The Spiritual Girlboss Era Was a Lie

By Hind Silkan  |  Silkan Journal

Picture her. You know exactly who I mean.

She wakes at 5am. Not because she has to, because she has designed her life that way. She meditates for twenty minutes, journals three pages of stream-of-consciousness, and makes a celery juice before the rest of the world has opened its eyes. Her Instagram grid is beige and white and dusty rose. She has a course to sell, a podcast in her ears, and a vision board on her wall that she genuinely believes is doing something.

She talks about alignment. About her higher self. About calling in what she deserves. She has a morning routine as a personality and a business that is mostly about teaching other women how to have her morning routine.

She is the spiritual girlboss. And for a very specific window of time, roughly 2016 to 2022, she was everywhere.

I was not quite her. But I was close enough to understand the appeal. And I have spent enough time on the other side of it to tell you clearly: the whole thing was a con. Not because the women inside it were dishonest, but because the framework itself was built on a foundation that was always going to collapse.

Where She Came From

The spiritual girlboss did not arrive out of nowhere. She was the product of two cultural forces colliding in the mid-2010s: the rise of female entrepreneurship content and the mainstreaming of New Age spirituality.

On one side, you had the girlboss movement, the idea that women could hustle their way to freedom, that ambition was feminist, that building your own business was the ultimate form of liberation. Lean in. Rise and grind. Be your own boss.

On the other side, you had Instagram spirituality, crystals, manifestation, the law of attraction, tarot, moon rituals, energy healing, moving from the fringe into the mainstream, repackaged in millennial aesthetics and sold as empowerment.

The merger was inevitable and extremely profitable. Hustle culture needed a soul. New Age spirituality needed a business model. Together they produced a genre of woman who worked very hard and called it alignment, who sold things relentlessly and called it abundance, who built personal brands and called it purpose.

It was capitalism wearing a crystal. And it worked beautifully, for a while.

The Lie at the Centre of It

Here is what the spiritual girlboss era promised: that your inner work and your outer success were the same project. Heal yourself, and money will follow. Raise your vibration, and the right opportunities will appear. Do the work on your limiting beliefs, and your business will grow.

This is a seductive idea because it contains a grain of truth, mindset does affect behaviour, and behaviour affects outcomes. But the spiritual girlboss version of this idea was not a grain of truth. It was a grain of truth buried inside a mountain of magical thinking, survivorship bias, and financial irresponsibility.

The women who succeeded were held up as proof of the framework. The women who did not succeed were quietly told they had more work to do, more limiting beliefs to clear, more resistance to release, more healing to complete before the abundance would flow.

The framework could not fail. Only the women in it could fail.

That is not empowerment. That is a closed loop designed to keep you purchasing the next course, the next retreat, the next activation, in search of whatever you have not yet cleared.

The Spiritual Cover for Ordinary Exploitation

One of the things that made the spiritual girlboss model so effective, and so hard to criticise, was that it wrapped ordinary commercial exploitation in the language of growth and healing.

When a woman charges three thousand dollars for a mastermind about calling in clients through aligned energy, she is not offering you a business strategy. She is selling you the belief that your financial struggles are a spiritual problem that she has the solution to.

When a coach tells you that your inability to sell is rooted in a scarcity mindset that you need to heal before you can grow, she is not wrong that mindset matters. But she is placing the entire burden of a structural problem, the difficulty of building a business in a saturated market with real financial barriers, onto your psychology. The market is not the obstacle. You are.

This framing is not neutral. It takes the genuine difficulty of economic life and reframes it as a personal spiritual failure. And it does so in the warmest, most supportive language imaginable. That is what made it so effective. It felt like care. It functioned like control.

What It Did to the Women Inside It

I want to be careful here because I know how it feels to be inside a framework you are only later able to see clearly. The women in the spiritual girlboss world were not naive. Many of them were genuinely searching, for meaning, for community, for a way of working that felt less alienating than the corporate world they had left or been pushed out of.

What the framework did to them was subtler than obvious harm. It did not take their money crudely, it convinced them to spend it willingly in pursuit of an identity that required constant maintenance. It did not undermine their confidence directly, it created a system where confidence was always conditional on doing more inner work. It did not isolate them, it built warm, tight communities that happened to be commercially structured around the woman at the top.

And it filled them with a particular kind of exhaustion: the exhaustion of someone who is working very hard at something that keeps not quite working, who has been told that the reason it keeps not working is something inside them that they have not yet fixed.

I have sat across from women carrying that exhaustion. It has a specific weight to it. It looks like dedication from the outside. From the inside it feels like drowning slowly while being told you just need to breathe differently.

The Girlboss and the Goddess Were Never Friends

There is a deeper contradiction at the heart of the spiritual girlboss era that I do not think got named enough: the values of genuine spirituality and the values of hustle culture are not compatible.

Real spiritual traditions, across Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and many indigenous frameworks, share certain themes: detachment from outcome, service to others, the limits of individual will, the importance of community over personal brand. They are, without exception, suspicious of the accumulation of wealth as a spiritual goal. They teach that the self is not a project to be optimised but a temporary vessel to be used wisely in service of something larger.

The spiritual girlboss inverted all of this. The self was the project. Abundance was the goal. The community existed to validate and purchase. The spiritual language was real but it was in service of an agenda that most serious spiritual traditions would recognise immediately as the opposite of what they teach.

You cannot dress hustle culture in a mala bead and call it awakening. The mala bead does not transform the hustle. The hustle corrupts the mala bead.

What We Were Actually Looking For

I do not want to end this without saying what I think was underneath all of it, because I think the women who were drawn to the spiritual girlboss world were looking for something real.

They wanted work that felt meaningful. They wanted community that felt genuine. They wanted a framework for ambition that was not purely extractive. They wanted permission to take their inner lives seriously in a world that told them their feelings were unprofessional and their sensitivity was a liability.

Those are not small wants. They are the wants of people who have noticed something real about the poverty of purely material success and are reaching, however imperfectly, for something more honest.

The spiritual girlboss era failed them not because the wants were wrong but because the product being sold in response to those wants was false. It offered the language of depth without the discipline. The aesthetic of surrender without the actual letting go. The community of belonging without the genuine accountability that real community requires.

What those women needed, what many of us needed, was not a better morning routine. It was a real tradition. A framework with roots deep enough to hold weight. A community accountable to something outside itself.

Not a brand. A path.

After the Era

The spiritual girlboss is quieter now. The market has shifted. The burnout became visible. A few high-profile cases of coaches causing genuine harm brought some accountability. The aesthetic has evolved, softer, less hustle, more 'slow living', but many of the underlying assumptions remain.

Women are still being sold the idea that their financial struggles are spiritual problems. Still being told that the right mindset work will unlock the abundance that is waiting for them. Still building businesses around healing a wound that the business model itself keeps open.

The crystal is different. The con is the same.

If you are somewhere in the aftermath of this era, tired, a little ashamed, not quite sure what was real and what was sold to you, I want to say clearly: the exhaustion is not evidence that you failed. It is evidence that you were inside something that was working against you while telling you it was working for you.

That is not your fault. And you do not need to buy anything to recover from it.

You just need to put it down. And rest. And then, slowly, find something that asks more of you than a credit card number.

Hind Silkan writes about faith, neurodivergence, and clean living at Silkan. To book a 1-on-1 session, visit hendsilkan.myshopify.com