Frasier vs the trauma economy
It started with a silly question. It unraveled everything that feels...off about today's self-help influencers.
I came across this on Reddit:
With thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments echoing the same exasperation, the post read like a breaking point, a collective exhaustion with the state of the internet we’re trapped in:
The endless diagnoses and the mounting sense that we’re no longer people — just money bags to be squeezed, metrics to be optimized.
Right around the time I saw the post, I had been watching Frasier, a ‘90s sitcom about the titular radio psychiatrist who obsesses over self-understanding and doles out advice to callers, not unlike podcasters of today.
What fascinated me wasn’t the advice Frasier gave. His advice sounded fine and smart. It was the hypocrisy.
Episode after episode, I’d watch Frasier melt down at the slightest inconvenience, torch his reputation, and alienate people — despite knowing better.
His Harvard training in psychiatry does not help him make better choices. His ego overrides his better judgment. And his love life is a catastrophe scored against Giacomo Puccini. And yet, the in-show public adores and reveres Dr. Frasier Crane as an all-knowing authority.
I couldn’t stop watching. The more meltdowns, the better.
This is where the two seemingly unrelated things — the collective fatigue and this bougie sitcom — fuse together:
After many years as the invisible right-hand to some of the most visible influencers, I couldn’t help but see flickers of Frasier in today’s landscape. I’ve worked with enough to trace the hidden pattern: influencers who perform insight and healing while, behind the scenes, things are…messier. They promise transformation but simplify the blueprint. They mean to help, but often can’t follow (or grow out of) their own advice.
If you know what to look for, you can’t miss it: The delusion baked into self-help influencer culture.
A culture built around the appearance of wisdom. A culture that flattens human complexity into something marketable, something that can scale.
A culture that Frasier accidentally skewered — three decades ago.
It’s not just fatigue toward influencer culture. It’s the trap of self-help and self-improvement as performance.
And the deeper I looked, the more Frasier started to feel like a ‘90s satire of what we’re living through now.
That’s when I was jolted with a thought, threw my head back, and cackled like a mad scientist:
How would this fictional ‘90s radio psychiatrist fare in today’s modern influencer era?
In an era obsessed with carefully curated identities, transformation arcs, and insight porn, Frasier serves as the countercurrent, and thus, the perfect vessel for this thought experiment.
So I followed the thread…all the way down the rabbit hole. And things got a little carried away:
It started with me making a funny little observation.
Now the video essay is a 58-minute cultural autopsy on how performance culture hijacked healing, and how Frasier accidentally exposed the flaw in the system. Oops.
No prior Frasier knowledge necessary to get it. Just bring your cynicism for influencer culture and come along for the ride.