The Gilded Age Is Back. So Are the Grifters.

In 1897, Ralph Waldo Trine published In Tune with the Infinite, laying the groundwork for what would become the modern self-help industry. The book promised that thought could shape reality, that prosperity was a state of mind. It sold over two million copies by the early 20th century. Trine wasn’t alone. Orison Swett Marden, Napoleon Hill, and later, Wallace Wattles, built a booming business on the idea that belief itself was a path to wealth.

This surge didn’t happen in a vacuum. It unfolded during America’s original Gilded Age, when tycoons like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller consolidated unimaginable wealth. The economy was a rigged game. Monopolies crushed competition, wages were suppressed, and working conditions were brutal. But instead of revolting, many workers turned inward. Instead of redistribution, they were sold transcendence.

Self-help flourished because it offered a spiritual escape hatch from material reality. It was a coping mechanism wrapped in the language of agency. You couldn’t unionize your way out of poverty, but you could visualize your way out. And that vision was easier to sell when the alternative was staring down the structural violence of unchecked capitalism.

A century later, the same market conditions have reappeared. The new Gilded Age has its own pantheon of tycoons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. And in their wake, another familiar figure has returned—the prosperity preacher. This time, the gurus wear Lululemon, host mindset retreats, and turn affirmations into algorithm-friendly content.

The products are slicker, but the message hasn’t changed.

Gratitude will make you rich; alignment will cure your illness; your mindset creates your reality; and if it’s not working, think and believe harder.

None of this threatens power - it protects it. The modern self-help hustle keeps people focused on their vibrations instead of their bargaining power. It rebrands despair as misalignment. It turns systemic precarity into a personal growth opportunity.

When inequality hits a certain pitch, these fantasies become more than popular. They become infrastructure. They channel discontent into consumption. They monetize powerlessness. And they quietly whisper that if you haven’t made it yet, it’s your own fault.

There’s a reason the Law of Attraction didn’t explode during the New Deal or postwar boom. It thrives in moments of scarcity, when belief is all that’s left to sell.

Which is precisely why it’s thriving now.

Wallowing in negativity and victimhood offers no path forward - I’d be remiss if I didn’t call that out. But the magical thinking of prosperity gospel represents an equally harmful extreme—one that disconnects us from the material conditions shaping our lives.

The self-help industry doesn't simply coexist with extreme inequality—it justifies it. By framing wealth as a product of mindset rather than mechanisms, it transforms systemic failure into personal responsibility. When hardship becomes a "growth opportunity," exploitation becomes invisible.

Perhaps the most telling sign of our economic reality isn't found in wealth statistics or wage data, but in the explosive growth of this spiritual bypass industry. Like a fever that indicates infection, the proliferation of prosperity gospels signals a system in crisis. The more we're told to align our vibrations, the more certain we can be that the system itself is fundamentally misaligned.

Until we recognize these comfort narratives for what they are—a modern opiate—we'll remain trapped in the same cycle that began in 1897: seeking internal solutions to external problems, while the actual levers of power remain untouched and untroubled by our perfectly tuned, magnetic thoughts.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​