Why the machine needs you a little lost to keep you a customer.
I want to walk through something I had to see clearly before I could trust my own read on anything, money, training, AI, all of it. The attention economy isn’t doing what most people think it’s doing. It isn’t monetizing your clicks. It’s monetizing your identity crisis.
Sit with that, because once you see the mechanics you can’t unsee them. A click is just the receipt. The product being moved is your sense of who you are and whether you’re okay. And the uncomfortable part is that the machine runs better when the answer is not yet, not quite, almost.
I run a gym in San Diego. I’ve been in strength and sports nutrition for thirty-four years. I’ve watched the supplement industry, the coaching industry, and now the AI industry all use the same engine, and the engine is this: confused people are easier to manipulate, doubtful people are easier to sell to, and disconnected people are easier to shape. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just what works, so it’s what gets built.
The customer the machine actually wants
Think about who the worst customer is for an outrage feed, a supplement funnel, or an AI-tool launch.
It’s the person who already knows what they’re doing.
A clear person is a bad customer. They don’t reach for the next fix because they’re not bleeding from the last one. They open the app, get the one thing they came for, and close it. They read the headline, recognize the hook, and keep walking. They hear “this changes everything” and quietly ask “for whom.” That person is a leak in the system. Every piece of the machine is tuned, on purpose or by accident, to keep that person rare.
So the offer is almost never the actual product. The actual product is a small, renewable wound. A little doubt about your body. A little fear you’re behind on the technology. A little suspicion that everyone else figured out the thing you missed. They sell you the wound, then sell you the bandage, and the bandage is designed to come off.
I’m not above this. I live next to the loudest version of it right now. The AI hype channel is a wonderful study in manufactured incompletion, a new tool every week, a new reason you’re already obsolete, a new guru who’ll save you for $97. I use AI every day in my actual operation. It’s useful. But the channel around it isn’t selling tools. It’s selling the feeling that you’re falling behind, on a loop, forever, because a calm operator who already has a workflow doesn’t buy the next course.
More inputs is the disease, not the cure
Here’s where most people get the counter wrong. They feel the confusion, correctly diagnose that something’s off, and then reach for more. More podcasts, more frameworks, more newsletters, more opinions. They try to out-input the noise.
That doesn’t work, because more inputs is the disease, not the cure. You can’t read your way out of a problem caused by too much reading. Every new voice is one more hand on the steering wheel of your identity, and you wonder why you can’t feel the road.
The counter isn’t addition. It’s subtraction.
The operator I worry about isn’t the one who knows nothing. It’s the one drowning in opinions, forty tabs, six gurus, three contradicting strategies, and no idea which signal is actually his. He doesn’t need a better input. He needs to strip away what’s distorting the signal he already has until he can hear himself think again. Cancel the subscriptions. Mute the accounts that leave you feeling behind. Stop asking eleven people a question you could answer by paying attention for one quiet week. Clarity isn’t something you acquire. It’s what’s left when you remove the static.
A test you can run in your own chest
People ask me how you tell real signal from noise when everything sounds confident. I don’t trust the noise in my head for this, the head is exactly where the marketing lives. I go lower than that.
Notice what contracts your chest versus what expands it.
I’m being literal. Read an offer, sit with a decision, listen to a pitch, and feel your body. There’s a tightening that comes when something is pulling on your fear, working an angle, selling you a wound. And there’s an opening, a small expansion, when something is just true and useful with nothing attached. That bodily yes and no is older and more honest than anything your anxious, over-fed mind will tell you. I’ve used it on supplement reps, on coaching offers, on people who wanted to put their name on my work and on people who wanted my name on theirs. The body knew before the head finished arguing.
It’s not mystical. Your nervous system has been collecting data your whole life. It just doesn’t get a vote when the feed is loud. Subtraction is partly about turning the volume down enough that you can feel it again.
Name the cost honestly
I won’t sell you the clean version of this, because that would make me one of them. Here’s the cost.
The clearer you get, the louder the world gets.
Not because you’re wrong, because you’re a problem. A person who can’t be confused breaks the loop the machine runs on. So the machine turns up the volume to get you back. The offers get more urgent. The fear-of-missing-out gets more personal. People who liked you better uncertain will tell you you’ve changed, gotten arrogant, gotten cold. What’s actually happened is you stopped reaching for the next fix, and your absence is felt by everyone whose business model depended on your reaching.
That’s the trade. You give up the comfort of the search and you take on the noise of the people who needed you searching. I think it’s worth it. I’ve watched too many strong people stay a little broken on purpose because being whole was bad for somebody else’s quarter.
I’m an anti-guru by design. I give the method away free and I only charge for proximity, because I don’t want a single customer who needs to stay confused to keep paying me. That’s the whole posture. Build something true, hand the blueprint over, and let the people who want to work with you, work with you.
You are not a problem to be solved on a recurring subscription. You are a signal that got buried. Dig it out by removing, not adding.
I live my truth and I make myself useful.