Is your “bucket” feeling “depleted”? Perhaps you’re thinking about how, exactly, you might “re-org yourself” (sounds like it would be rather painful, and probably require the advice of a qualified physiotherapist). Or perhaps you’re simply “taking stock in your actual stock”. Maybe, like me, you’re wondering exactly what any of this mushy jumble of vaguely inspirational word-puree actually means.
Welcome to Confessions of a Female Founder, the new podcast from Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, that manages to reach new frontiers in bewildering self-help speak. All of the head-scratching concepts and phrases I’ve just mentioned can be found in the opening episode, in which Meghan, fresh from sprinkling edible flowers over stuff on her Netflix show, speaks with her friend Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and former CEO of dating app Bumble.
As you might have been able to glean from the name, Confessions of a Female Founder is yet another show where two girlbosses trade truisms and tell each other how inspiring they are, in a verbal ping-pong match of hashtag empowerment. It’s a mutual love-in that isn’t all that different from Meghan’s previous, ill-fated, foray into podcasting, Archetypes, which also saw her engage in slightly stilted conversation with famous women about their journeys to success; that particular venture ended after 12 episodes in 2022, and the Sussexes “mutually agreed to part ways” from Spotify the following year.
Wolfe Herd is obviously an impressive figure. In 2021, she became the youngest female self-made billionaire after Bumble went public, and I’m sure that she does have great insights into how to build a successful company; she’s also spoken out about sexism in tech. The trouble with her interview on this podcast, though, is that anything remotely meaningful she has to say is buried under layer upon layer of sickly sweet, faux-profundity. And Wolfe Herd certainly meets her match in Meghan, who never misses an opportunity to transform a normal sentence or question into a piece of fridge-magnet wisdom.
Their 49-minute chat proves that self-help speak has now mutated so aggressively that it is now almost impossible for the uninitiated to understand. Now that it is commonplace to hear people talk about setting boundaries, prioritising themselves and practising self-care (all of which, I should add, are totally valid concepts that I wouldn’t knock), it’s as if certain influencers, CEOs and, most of all, podcasters feel the need to set themselves apart from the fray by adopting yet more convoluted, self-aggrandising phraseologies.
Meghan might say that motivational language has “evolved”, but she’d be just as likely to use that same word as a complimentary adjective (in episode one, she praises Wolfe Herd for “how evolved you are”, and she’s not talking about, well, Darwin’s theories). In self-help land, the word chaos has to be prefixed by “beautiful”. Anything bad happening is an opportunity for gratitude. If something is, well, “good”, it becomes “super high value”, and if you’re busy, you are “so in it”; you should also be trying to cut out anything that “doesn’t serve you”. And a celebrity side-hustle like Meghan’s jam venture is an “extension of [their] essence”, rather than a new revenue stream.
In self-help land, the word chaos has to be prefixed by ’beautiful’. Anything bad happening is an opportunity for gratitude
She’s not the only one who’s guilty of pushing this sort of “uplifting” language to its absolute limits – simply scroll through your podcast app of choice and you will find plenty of shows where the hosts wrap up utter banalities in pseudo-profound ways. Last year, one clip from the Transform self-help podcast went viral, in which the host solemnly declared that “when you get married, your partner actually becomes your immediate family”, much in the way that, I imagine, if you give birth, that person “actually becomes” your child; the host’s explanation of the millennia-old process of marriage was offered up as a piece of sagacity.
But Meghan does happen to be one of the highest profile, and most outlandish, culprits of this trend. Take, for instance, the moment when she describes Wolfe Herd’s family, which consists of a husband and two young sons, as an “energetic circle of the opposite of toxic masculinity”. Or when she praises her interviewee for her ability to “be vulnerable in the humanity of what that experience has been like”. I know that these are, technically, sentences in the English language. But they have been so over-engineered as to become practically unintelligible – each word given a new, inspirational meaning that’s a couple of cognitive leaps away from its actual dictionary definition.
The Bumble founder, I should note, is arguably just as brazen in stretching the limits of language. She describes the time after she initially stepped back from her role as CEO as a period of being “professionally single”, which is certainly a snazzy way of rebranding the state of being in-between jobs. She also posits that “there’s something deeply intuitive and brilliant about the way children can read energy”, and shares her goal to “engineer positivity into a product”. There is a fine line between speaking the part of a West Coast tech founder and just sounding like one of the brothers from the Bros documentary; I will leave you to decide whether or not WWH has crossed it.
The irony, of course, is that this way of speaking is supposed to be vulnerable and open – but it only ends up alienating the average listener. And while a podcast like Meghan’s is surely intended to lift up and spotlight the achievements of women, couching those achievements in this garbled verbal mush only does them a disservice.
Not everything has to be a moment of gratitude: telling us this is just another way to make us feel bad. Not all chaos is beautiful. Sometimes things are just… crap, and recognising that is arguably far more “evolved” than pathologically attempting to spin every bit of adversity into a motivational quote. On that note, I’m off to cultivate my energetic circle.
