The Confounder Is Being Popular and Important

Something that's bothered me for a long time is Thinkfluencers advertising their life philosophy like so:

1) I used to be very unhappy
2) then I discovered the wonderful Method X
3) I started started lecturing and writing about Method X
4) now I am happy

Basically, the message of these books is always you, too, should try Method X. But I think that's just a confounder. These people have 1) found a shared community with other adherents, 2) get to lecture other people about what they do with their life, thus validating their life choices, 3) sometimes also become rich/famous/successful.

I suspect that what makes people happy is finding community + having other people listen to your opinions. (If there's one thing that watching billionaires spend their times spouting opinions on twitter has taught me, it's that for some section of the population Having People Listen To My Opinions is the no 1 most pleasurable thing you can do with all the wealth and power in the world).

The specific Method is actually just a macguffin, it doesn't matter what it is or does. As a corollary, if you just sit at home and follow the method without being part of a community or having people listen to you, you will get ~0 of the benefits.

Obviously there's situations where this wouldn't hold: notably, if you start following a method privately and it really changes your life and you only later start writing/talking/etc about it. But I think that in most cases the adoption and the popularity are intertwined: most thinkfluencer books I see are full of "in one of my lectures, an audience member said..." YES! You have an audience, that feels amazing, that is why you are happy. What particular sermons you preach to that audience doesn't matter, you could tell them the opposite thing and you'd still be happy, because people are listening to you.