Too Many Gurus, Not Enough Students

“I adhere to a guru-free philosophy, I don’t claim to have all the answers.” - Chris Guillebeau

Social media is inundated with gurus. Beneath the facade of most wisdom-givers is a product to sell, or a subscription, or a “like” button. If you do not pay the gurus with money, which you usually do, you pay them with your time. Interspersed with the time you spend reading or listening to them are advertisements that remind you of the core of the guru’s wisdom. Your current life is lacking, and this product is the key to improvement.

“Time is money,” Benjamin Franklin claimed. I do not wholly agree because I see time as a more valuable commodity than money. Franklin measured time as a cost in dollars per hour when in fact one cannot put such a number on something so intangible. Money can only satisfy the flesh, whereas time can satisfy the soul. We have too precious little time to spend and our sense of time accelerates as we age. Giving our time to fake gurus, or to anyone in a wasteful manner, is a higher cost, in my opinion, than adding credit card debt to our bank accounts. Time has been sold to them, and if the guru succeeds, credit card debt will accumulate anyways. Adding credit card debt, by the way, can be very damaging to the human spirit.

It seems like these days it is the gurus themselves that are often the commodities. Companies buy them in exchange for the act of flaunting their products on YouTube or Instagram or whereever the hell they taut their grandeur. Gurus are often nothing more than vessels for selling things to people. They are interchangeable in the eyes of a corporation. They are bodies for t-shirts, mouths for online programs. They are essentially McDonald’s stores, and we, the readers and viewers, are often sitting in the drive-through lines, “engaged” with social media, for something that earns someone else profit.

It is a fine line when blogging between giving advice and sharing things I’ve learned. Sometimes I have to catch myself and backtrack. The last thing I want to be is a guru, and the last thing I want as a measurement of a writer’s success is an engagement metric. To me it’s more about finding things that go well or wrong in your life and thinking, “If this is resonating with me, maybe it will with someone else too,” and then putting those thoughts to words.

Life is about connection, not subscription.