Life Dysmorphia: How the Internet Turned Our Dreams into Products

Many years ago, when I was starting my business, I'd attend free seminars hosted by big names in the startup scene in Australia. These events would last anywhere from half a day to three days. Speakers would come on stage, motivating the audience to believe that the most effective way to generate wealth and prosperity and attain the life we dream of is to start a business. They'd quote people like Jerry Rice: 'Today I will do what others won't, so that tomorrow I can do what others can't.'

The speakers would tell of their own entrepreneurial journeys. Stories of how they struggled in their day-to-day lives, but then found the gym, and waking up early and meditating and niching down and posting every day and hustling and investing in themselves. And today they drive a white Maserati and get invited to spend time with Richard Branson on his island.

Invest in yourself. At face value this seems like insightful and reasonable advice. Learning never goes to waste so level up your skills, your potential and your intellect. And after hours of being told that you too can be Maserati-rich, the organiser would stand on stage and sell their course, or mastermind or whatever, for a once-in-a-lifetime discount, so that you can learn from them and attain the amazing lives and happiness they experience.

What they didn't tell us is that they made their money selling bullshit courses and not actually doing the thing that you might care about. They'll tell you how they started their school but won't mention that starting an entrepreneurial business school is very different to starting a surfboard shaping shop.

That was my first introduction into what would become a much larger phenomenon.

To understand how these seminars evolved into the relentless online hustle culture we see today, I need to make mention of passive income and how it was hijacked and weaponised against us and our deepest insecurities.

Passive Income

The idea of passive income was introduced to the mainstream by Robert Kiyosaki. The concept focuses on the idea of generating exponential wealth by separating your time and physical labour from your ability to make money. In other words, one should aim to make money while sleeping.

Because Kiyosaki wrote his famous book in the 1990s, his reference for passive income focused mainly on royalties and rental income.

Then the 2000s came along and at some point, someone decided that online courses were a good way to make money while you sleep. And online courses saw exponential growth. It hit a point where startups were developing software to help people create online courses.

However, the marketing of these courses borrowed from how the startup gurus sold their services. The formula is:

1. remind people how desperately unhappy they are with their lives

2. convince them they too can be happy and rich and maybe a bit famous

3. reinforce that investing in yourself is never a bad idea

And watch the cash roll in as your online course makes money while you go for a surf and live your best life in Bali.

The False Promise of Freedom

Over the past twenty years, three seemingly helpful messages which we used to help and motivate our children have evolved to pressure us to become resources our neoliberal economy is able to better exploit.

These messages are:

• You can become whomever you want to be.

• Don't waste your life—every moment provides you with an opportunity to be better.

• A good life is one where you become the best version of yourself.

Along with these platitudes, the attention economy has given us a definition of success that we all can work towards and aspire to. Success now boils down to achieving at least one of three things: obscene wealth, embarrassing fame or perpetual self-employment. Attaining all three is preferable.

Since the turn of the century, the idea of a single career for life became something that sad people did. People who weren't interested in 'improving themselves', who couldn't 'see their own potential' or 'get out of their own way'.

The internet and the attention economy perverted these messages of freedom and possibility to the point where everyone eventually turned to the internet to seek out happiness. We were told that everyone now had a platform, we were no longer beholden to the media gatekeepers to be chosen and to have our ideas and voices heard. The long tail of interests meant everyone could get an audience, anyone could become successful. The internet made it possible.

For this reason, I now look at my own children and fear that one day when they become adults they'll feel like they're being pushed out into a giant colosseum in front of a multitude of people all chanting, "What makes you special?"

And if they don't have anything extraordinary to show, they'd be labelled failures.

We are told we're free. We can do anything we want with our lives, read or say anything we want online. In fact, outside of a handful of countries, humanity hasn't been more free to actualise their full potential than we are today.

But this freedom is an illusion. We aren't trapped by the limitations of what is possible, we are trapped by the singular, two-dimensional view of what has been defined for us as a successful or good life. Billionaires, celebrities, and entrepreneurs who have (apparently) pulled themselves up by their bootstraps are what we should all be aspiring to.

We aren't free. We are doomed to spend our lives constantly bettering and optimising ourselves in the hopes that we can achieve goals that have slowly been moulded for us by social media algorithms and tech entrepreneurs desperate for validation.

How the Internet Became a Pyramid Scheme

For most of us, our lives in real life aren't all that dramatic or spectacular. Compared to what we see and hear from people who show up on our feeds, our lives are pretty mundane. Most of us get up, go to jobs that don't fulfil us, sometimes we have more than one job, and then we get home exhausted and spend our time either watching shows of how other people live, or scroll through posts of what other people are doing. All of it more exciting than anything we've done.

In between these 'behind the scenes looks' at what people far more 'successful' than us are doing, we get influencers telling us that we can become rich to the point that we never have to worry about money if we pay for their course on how to make bazillions of dollars online doing whatever we're passionate about. And they will belittle and shame the people who work for others in jobs that are mundane and soul-deadening, not for a moment caring that most people work to put food on the table, to pay their mortgages and to look after their families.

And we get what I call life dysmorphia: the chronic sense that our lives are inadequate, distorted by a constant stream of curated ambition, shame-based self-improvement, and performative success. We come to see our own lives as inadequate, fat with disenchantment and bloated with poor decisions and cowardice. And so, we start our online journeys. We will make money making videos, learning how to build apps, writing, drawing, creating. We will become part of the creator economy and shrug off the shackles of ordinary life and become what we were meant to be and just didn't have the courage to become.

Photo by Damir Samatkulov

And all these factors have sculpted for us an internet where users can be divided into six categories:

1. Corporates: The websites banks, airlines, insurers, supermarkets and other established companies maintain. We only visit these for information for purchases or complaints.

2. Small Businesses: Businesses fighting to establish themselves and to scale. They work hard to get an audience and a client base. Many would like to get 'in' with the corporates.

3. Want-to-change-my-lifers: People who go online, miserable with their lives, hoping that if they publish regularly or hit upon something that goes viral, they might be able to change their lives enough to become happy. Most bloggers and people who post regularly on social media fall into this category.

4. The coaches: These are the people who run small businesses, but they prey on the insecurities of the 'want-to-change-my-lifers' and the small business owners. They promise to teach the other two groups how to succeed, how to turn the corner in their lives, or to help their businesses scale and succeed.

5. Teachers: The few that come online solely for the purpose of sharing their knowledge. They get a thrill out of updating wikis and helping others find enlightenment.

6. Everybody else: These are the people who consume what the other five categories publish. They might sometimes comment or occasionally share a post but mostly seek out entertainment or distraction.

There's a saying in poker: 'If you can't spot the sucker at the table, then you are the sucker.' It's true of poker (I'm always the sucker) and of the internet. Most of the people making money online do so at the expense of others. The consensus seems to be that if you can make people feel inadequate enough about their lives (give them a severe enough case of life dysmorphia) then you can get them to give you money or endless stretches of their attention. And all these people do is teach or inspire others to fill the internet with dross and hopefully win the internet attention lottery.

To put it another way, people seem to go online thinking it's the one place they stand a chance of making real 'fuck you' money. What people don't tell you is that if you create work only to make money your chances of garnering an audience or success are vastly diminished. Money-driven creative work tends to be dull, shallow and forgettable.

Reclaiming the Small Life

I've spent a long time trying to work out what happened. How is it that the internet, a place that filled me with hope and wonder, now just overwhelms me with mild dread and low-level rage?

Sure, I've read and written about enshittification, and the attention economy having depressingly shitty incentives, and advertisers being complicit and not doing enough to make things better, and social media being the death of culture and nuance. However, I think the problem is much broader than that.

We need to help one another stop thinking about the work we do and the way it makes us feel as the ultimate litmus test for whether we're leading good lives or not. Defining one's worth according to how much you make, or whether you're famous, or whether you have a boss or not is, in many cases, a recipe for deep dissatisfaction.

I remember after COVID there was much said about the quiet quitting phenomenon. For me, quiet quitting was just a revival of how people in the mid-20th century approached their jobs. They did their work so that they could lead fulfilling lives outside of work. They went into the office, did their jobs and went home. That was the definition of a job—you did the work that was assigned to you, you did it well and then got on with the rest of your life.

The whole idea of work being the cornerstone of how fulfilled we are with life is quite a recent development. Previously poverty and hunger drove people to learn skills and to sell their labour for reward. Work wasn't seen as a gateway to meaning, it was a way to provide for oneself and one's loved ones.

However, as global economies expanded and the number and types of jobs grew exponentially, the idea of self-actualisation took root. With more opportunities and fewer decisions regarding basic survival requiring intellectual bandwidth, people and businesses came to realise that work can be more than just work. If everyone was allowed to do work that held meaning for them then logically, we'd all be happier, and our economies would flourish.

However, we lost sight of the fact that we should do work that's meaningful to us. Instead, we started seeing our jobs and titles as status symbols. The proof of a good job and therefore a great life focused on wealth and recognition. We went from seeking meaning to attaining money and admiration. And, with there being so few of these prestigious jobs, we started competing with one another. It put us all on a treadmill of constant hustling and self-improvement to beat the person next to us.

And over time, we forgot that a life well-lived should reflect the values, passions and interests of the person who lived it. Very rarely would a good life entail fame and fortune.

Instead, I think a good life calls for more individualism and self-knowledge.

If we were approaching the idea of how to lead a good life in a more thoughtful way than defaulting to an aspirational idea of success that's fed to us on a screen, I suspect we'd see a wonderful diversity in how people go about making a life—most of them small and completely unique. And this would make us all more tolerant, happier and more productive.

It's for that very reason I think we should go online and seek out the stories that expand our horizons and challenge our preconceptions. Just because it's difficult to have such an experience, shouldn't stop us from trying to create a valuable online experience for ourselves, and for others. More importantly, it shouldn't stop us from remembering that our worth isn't determined by our productivity, our audience size, or our ability to monetise our hobbies.

The good life isn't grandiose. Instead, it's probably small, intentional, and entirely our own.