'I Know That My Worries Are Simply Mental Events'

Affirmations, abundance and Amadeo Llados.

My TV stopped working in October last year. It was old and only got analogue channels, those channels went fully digital and so the TV became a pointless black rectangle taking up precious shelf space. When it still worked, I used to watch a Spanish satirical programme called El Intermedio, which constituted my news intake and my window on the world.

On the two days a week that I went to the office, I also used to listen to the equivalent of the Today programme on the radio in the morning. However, I haven’t been to the office for about six weeks now.

I am living in a news vacuum.

For that reason, I knew nothing about Mr Amadeo Llados until last Sunday.

The fine figure of a man that is Amadeo Llados sporting a cute little bolero tattoo jacket

He is a madrileño influencer (now based in Miami) who boasts about his successful, brutishly capitalist life - his money, cars, women - and encourages his followers to subscribe to his courses so that they can be like him. Nothing new there, I guess. He also talks about the importance of physical appearance, of creating ‘the man you've always admired: tattooed, ripped, in shape, a jet, girls, Lambos...’ His videos often repeat the premise that being fat or poor is a personal decision. To prevent such a horrific fate, on his website, he offers a kind of mentoring program as an online coach, as well as courses on how to become a millionaire, or other events such as one he described as being for ‘the big bosses’ because ‘plebs won't understand.’¹ Last year, he was subject to a class action by former students that was eventually thrown out.

As previously mentioned, I live in a news vacuum, so I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of his story. He seems to me like an utterly odious human being for all kinds of different reasons and there is so much to unpick about the case, but that and his alleged crimes aside, what ultimately utterly fascinates me about this story are two, separate and linked, things:

Our seemingly infinite capacity to fool ourselves. (Perhaps hope in disguise?)

And, what, in the collective, traditional (probably Western) view constitutes a successful life?

The first was my immediate reaction when watching the collection of videos on the Instagram account @humi_llados_oficial (a play on words with ‘humiliated’ and Llados) that collates posts by his disciples. All his students looped on the same “message” which was a variation on ‘with the right attitude, I will gain success in business and have tons of money’, without actually ever mentioning what that business might be (except a few more high-profile graduates of the school of Llados who offered coaching in the Llados method. Not unlike a pyramid scheme). The said referenced attitude, also not explained, appeared to be based around the law of attraction and an abundance mindset, and other New Thought spiritual beliefs. What got mentioned more often than the attitude or the business model, was self-discipline, which translated as: getting up early every day, going to the gym a lot, not eating fast food, not drinking alcohol and - this one was talked about more than anything else - not wanking or having sex.

Confused yet? It’s confusing because there is no clear narrative, no through-line in Llados’s teachings beyond ‘Hey, who wants to be ostentatiously rich in the kind of way that looks good on Instagram and in music videos?!’ Which makes it kind of hard to write about, but bear with me.

So - hope disguised: all the devotees that I watched passionately subscribed to the idea that if they simply believed (and stopped wanking) that they would self-actualise, emerge one morning, miraculously as if from a chrysalis, as a new Llados clone without actually having to do anything at all beyond a kind of ‘fake it until you make it’ attitude involving renting deluxe, out-of-season Airbnbs and buying fake Rolexes and branded clothing so it looked as if they were making Llados’s teachings come true. They continued to believe that this rebirth would eventually come to pass even when they had spent all of their money on expensive Llados courses, had to live in a shared room in a hostel, or in a car, had alienated their friends and family and lost all their job prospects. They still believed. Which, in a way, I was envious of.

Hope has been gaslighting me recently and so this type of blind faith in a golden future is seductive. The title for this post comes from a meditation I’ve been doing on building self-esteem. It always makes me smirk because mental events is a great description of life lately, both personally, and in the world at large. I'm moving towards big change and when that scares or overwhelms me, I tell myself that it will be okay, it will all work out one way or another, I just have to keep my feet to the fire, keep moving, keep trusting myself. Which comforts me, until I remember one of Llados’s most well-known students.

Ferran is a plumber who, after getting entranced by his guru, went from his pleasant, ordinary, settled life, with his steady job and his nice flat, to financial ruin, living on the streets and eating out of rubbish bins. It’s then that I wonder if I'm fooling myself with vacuous empty statements, just like a Llados clone, and that Ferran's fate will be my own in the not too distant future.

But wait, we haven’t talk about the second point yet.

Ferran’s story clearly is not the fairy tale ending. However, I did wonder whether, in some very unconventional and probably messed-up kind of way, he might still be happier than he was in his old life. As I was thinking this, he popped up on my screen saying it himself. He addressed the people who replied to the videos he posted of himself digging through rubbish bins with a big smile on his face and talking about how happy he was to have found a new “mattress” - a nice thick bit of cardboard - to sleep on, who were advising him to move back in with his parents or find a friend’s sofa to sleep on and generally try and get his life back on track because he seemed like a decent bloke, by saying ‘what you don’t understand is that I feel better now than I did before’ (my translation/paraphrasing).

This isn’t a defence of Llados. Imagine! More just something to think on - like, what is so great about a conventional, settled existence anyway? Part of what drives us towards it is fear of ending up on the street (‘tramp anxiety’ as Alain de Botton calls it), so if you are already on the street, aren’t you pretty much free of those worries? I realise that instead you have a load of other, different worries, for example: is it safe to eat jamón ibérico that has been marinading in bin juice? And also that safety and security are great privileges, more and more so these days, but I also feel that on some other level, whole swathes of society are being encouraged to aim low. Lie low and stay there. Take your nice flat and your steady job and be grateful.

I know that when I’ve taken risks, whether they have paid off or not, I’ve always been glad that I took them. (Another of the affirmations I'm feeding myself lately!) And I also know that my definition of happiness, of a flourishing life, is not the same as most people. Moving here to Madrid was a big risk, I left much behind and said a lot of sad goodbyes. It involved a lot of having to redefine myself, who I thought I was, or might become, of contorting myself into unexpected and not always comfortable shapes.

It’s worth me repeating that this is not, in any way, a defence of Llados. Nor am I saying he is giving good advice on the best way to live, yet it is worth bearing in mind that there is more than one way to spend our ‘one wild and precious life’. I doubt for most of us it involves houses in Miami and that mythical beast, the Lambo, but it is also possible that it lies just beyond the norm.

1. https://www.ondacero.es/noticias/sociedad/quien-amadeo-llados-influencer-que-desprecia-pobres-cursos-hacerte-millonario_2024021665cfb92982085c00018366cd.html