, stopping that call was the healthiest decision they ever made, and no life coach whose methodology is “love and light” is qualified to weigh in on that.
Learn to cook at least five things really well. I heard this advice from my grandmother who wanted me to be a good wife. Thankfully, I married someone who can cook. But this advice also implies full physical capacity, kitchen access, energy, and time are doing a lot of work in this one. There’s also embedded shame in eating processed foods, which is classist and undeserved.
Stay out of debt. The financial literacy industry is on my shit list for 2026. Debt isn’t usually a choice. Presenting a credit card bill as a silly mistake made by an irresponsible human being converts a structural economic problem into a personal failing, which is exactly what a financial wellness company wants you to think.
Marry someone you actually like talking to. This is true, but it’s also heteronormative by default, and often delivered by someone who found a good situation and now sells you their story. If you’re going to marry, there are a lot of reasons behind the decision. Who says you have to get married, anyway? Who says you have to fix the so-called falling birth rate and also be in a monogamous relationship with someone of the opposite sex?
Learn to shake hands firmly and make eye contact. Early on, I was told that women need to shake hands better. And some dude taught me how to do it. I mean, okay. But this specific white-collar American cultural norm excludes people from cultures where these behaviors read differently. Not everyone wants to touch your sweaty hand or look into your crusty eyes. This can be challenging for autistic people for whom eye contact is genuinely distressing, and people with physical conditions that make a firm grip painful. Nobody who teaches this as professional development has ever explained why they left all of those people out.
Write thank-you notes. I go back and forth on this. Thank you notes are nice, but what’s actually being evaluated here is familiarity with a specific set of class-coded rituals.
What should you do with all of this?
Before you share anything from this list, just stop. Ask whether the credentials are verifiable and relevant to the specific advice being given. Also, whether paid relationships with recommended products and companies are disclosed. And what about whether or not it’s even correct?
I’ve spent a long time studying the personalities and archetypes that dominate corporate life. If you’re not sure whether someone in your feed is worth your time or just running a very old playbook with a new logo, find me. I’ve got your back on this one.
The grift survives because it goes unexamined. Drag it into the light and throw some bleach on it.