TLDR: Fifty seven percent of American adults report being lonely, and fifty five percent of CEOs experience significant bouts of it. That loneliness, not a lack of willpower, is why a huge share of people buy coaching and self help. Executive coach Sarah de Sousa pointed this out to me directly, and it reframed the whole argument I made last time. Full breakdown and sources below, video and podcast linked at the top.
Last time I tore apart a fifty one billion dollar industry. Broken incentives, a collapsed willpower theory, an intention action gap that Harvard’s Immunity to Change research explains far better than “you did not want it enough” ever could. That diagnosis still holds. It is also only half of it.
Not everyone buying a course, a coach, or a mastermind wants a fix. A lot of people are not missing information at all. They are missing someone to say the real thing to. Fifty seven percent of American adults now describe themselves as lonely, according to Cigna’s Loneliness in America research.
The United States Surgeon General formally declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023, and the advisory behind that declaration put the health risk of chronic loneliness on par with smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, alongside a twenty nine percent greater risk of heart disease and a thirty two percent higher risk of stroke for people with poor social connection.
It gets worse at the top, not better. Research out of HEC Montréal found fifty five percent of CEOs report significant bouts of loneliness, and roughly one in five routinely downplay it rather than say it out loud. That is the paradox nobody selling into this industry wants to name. You are surrounded by people all day, and there is still nobody you can actually talk to.
This is where Sarah de Sousa’s pushback landed. Two people can buy the exact same course, for two completely different reasons. One wants a fix. One wants to feel less alone. The industry sells both people the same product, priced the same way, promising the same transformation, and for one of them it was never going to work.
Look at the coaching industry’s own numbers. The International Coaching Federation’s Global Coaching Client Study found ninety nine percent client satisfaction, and ninety six percent of people who worked with a coach said they would do it again. That should read as proof the model works. Look closer and it reads like the opposite. That level of repeat buying is not what resolution looks like. It is what relief looks like, on a loop.
I recorded a conversation with Jonathan Chase, billed by the Mail on Sunday as Britain’s leading hypnotist, before he passed in 2024. His framework was built around the split between the conscious and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind sets the goal. The subconscious mind runs the behaviour. Most of this industry only ever speaks to the first one. That is why the achievement seeker fails despite real intention, and why the belonging seeker only improves temporarily, since connection soothes something real without changing anything structural underneath it.
Neither half of the fork is wrong on its own. Structure without permission produces intention that never converts. Permission without structure produces relief that never compounds. What actually works sits in the overlap, and permission itself cannot be manufactured at scale. You cannot sell it in a course. You can only give it, human to human.
Sources: Cigna, Loneliness in America 2025. US Department of Health and Human Services, Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community, 2023. HEC Montréal research on CEO loneliness, cited in Forbes, June 2026. International Coaching Federation, Global Coaching Client Study. Harvard Graduate School of Education, Immunity to Change research, Kegan and Lahey.
Full video and podcast episode above.
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