Look, I’ve been sitting in meditation for over a decade. I teach high schoolers in Omaha who treat manifestation like a vending machine: put in three crystals and a positive affirmation, get out a paid internship. It’s exhausting. Not because spirituality is fake, but because we’ve handed Carl Jung’s work on the collective unconscious to marketing departments. They don’t want inner alchemy. They want a branded subscription that promises enlightenment by Q3. When you reduce shadow work to a 15-minute Instagram reel, you’re not doing psychological integration. You’re leaning hard on confirmation bias, filtering out every piece of evidence that doesn’t fit the “abundance mindset” script.

Tarot’s got a card for this, by the way. The Hierophant. It’s not just about tradition; it’s about institutionalization. It shows up when we take something deeply personal and package it into a system that sells. And I get it. People are hungry for meaning in a world that’s moving too fast and burning them out. But buying a $40 sage bundle or paying for a “chakra alignment” webinar doesn’t fix systemic burnout. It just monetizes the symptom. Consultants love this market because it’s scalable, trackable, and completely detached from actual transformation. You can’t measure a breakthrough with a KPI. So they sell you the aesthetic of one instead.

Stop treating your inner life like a startup. Real practice is messy, unglamorous, and doesn’t come with a loyalty program. If you want actual clarity, put down the app, sit with the discomfort, and stop outsourcing your peace to a quarterly earnings report.