Why are there so many life coaches in America?

When systems break down, grifting is incentivized

“What’s up with all these life coaches?” a friend texted me the other day. I have now talked to several friends who work either as psychologists or licensed clinical social workers, lamenting the same thing: “I am concerned by this coaching thing. I am seeing these life coaches on instagram claiming that they can heal trauma, but I know that working safely with clients who have PTSD requires a lot more training than a coaching certificate. It requires much more specialized training than I have as a licensed mental health practitioner with a graduate degree and years of clinical experience. What the hell is going on???”

As someone who has one foot in the biomedicine and one foot in traditional medicine, I oftentime get asked these kinds of questions by friends who are professional healthcare workers. To them, the growing interest in “alternative health” is both confusing and alarming — there seems to be a large surge of coaches and other kinds of wellness influencers offering medical and mental health advice that they don’t appear to be qualified to offer. And even more disturbing, these coaches are advertising their services on on instagram and TikTok in the same way an influencer who is advertising a pair of designer sunglasses might.

This past weekend, I saw There’s Something in the Barn, and it got me thinking about this entire life coaching phenomenon and how very American it is. The movie is a horror-comedy about an American family who moves to northern Norway and ends up being harassed and stalked by demonic barn elves of Norwegian folklore. It is very silly, and perhaps wouldn’t be as funny to those less intimate with the cultural differences between Americans and Norwegians. As someone who is, I found myself laughing pretty hard.

The movie roasts both American and Norwegian culture indiscriminately, but one of the things it pokes fun of in Americans, is the incessant influencing and grifting all-American tradition of entrepreneurship. The hero of the story, Bill, is an American father who has relocated his family to (what can assumed to be northern rural) Norway so he can set up an AirBnB at an old farm he inherited from his distant Norwegian relatives. He met his current wife Carol, a life coach and creator of her brand Happy Vision, in one of her coaching seminars while he was experiencing depression after his first wife’s death. The movie pokes fun at Carol’s hypocrisy at providing unsolicited mental health advice to others when she herself is unable to find other coping mechanisms besides fits of rage, wine, and trashy magazines when she finds her relocation to Norway too difficult to bear.

As someone who myself has relocated from the US to northern Norway in the past year, I can tell you that all of the yoga, wellness, and positive thinking could never prepare you for the culture shock and logistical difficulties of relocating to Norway. And then there’s the snow. I have been living here eight months and still cannot open a bank account, have my own phone number (it’s registered to my Norwegian husband), drive, get into the public healthcare system, or legally work until my immigration is processed, which can take well over a year for most immigration applicants. I can also not travel out of the country, without risk of losing my right to overstay my tourist stay in Norway while my immigration application is processed. Although there is a roof over my head and warm food on plate for every meal, a year living completely dependent on your spouse for most things can still take a toll on your sanity even when your basic material needs are met.

It’s not just this difficult experience of immigration, but other hardships that have occurred in the past ten years of my life, that make me eyeroll all of the over-promises that American coaches and wellness influencers promote: I was once like you. Then I changed my mindset using X. Now I am happily ever after. You too, can be like me, and learn how to have an X mindset and live happily ever after. For just $5000 you will learn the secrets of X, and can then charge other people exorbitant amounts of money to learn the secrets of X too. It might seem like a lot of money, but who can put a price on happiness? Escape the corporate grind, and find your dream career in the happiness economy.

Please, if anyone can help me think my way out navigating a very strict immigration system in the middle of an international refugee crisis I am all ears! Wait. Nevermind…

Life is difficult. We can certainly find ways to cope with its challenges that are healthier than others, but nothing we can do, purchase, or “believe” will change the fact that difficulty is a feature, not a bug, of existence. A lot of what upsets me about the wellness industry is that exists as a large MLM predicated on denying this reality, promising others an escape from what cannot be escaped, and shaming them when they cannot for not having the right mindset.

The movie got me thinking — why are there so many more Americans working as life coaches and lifestyle influencers? Sure, we have some of them here in Norway too, but this phenomenon has not taken off in the same way here in Scandinavia. This is completely anecdotal, but I have never met anyone in northern Norway who has actually hired a life coach or ever spoken once about the phenomenon. From the other side of the pond, it is starting to look like Americans are going a bit insane with all of their self-promotion gimicks. Is everything okay over there?

There’s Something in the Barn (2023)

Answer: Supply & Demand

First of all, I want to say that I am not criticizing individual life coaches or workers in the wellness industry for predatory nature of the wellness industry as a whole. I am a systems thinker, who likes to criticize system failures, not individual actors, when things break down. While there do exist predators in the coaching industry, it’s my understanding that most people who get certified to coach do so because they want to work in a profession that involves helping people. And some of them undoubtedly have some talent in this area, and are doing their job responsibly by offering some sort of real service. I am not saying the profession shouldn’t exist at all, but what I do think is that coaches should stay in their scope of practice, and not promise people that they can heal things like PTSD. I am more concerned that the wellness industry is so big and so unregulated, and what it means for healthcare as a whole when so many people are turning to instagram and TikTok for serious things like mental health advice.

Many people I talk to in the US are miserable at their jobs are looking to escape them and do something else. A lot of this has to do with pressure in the US to overwork, often for large companies, where workers feel like their only purpose is to make rich people even richer. A lot of US workers are experiencing stress, depression and a sense of meaninglessness when it comes to what they do for a living. When a coach comes a long and says “I was once like you, now I work for myself healing others and I do it from a yoga resort in Bali or my little, romantic permaculture cottage in the woods” it can be tempting to buy whatever they are selling.

In contrast to the US, a full time job in Norway is clocked at 37.5 hours a week. If you work more than that you get overtime pay, and if you work evenings or Sundays, you also get overtime pay (at a much higher rate than your base pay). You are entitled to that pay, and no one thinks of themselves as “lazy” if they don’t overwork without getting properly compensated. People here feel comfortable denying their boss’ requests to overwork because there are better labor laws and better union representation that will back them up if their employer tries to exploit them. I’m not saying Norway is perfect, because I have heard of many bosses who try to illegally pressure their workers to work more, especially when they are immigrants, but workers here do have much more success sticking together and arguing for their rights when it does happen.

In addition, in Norway most people are middle class and content with that. Having “just” a middle class salary isn’t a scary, slippery slope, that makes you one paycheck away from homelessness, it is completely normal and respectable, and something most people don’t relentlessly aspire beyond, because they have other things to do besides work all of the time. There exists public healthcare, free college tuition, and other public programs so that Norwegians are in less debt and less financial precarity. There are also better disability benefits if you are dealing with a chronic health issue, and public job assistance if you have trouble finding work. In general, people here are much less stressed about their work, and less scared of losing their jobs on a whim than they are in the United States. And none of this is considered communist or radically left wing — it’s still considered capitalism, just better regulated.

There is an over-supply of coaches in the US, because many of these coaches were once coaching clients who then shelled out a lot of money to become coaches themselves. Much like the education system in the US, they want a return on their investment. They also want to do something meaningful with their life, not just grind life away while being exploited at some large corporation. Coaching and other forms of self-employment tease an escape from both the stresses and meaninglessness of corporate life. If you think about it, this is entirely understandable and the answer doesn’t lie in blaming anyone for wanting better working conditions for themselves. As long as there are other unhappy Americans in the same position with some extra cash, life coaches and lifestyle influencers who market themselves successfully will get clients.

I myself am not immune to this phenomenon. I have paid money to dubious people who promised dubious cures for my health ailments (in addition to the traditional healers who I do believe have genuinely helped me). I have blamed myself for being lazy and not resilient enough, when my health deteriorated after being consistently asked to work overtime at a corporate job, and falsely believed that more yoga and meditation classes would fix me. I have worked as a yoga teacher, often doing free labor for yoga companies by means of marketing my classes in super cringe ways, because I wanted the “opportunity” to work a meaningful part-time job on top of my stressful and soul-sucking full time one. While in acupuncture school, I felt enormous amounts of pressure to market myself and exaggerate the benefits of what acupuncture can actually do on social media, so that I could get clients after shelling out $80k for a degree that is essentially free in Norway.

But here is the thing: life coaching and wellness influencing functions as a giant MLM that is built off the back of the current dysfunctions in the American labor, education, and healthcare systems. The existence of a large, alternative wellness industry is not an answer to this disaster, but more askin to disaster capitalism swooping in like a vulture as these system failures worsen. I don’t blame the individual coaches trying to save their own butts in a sinking ship, but I do blame the United States for its inability to regulate its economy, in terms of labor rights, student debt, exorbitant healthcare costs, and health advertising. (It is illegal in Norway for an alternative or complementary health practitioner to claim they can heal PTSD).

America, I say this because I love you and will always love my home country: you are going to have to find a way out of your collapsing healthcare system and fight for better labor protections. You should stop conceiving of yourself as lazy just because you are not over-working yourselves into sickness, anxiety, and depression. You are going to have to do better research to discover which alternative health practices actually work and should be integrated into mainstream healthcare (or serve as a complement to it), and which are snake oil, so that you don’t continue turn to snake oil salesmen for all your problems. The reality is that most aren’t going to “make it” as lifestyle guru, and it’s going to be the slimiest of sef-promoters who rise to the top of the wellness industry and eat all the rest of you for breakfast. We’d love to have you in Norway, but immigration here is damn near impossible, not to mention the demonic barn elves.