One of the chief products of our internet based economy of emotions seems to be Motivation. All across the net, little factories are hard at work churning out hours of youtube videos of a man in a neon tank top yelling at you about how you can do it. Artisans are crafting lovingly produced image macros about going to the bank instead of the club. Even a moderately successful producer can rack up millions of views, hundreds of thousands of followers. There is certainly a class of people for whom viewing these things is a major source of entertainment, connoisseurs of the motivation industrial complex. They tend to appear on the more “normal” social media, particularly on Facebook, where they are absolutely endemic, though they are native to Youtube. The platonic ideal of the internet motivational speaker is this: a youngish man in a neon t shirt (possibly from his own clothing line), yelling at his audience about how pain is weakness leaving your body, filmed in good lighting but from an unflattering camera angle.

Speaker Tony Robbins, wearing a blazer and jeans

These videos do not seem to work as intended on me. Rather than psyching me up for a long day of selling Herbalife, they fill me with a sense of despair. They seem slightly maniacal to me, like the speakers are trying to cover up an underlying sense of dread by yelling louder and pursuing a pristine late capitalist aesthetic. I feel like I’m watching the president of my country give a news report at gunpoint, reassuring us that everything will go back to normal after a military coup. Sometimes the motivational guru is a child, as the internet seems to have some kind of pathological soft spot for 12, 13, 14 year old entrepreneurs. These child labor cheerleading videos are so depressing that it’s basically Lovecraftian, too sad for the human mind to truly comprehend. I don’t think this feeling of darkness can be totally explained my own cynicism, I think there is something genuinely sinister about the motivation industry.

The definition of motivation is difficult to pin down in this context. The dictionary defines it as something like “the reason or willingness to do something,” though these videos tend toward the latter. Generally, the reason why someone might choose to pursue success is not questioned. Success, defined monetarily is presented as the natural goal of every human alive. Those who are not Range Rover driving independent business owners, they imply, are not because they lack the proper motivation. Though success is the inherent drive of all humans, we are too afraid to pursue it, or too discouraged by the failure that lurks around every corner. A frequent theme that appears in these videos is that of the hater, the apparently teeming masses that do not want to see you succeed. Insidiously, these haters can be your closest friends or your family. The cynic might suggest that this is a quasi abusive effort to isolate the audience from anyone who may discourage them from pursuing the less than sound investments that many internet motivators seem to peddle.

Ultimately, despite the manically optimistic veneer of the motivational speaker conceals a bleak message: success is far away, impossibly difficult and painful to achieve. Along the way, you will encounter nearly insurmountable obstacles, and quite possibly lose all of your friends. At the core motivation, is the management of pain. It encourages a capitalist stoicism, in which pain is not to be dealt with but ignored. The only acceptable ways to deal with emotional pain are by making more investments, or possibly by guzzling protein powder. Worse still, if you feel a type of unapproved pain, it is due to a moral failure on your part.

The internet motivational speaker is different from the “traditional” motivational speaker in his (almost always his) proximity to his audience. The traditional speaker appears on a faraway stage, makeup melting under burning house lights. He is a godlike figure, only communing with his audience during specific holy rituals, like conferences or vaguely titled summits. The internet motivational speaker is so close to his audience that he functions almost as a mirror. They favor interactive platforms with comments section, particularly the facebook live video, where the content can be shaped by the real time input of the audience. Perusing these comments sections, I have found a searing degree of vulnerability. You can scroll through endless examples of people yelling into the Facebook branded blue and white void, telling masses of faceless strangers about how none of their friends support them, how they’ve lost all their money, how they’re ready to quit. We’re not equipped to see this kind of helpless suffering by fellow humans, where all they are offered are more motivational platitudes.

Unsurprisingly, these motivational communities tend to target particularly vulnerable people. After all, someone who already has a robust support network is more likely to turn to that for inspiration rather than turning to some Tapout clad stranger. One could convincingly argue that happy people don’t need motivation. Though most people may occasionally need someone to convince them to finish studying before reading for that glass of wine, pursuing your dreams isn’t usually a complete slog. If you are going through the kind of struggle these videos describe, you could probably benefit from more help than these videos could ever offer. And while most speakers focus on some vague idea of Business, they also tend to zero in on their audience’s other hangups and insecurities. The majority of them are men, and their speeches reflect their ideas of what modern hypermasculinity looks like. Their metaphors lean heavily on “hunting the mammoth” type rhetoric. Many are preoccupied with physical fitness and not the drink green juice, run three times a week kind but the biceps bulging out of a tanktop kind. Even if they don’t say it outright (though many do) the industry portrays success not just as an economic necessity but the very basis of what it means to be a Man. Nothing possibly unhealthy there.

Of course, they target not just the sad, but those who are genuinely the most disadvantaged under capitalism. They play into the myth of hard work that tries to convince every janitor that he will one day be a CEO if he mops as hard as he can every day. At the center of these videos’ ideology is the idea that pay and status are commensurate with talent and hard work. They suggest that a CEO has his position because he wanted it the most, not because he had the richest father. A steady diet of motivational media is more likely to create a stressed and neurotic employee than a CEO. The CEO doesn’t need these videos, he has his family’s network, his overpriced degree, and adderall.

There also seems to be a very cozy relationship between motivational speakers and pyramid schemes. At best, the most successful speakers are orbited by a small universe of pricy merch. Aside from the tacky t shirts, many of these products seem to fall into the borderline scam category, things like protein powders that are somehow “high octane.” At worst, the motivation is just a way to pull people into some kind of ghoulish pyramid scheme.

Despite the sinister ideas at the core of the motivation industrial complex, and despite the instant revulsion I have toward these videos, I have only heard people speak highly of the motivational speakers they enjoy. My coworkers, who seem to be happy and well adjusted people (or at least balanced enough to convincingly fake it) rave about certain speakers, whose names tend to filter easily through the sieve of my brain. For them, motivation is part of their routine, a moment that they spend on themselves during a day that is otherwise devoted to their jobs, their children and spouses. Working at a school, many of my students, especially those with a limited or unstable support system, are straightforward of the effect that motivational speakers have had on their lives. In an often lonely world, these speakers can feel like genuine sources of support. They often express a desire to make their own motivational videos, which I see as a genuinely altruistic desire to help others as they have been helped themselves. Rather than indulging our knee jerk reaction of disdain for a certain kind of media, we should be considering why people enjoy it. Often, things that were made as a souless or manipulative cash grab can provide genuine solace to someone. The obsession with motivational speakers seems to be driven by a very human desire for connection and support. What we should be asking is why people find those things so elusive that they seek them out from yelling strangers on a computer screen who try to sell them energy drinks.