When Did We Start Paying for the Village?
A Decolonized Look at the Life Coaching Industry
Somewhere in America right now, someone is paying $300 an hour to be told to set goals, find their purpose, and build better habits.
The person on the other side of that Zoom call holds no medical license, no clinical certification, and no standardized training requirement of any kind.
They simply declared themselves a life coach – and in America, that is entirely legal, entirely common, and apparently entirely necessary.
But necessary compared to what?
A $4 Billion Answer to a Question the Village Never Asked
The life coaching industry generates over $4 billion annually in the United States. It employs hundreds of thousands of practitioners and serves millions of clients searching for direction, purpose, and human connection.
Thomas Leonard, a financial planner in the 1980s, planted the seed when he noticed his clients needed more than money management – they needed someone to help them navigate their own lives.
The International Coaching Federation formed in 1995, and the industry has grown every year since.
Read that origin story carefully. A financial planner noticed that American adults needed paid guidance to navigate basic human existence.
He built an industry around that need. And that industry now thrives because the need has only grown.
In Ghana, they have no word for depression. My friend Ama explained this to me during a conversation that I have never forgotten.
Ghana operates as a community and family-centered society. When grief arrives, the village arrives with it.
When someone loses their way, elders and family and neighbors show up – not with an invoice, but with presence.
The communal structure catches what the individual cannot carry alone. Purpose does not require a coaching session because the community constantly reflects your value back to you. Belonging comes standard.
No one in that village needs to purchase what the village already provides freely.
The Symptom and the System
Life coaching did not create itself out of thin air. It grew in direct response to the conditions that American individualism produces.
A society built on the premise that every person stands alone – responsible for their own success, their own happiness, their own sense of meaning – generates a specific kind of hunger.
People starve for connection, direction, and affirmation that the community structure once provided at no cost.
When the village disappears, the market fills the void.
This matters deeply for Black Americans, because the destruction of our communal structures was not accidental.
Slavery separated families with surgical precision. Reconstruction promised community resources, and then abandoned that promise within a decade.
Redlining trapped Black families inside neighborhoods while simultaneously cutting them off from the economic resources that sustain healthy community life.
Mass incarceration continues pulling fathers, mothers, and young adults out of families today. Every era arrived with a new mechanism for fracturing the village.
We did not simply drift away from community. Community was systematically dismantled around us.
And now the same economic system that dismantled it sells us back a pale, hourly substitute.
A Decolonized Question
This piece does not argue that every person who works with a life coach wastes their money or makes a wrong choice.
People seeking growth and direction deserve support, and some coaches genuinely provide meaningful guidance.
The deeper question sits beneath the individual transaction.
What does it reveal about a society when human beings must purchase the guidance, affirmation, and sense of purpose that every functioning communal culture has always provided freely?
When belonging carries a price tag, something fundamental has broken down – not within the individual, but within the structure surrounding them.
Africa does not export life coaches at scale because Africa, at its communal core, never created the conditions that make life coaching feel necessary.
The elder sits with the young person. The family surrounds the grieving widow. The neighborhood raises the child.
Purpose gets transmitted through relationship, through story, through presence – none of it invoiced, none of it scheduled between other paid appointments.
Building the Village Back
The answer to a $300 coaching session is not a cheaper coaching session. The answer is rebuilding what was taken.
Real community – where people know each other, show up for each other, speak truth to each other, and carry each other’s weight – produces the outcomes the life coaching industry charges billions to approximate.
This healing community exists as one small act of rebuilding. Every honest conversation here, every moment of recognition, every elder sharing wisdom with someone younger represents the village reassembling itself. We are not purchasing belonging. We are reclaiming it.
The village was always the answer. We are simply remembering that truth together.
Leave your thoughts in the comments below. I would love to hear from you.
And make sure to join ‘Destiny’s Divine Health Community.’ I created this space as a gathering place where we can come together around the ‘kitchen table’ and have open and honest discussions. Click the link below to join the community today.
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