BetterHelp's tagline, "You deserve to be happy," sounds like a warm hug at first—until you realize it’s being used to sell you something you probably don’t need. Yet their marketing makes you want to buy it anyway. Happiness—a fleeting, elusive, and deeply individual state—has been repackaged as a subscription service, just another product in the booming self-improvement market.

But here’s the thing: happiness was never the goal. What we really seek is something older, deeper—joy. The kind that can’t be manufactured. The kind that doesn’t come in an app or with a chatbot therapist nodding along in automated empathy. The kind of joy that ancient cultures understood when they danced around fires, told stories late into the night, and healed through human connection—not through a 50-minute Zoom session with a stranger.

But don’t worry, because BetterHelp will match you with the right therapist. How? Artificial intelligence. That’s right—the same kind of algorithm that recommends gardening or DIY videos, and decides which ads to shove in your face, is now determining who gets to untangle your deepest traumas. Your suffering, your existential dread, your very essence—boiled down to data points and crunched into a neat little suggestion. It's modern convenience at its finest. Or maybe just a new way to industrialize pain.

BetterHelp is, at its core, a tech company. A platform designed not to revolutionize psychotherapy but to manage desperate therapists and lure even more desperate clients into a healing assembly line. The therapist pay starts at $30 per hour—less than what many Uber drivers make in surge pricing. No self-respecting therapist would ever sign on—unless they’ve been evicted from their overpriced Upper East Side office and are now debating between applying for unemployment benefits or robbing a bank.

And business is booming. The U.S. mental health industry is worth $90 billion and climbing, with therapy apps leading the charge. Meanwhile, Big Pharma rakes in another $35 billion annually on psychiatric medications alone. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, stimulants—it’s an ever-expanding catalog of quick fixes for a system that doesn’t actually want to heal you, just keep you subscribed. Because a cured patient is a lost customer, and nothing fuels the machine like a society convinced it’s broken beyond repair.

But therapy apps like BetterHelp aren’t just selling mental health—they’re selling convenience. Their services are marketed alongside wellness trends, mindfulness courses, and pop-psych self-care advice. Because what’s a better upsell than inner peace? If your therapist doesn’t know how to help you, don’t worry—they might suggest journaling, meditation, or some other feel-good tactic.

Let’s be real—you’d probably get more out of talking to the bartender down the street. The guy’s been there, done that, and seen more of life than any psychotherapist on a Zoom call ever will. He knows real, raw life. The modern self-care industry doesn’t heal—it monetizes distress, offering just enough relief to keep you coming back. It’s therapy repackaged as an Instagram ad, filtered through words like alignment and self-improvement, as if true healing could be achieved through a payment plan.

So, what are we left with? Psychotherapy for the masses, optimized for efficiency, stripped of human depth. A system where therapy is fast, cheap, and available at the click of a button—no matter that the person you’re talking to is either a 25-year-old fresh out of grad school, barely older than your trauma, or a retiree dusting off their license for extra cash. Somewhere in between, you have therapists simply trying to pay their bills—because let’s be real, the price of eggs isn’t going down anytime soon. Therapy has become a marketplace of emotional labor, where healing is outsourced and mental health is just another industry scaling for profit.

It’s like pulling up to a drive-through, the speakers rusty and trembling with echoes, as you try to place an order for mental relief, unsure if they’ll get it right. The hope is that you won’t end up lost in translation—that somehow, despite the clock ticking and the constant pressure to move on to the next client, they’ll understand the depth of your wounds. And yet, people keep signing up. Because what else is there? For the millions without access to affordable in-person therapy, this is the only option. It’s either BetterHelp or no help at all. And that, more than anything, is the real crisis - and it’s only going to get worse in the years ahead.

Go talk to the bartender. Or you can unfuck your life here.