The human side of content marketing
Imagine going into a conversation with a friend with an exact script of what you’re going to say. Weird, right? So why is every piece of content most people put our written in that way? Why has content become this funnel-based, coercive, inhuman, medium where everything is meant to build a slippery slide towards someone buying your stuff?
It’s become truly egregious. And in 2026, people are done with it. Those “gurus” the ones teaching you to make sure every piece of content directs towards your digital product, the ones telling you that you just need to do “this one thing” to unlock $10k a month in revenue. Yah, they don’t make any money anymore. I know this because I talk to them. I know this because I talk to their customers. People are done with the formulaic garbage. They refuse to open their wallets for something that reads like a script.
If we look back at history, it all makes sense. I just re-listened to a podcast interview between Joe Rogan and Dan Carlin, two of the top podcasters in the world, from 2017. Their level of optimism for people starting online businesses was crazy high. They went back and forth, hyping each other up over how easy it was to build something of your own and “stick it to the man” leaving corporate jobs. That was also an era of zero interest rates, money was cheap or even free for many people. You could borrow money for zero dollars in return.
The combination of high optimism and free money meant lots of people wanted to pursue their dreams of starting a business. And the gurus showed up to teach them. The gurus taught funnels, and content, and the “just do this one thing” approach. And it caused those optimistic business owners to do two things. First, they lost their edge. Instead of speaking from their real, lived experiences, they tried to follow some weird formula for “content that converts” where everything started with a hook and ended with a call to action. Second, they lost their resilience. The gurus were screaming in their ear that if they just “did this one thing” they could make $10k a month. So they lost their ability to be patient, build empathy, and perfect their craft.
For a while, it all kind of worked. Following the formula DID bring in money. Creating content that was scripted for conversion DID get customers. As long as money was cheap and optimism stayed at all time highs, everything just kind of worked. Until it didn’t anymore.
The chart below charts consumer sentiment starting in 1981. Generally this means how people feel about spending money. It’s currently a 51, the lowest on record. The last time it was near that low was 1981. Guess what happened in 1981? Gas prices had risen from $.72 to $1.35 a gallon in the previous three years. Guess what has happened since 2021? Grocery prices have risen by about 25%. All of a sudden people are feeling so good about spending money. The panic that sets in when a consumer staple like gas or groceries experiences a sudden rise is giant. You need gas, you need groceries. If those prices are going up in a way you cannot control. And you don’t know when it will end. You stop spending money on things you don’t absolutely need. Like digital products.
So it all comes crashing down. Those guru formulas for building a content funnel fall apart. People go cold turkey on buying digital products. Results don’t just drop from a 10% conversion rate to 8%. They drop to 0% overnight. The entirety of everyone who had followed those guru formulas loses everything in an instant.
Even more sadly, because those people had given up their humanity, and their resilience, to follow a formula for getting rich quick. They have no ability to pivot and figure out a new path. They only know how to follow the script. So they all shut down their businesses, and never recoup their investment.
And then, out of the ashes, rise a new crop of content-driven entrepreneurs. This group is fundamentally different from the start. Their entire focus is on the audience, and what they audience needs. They know build an intuition about their audience where they can confidently say “I know exactly what my audience wants and needs to hear” and they can stand on that. Every time they create content, it speaks to their audience in a way that cuts through all the noise and gets attention. They don’t use funnels, they don’t use formulas, they just provide actual help. For this group, the funnels and formulas are easy. They just make a product that’s a continuation of the help they provide people, that they know people respond to. They make quizzes that answer questions they know their audience wants to know the answer to. They create memberships that guide people through the most difficult, painful parts of whatever it is they are going for.
They are like Akio Morita and Sony. Akio is the founder of Sony, and they started in Tokyo in 1945, when the city was completely destroyed and no one had any money. They simply built what people needed, starting with radios, and adapting to the every-changing needs of a rebuilding economy.
Right now in 2026 we are in a rebuilding economy. We don’t use physical bombs anymore. But think about the economic and emotional bomb of your grocery bill going up uncontrollably. Think about the wild swings of the last 5 years with the pandemic. It’s emotionally similar to rebuilding after a war.
To be successful now requires a mindset shift away from funnels and formulas. Humanity and resilience have to take the lead. And the creators who are experiencing torrential growth are the ones who lead that way. They lead with empathy. They lead with resilience. They don’t give up when a post flops. They have 1,000 podcast episodes, or 2,000 TikToks. They produce content that aims squarely at being helpful to an audience they know deeply. And they are rewarded for all of this economically.
I genuinely think everyone has this in them. We were just misguided in an economic time. We were misguided in a time of extreme optimism. We lost our ability to lead with humanity and to build resilience. Now we have to get those things back. Start with being helpful to another human or group of humans. Start by working on our resilience. Then the rest will fall into place. The funnels and formulas are still there when the time is right. But you will fill them in with words, videos, and messages, that are from a place of deep understanding of your audience. Not some set of words that AI tells you will convert people to buy your digital product.
