Is It Creator Economy or Is It a Cult? Signs You Might Be in a Pyramid of Productivity

By Ken Hollow, ex-member of five hustle cults, current prisoner of passive income promises

Ah yes, the Creator Economy: that glittering dystopia of self-monetization, aesthetic burnout, and endless brand opportunities… if you can just manifest your mindset hard enough.

What began as a revolution — “own your platform! build your brand! be your boss!” — has quietly morphed into something eerily cultish. It’s got all the red flags: charismatic leaders, vague promises of financial freedom, community chants (“consistency over perfection!”), and a suspicious emphasis on selling the dream rather than doing the work.

So let’s talk about it. Welcome to the Pyramid of Productivity, where you are both the product and the unpaid intern.

🔹 Step 1: You’re Told You’re Special (But Just Like Everyone Else)

The onboarding always starts with love bombing.

You’re a visionary. You’re a multi-hyphenate creative badass. You’ve just gotta believe. And post. And niche down. And build your funnel. And share your journey. And start a Substack. And launch a mini-course. And build a community. And host a challenge. And maybe breathe once a month.

They promise empowerment, but what you really get is a spreadsheet with 14 content pillars and a reminder to stay “high-vibe.”

✅ Cult Check: Excessive flattery followed by 80 hours of unpaid homework.

🔹 Step 2: You’re Given The Sacred Scriptures (aka Free PDFs)

Every cult needs doctrine. In the Creator Economy, this manifests as:

• Free “Ultimate Guides to Six-Figure Success”
• The 7-Step Productivity Flow Template™
• Notion dashboards color-coded like a serotonin trap

You don’t know what your actual goals are anymore — but you sure have a lot of pastel-colored tools to track your KPIs.

✅ Cult Check: Devotional study of branded PDFs and the belief that the next template will fix everything.

🔹 Step 3: You Must Buy Into the Belief System (Literally)

“Invest in yourself!” they say. Translation: buy the $497 course, the $97 upsell, the $49 workbook, and maybe a healing crystal or two.

If you’re not succeeding, it’s not the system — it’s your mindset. Or maybe your aura isn’t aligned with your audience. Or you didn’t show up enough on camera this week.

✅ Cult Check: Any system where failure is always your fault and success is always available (if you just pay more).

🔹 Step 4: You Start Speaking in Tongues (aka Buzzwords)

One day you catch yourself saying:

“My aligned offer lives at the intersection of value-driven storytelling and intuitive client attraction.”

You don’t know what that means. No one does. But it sounds important. It sounds like you have a niche. It sounds like you’ve ascended.

✅ Cult Check: When your content starts to feel like a Ted Talk and a guided meditation had a brand baby.

🔹 Step 5: You Recruit Others (Unintentionally… or Not)

Suddenly you’re giving advice. Maybe even coaching. Maybe even launching your own “authentic creator pathway” program. Because once you’ve bought in, you’ve got to make that money back — and the easiest way is to get others to do exactly what you did.

A pyramid of productivity, built on aesthetic optimism and a lot of Canva templates.

✅ Cult Check: Monetizing your survival strategy as a repeatable system.

🔹 Step 6: You Can Never Rest

The hustle cult doesn’t like silence. It thrives on presence. You must show up daily. You must provide value. You must batch your content, schedule your posts, optimize your SEO, update your offerings, engage in stories, film your day, and tell people about your morning mindset ritual that’s actually just you weeping into coffee.

Rest is for those who haven’t built a scalable ecosystem of passive income yet.

✅ Cult Check: Guilt for taking weekends off.

🔹 Signs You Might Already Be In Too Deep

• You have a content calendar but no actual content.
• Your therapy sessions are just branding audits now.
• You say “value” more than you say “hello.”
• You’re in three group chats with people named things like @CoachMoonRise and @AlignedBossMentor.
• You haven’t made money in weeks but you have made ten Reels about mindset.

🔹 But Wait — Am I In a Cult Too?

Yes. Probably. We all are.

Even Nana Vix. Even me.

I still schedule posts I don’t care about for clients who think they’re visionaries because they watched half a webinar once. I still buy templates hoping one will save me. I still flirt with the idea of launching a “burnout-proof content system” while actively burned out.

Because the Creator Economy is seductive. It’s flexible. It’s freeing. It’s full of possibility. But it also demands devotion — to the feed, the brand, the hustle, the self that’s always slightly out of reach.

🔹 Final Thoughts (Before I Launch My Next Funnel)

If the Creator Economy feels like a cult, it’s because it kind of is.

It feeds on hope. It speaks in the language of empowerment while selling you productivity as identity. It gives you a platform, then guilts you for not using it enough. It offers freedom, but only if you keep performing. Performing success. Performing authenticity. Performing the performance.

So no, you’re not crazy. You’re just tired. And branded.

Now go hydrate, realign your metrics, and post about your journey. We’re all in this together.

Ken Hollow, full-time content heretic and part-time Canva cult survivor