Most “inner work” looks like entertainment.
Imagine you’re looking for a personal trainer.
You open one trainer’s webpage and read their testimonials: “I had an experience tied for the most intense experiences of my life”; “They do it all with fun, care, and a sense of humour.” You notice that none of the testimonials mention improved body composition, fitness, or bloodwork. What would you think?
Personal training should improve your body. Inner work should improve your life. If inner work were optimized for results, what would we expect to see?
I’d expect to see success stories: people who got undeniable life changes. Like:
“Founder was single for years due to social risk-aversion; today, they’re celebrating their one-year anniversary.”
“Researcher used to lose 4–5 hours per day to doomscrolling. After our program, he got bored of them all and stopped. It’s been six months; he’s used the extra time to host parties for his friends.”
“Executive recovered from burnout, negotiated for the first time, and started shipping again.”
But this is not what we see.
Look at the testimonials
I reviewed every testimonial posted by a popular retreat, a well-known coach, and a prominent organization in my network. How many describe a specific life change — something the client durably started doing, stopped doing, does differently, or achieved?
For the popular retreat: 0 / 20
For the well-known coach: 0 / 3
For the prominent organization: 0 / 14 (homepage)
The organization also had an additional ~200 testimonials posted on another page, which I had Claude review. Finally, we found 2 of 200+ testimonials that described specific life changes: a husband confirming his wife sleeps better, and a CEO crediting the work with helping quadruple revenue.
Nearly every testimonial from every practitioner focused on fleeting emotional states (“I had an experience tied for the most intense experiences of my life”), practitioner personality (“They do it all with fun, care, and a sense of humour”), and unfalsifiable claims (“The ROI is immeasurable”), but not results. Experiences appear to be the product.
This surprised me, so I checked another ~15 similar practitioners. Almost none of their testimonials described specific life changes either.
I’m sure some clients get lasting results, but isn’t it odd that these practitioners don’t get testimonials long enough after the intervention to show durable results? If lasting life improvements were the product, wouldn’t practitioners highlight their success stories?
Check for yourself: Pick the practitioner you most recommend, and count how many testimonials describe a lasting change in what the client does, avoids, or achieves.
If the purpose of most inner work were to improve people’s lives, then why do testimonials focus on experiences? Why don’t practitioners solicit testimonials about lasting results? And why don’t clients write about them?
Seven years of Duolingo
Two people say they want to learn Chinese. One downloads Duolingo and embarks on a 1,000-day streak. The other finds a friend of a friend who got fluent in two years and copies everything they did…
I believe the purpose should be results. I’m reminded of an AI researcher I worked with in 2024 called his prior seven years of inner work (Vipassana, Tibetan Buddhist meditation, various retreats, IFS) “LARPing working on the problem.”
Seven years of Duolingo
When we caught up this month, he added: “It’s like entertainment. It’s like identity. It’s like wearing a costume.”
Once he gained the ability to ask people out without risk-aversion and to stop avoiding relationships, he lost interest in communities organized around talking about problems they haven’t solved. Last month he celebrated one year with a girl he loves.
Are you playing Duolingo or are you getting results?
—@chrislakin | Writing | Now
Next post: Humans are not automatically strategic — “inner work” edition
- “Flaky breakthroughs” pervade inner work — but almost no one tracks them by (4 Jun 2025 19:02 UTC; 216 points)
- Humans are not automatically strategic — “inner work” edition by (19 May 2026 18:37 UTC; 36 points)
- What if “inner work” optimized for results? by (14 May 2026 17:00 UTC; 8 points)
With therapists, you can ask about their experience of “graduating” clients, that is, being done with a client because the client doesn’t need therapy anymore, they actually worked through whatever problem they were seeking help with.
This distinguishes those who help people fix their problems, from those who expect to be your paid supportive friend for the rest of your life.
This part is interesting, since he’s been on both sides. It’s not that he “just wanted to LARP”, or he wouldn’t have done it for realsies and lost interest in hose communities. At the same time, by his own description, what he did for the first 7 years was LARPing at doing the thing instead of doing the thing. Not “Genuinely trying, and failing”. LARPing. Wearing the costume.
I bet you there are a lot of people in these shoes. LARPing and playing pretendies until someone shows them the real thing, at which point they eat it up.
A big part of the problem, maybe even the only problem in a real sense, is that they don’t know how to take it serious. Don’t really know that they aren’t taking it seriously. Because if you face that, then you have to take it seriously. And that means you have to look for reviews with actual results that you can expect to apply to you, and we all kinda know already that we’re not going to find that. Which means that we’re going to have to sit with “Oh god, they’re all useless, aren’t they. Am I hopeless?” as a real possibility. Which is a hard thing to sit with and take seriously. Especially as someone who has been flinching from “what will people think of me” into an anxiety problem, and flinching into LARPing at addressing their anxiety. What’s one more flinch? This one comes with reassurance from your therapist and support group that your therapist is doing a good job, and that you, like they, are trying your best.
Then, once you have an actual option to work with someone who does it for realsies, of course you take it. You don’t need to put on the costume anymore because you might actually become the real thing.
On the other side, I think it’s much the same. There’s still reason to flinch, only this time motivated by guilt and a need to pay the bills. I’m reminded of watching my daughter learn to play “play “hide and seek”″ as a stepping stone to learning to play “hide and seek”. Mentors who track their results are rare. And if you never meet any older kids playing “hide and seek” for realsies, it becomes hard to even notice that you’re LARPing even without reason to flinch.
I have a lot of sympathy for people stuck in this trap, even as the whole thing is kinda frustrating.
I think we’ll get there though. In part through posts like this, which make it more salient that there *is* a real thing, and it might even be reachable.
My guess is simply that almost nothing works, and to the degree that it works it only works a little, and insofar as it works a little it is really time-consuming, and probably reverts to the mean if not actively maintained.
“Adjust your effect size estimates downwards.”
Also, almost nobody is quantitatively tracking what they try, the degree to which they try, wouldn’t know when they’re wrong or are simply performing great contortions in selection bias. So even people who claim they have huge effects can’t actually distinguish the effects from random positive noise. (This also applies to the person mentioned at the end of the post.)
CFAR tried, but it was really expensive, and the results were middling. (They’re best in class for this, still.) From everyone else I demand at least track records.
So: What are you doing differently? I reckon you’re going to publish the follow-up data from your clients from two years ago, soon?
I guess the problem is that some aspects of human life that can be easily changed for a while, but not in long term. As a random example, let’s say reading books—if you told me that the price of success at something is that I may never read a book again, in my entire life, if would probably consider this price too high. But if you told me to stop reading books for a month and focus on doing something else, I would say no problem.
And there are dozen examples like this; for the duration of one-month intense workshop I would be willing to give up reading books, watching movies, meeting friends, who knows what else. Which would create a lot of space, if I did all of that at the same time, and that space could be filled with some kind of productivity, maybe achieving amazing results. But the productivity would be unsustainable precisely because the things I gave up temporarily I am not going to give up forever; and as they return, they will fight for their space.
You can keep pushing people if they are in some kind of cult; if there is constant pressure to prioritize the things the group care about over everything else. That leads to burn out and general unhappiness.
The good solution needs to be sustainable for long term. But it is a problem to figure out what is sustainable and what is not, when many sacrifices genuinely feel okay in short term, especially when a person is enthusiastic about achieving something.
The therapist/coach/whatever should not be judged by what the client does when he leaves the therapy, but what the client does one year later. (Often, the therapist/coach/whatever simply has no idea.) CFAR did that one thing right, by asking people how they were one year after the minicamps.
Even though I have never been in therapy or practiced inner work, this point reminded me of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy where she argues that a major part of therapeutic interventions actually brings more harm than good.
UPD: There is Zvi observing that Math Anxiety Is Often Due To Knowledge Gaps...
I enjoyed the post. My experience in meditation circles is that people are awfully resistant to talking about results—for good reasons and bad. Speaking opening about the results of yourself or others makes you a target. But, as your post implies, not talking about results could be a convenient excuse for not having results.
For those looking for verified results in I think one’s best bet is finding mentors or communities of practice where results of members can be relatively verified. Even there, epistemics are hard.
Also, side point that I think you would agree with, I don’t think meditation practice is the quickest intervention to achieve mundane life benefits like making deeper friendships, or having a flourishing home life. I’m not sure about that though, because my maturing has been intertwined with meditation practice, so I don’t know the counterfactual.
You’re completely right
I’d like to build on to your post with the focus on, “what does effective inner work look like?” With a more specific look into the approach to self-help rather than the self-help tactic.
I’d imagine 80% of the reasoning is utilizing the scientific method
I would love more insight into his process when he was engaging in “inner work,” as I suspect that his process vaguely resembles: He has a vague idea of what his problem is and hear of a meditation retreat that offers miraculous benefits > Try it out > right after the experience determines whether or not it worked
As opposed to: Figuring out operational definition of your problem > looking at the evidence to form a hypothesis reflecting on the intended course of action and the intended measurable results > test it out > compare results at the end
Have you seen Most “inner work” is not optimized for results?
Note: Sid is anonymous.
Um, trainers reviews are mostly like this too, I’d imagine?
What should be a good review and good advertisement isn’t the same as what is.
Which is not to disagree that results -based thinking is the ideal, and I think you could do great business by actually promising and getting testimonials for results
I guess one central problem for most people wanting therapy is that they do not know what ‘success’ looks like—at least the kind of ‘success’ they have or can move towards having internal alignment on.