2026-05-05
I will pay you if you find me a therapist or coach
Disclaimer
Main
- I will pay you $1000 if you find me a therapist or executive coach or similar such that either a) I attend 15 1-hour sessions with them or b) I am confident they helped me make a major long-lasting improvement in my life
- I don't know how to formally define "major life improvements." So I will use a proxy measurement, which is number of sessions attended. (I obviously care about actually improving my life far more than I care about number of sessions. It is important that the life improvement is permanent not temporary, and doesn't just go away the next time I encounter some major bad event in my life.)
- It seems likely that if I think a therapist is wasting my time, I won't attend 15 sessions with them. My tolerance for people (including therapists) wasting my time has only gone down with time, so I think 15 sessions is a good enough bar to confirm they are not wasting my time.
- You are also allowed to enrol yourself and claim the payment yourself, if you think you can provide me with important life improvements.
- Since I am willing to pay you $1000 to refer me a therapist, you can guess I am also willing to pay in the ballpark of $1000 to the therapist itself.
- Examples of a major life improvement
- something that permanently shifts my self-reported life satisfaction averaged over a year from 4 out of 10, to 5 out of 10
- something that helps me find atleast one relationship that lasts atleast 5 years, either platonic or romantic, such that I can confidently say this relationship improved my life
- something that helps me raise $1M in funding, which I would have failed to do otherwise
- something that completely shifts my life trajectory in a way I endorse, even 5 years later.
- See also: Effectiveness of therapy on me personally
- I have wasted atleast a hundred hours and multiple thousands of dollars on therapy already.
- I think the average therapist is too non-violent for me to give a shit about their opinion on how to live life.
- I think the average therapist is trained to hide their own values and worldview in a way that makes me trust them less.
- If you find someone for me, it will probably not be an "average therapist" and it will probably be someone who can circumvent these failure modes somehow.
- I don't care about the formal title or degree of a therapist, I care about actual insights they have.
- That being said, I am more comfortable with the one hour video call format that therapists use, and I am less comfortable with anything that gives me the vibes that you are inviting me to your cult.
- I can't formally define what a cult is, but an invitation to an activity that requires my trust without actually earning it first, indicates cult vibes to me.
- Examples of such activities - having sex, doing a drug together, visiting a physically unsafe place, isolating from current social circle for a month or longer, meditating for a week or longer, etc
- For adversarial nitpicky readers, I am not saying every group that has sex or does drugs is a cult. For that matter, I am not even saying that being a cult is always bad. I am saying that if I receive an out-of-the-blue invitation to have sex or do drugs or meditate for long hours, from a stranger, along with a vague promise of life improvement, this increases P(this is a cult, in a way that is bad for me) in my head.
- I actually think formally defining what a cult is, is an interesting intellectual challenge, but that is best saved for some other post.
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