What a Wantologist Wants

In the New York Times, I read an opinion piece by Hochschild called "The Outsourced Life." But it's not about outsourcing as we normally think of it, shipping manufacturing jobs overseas. No, it's about the outsourcing of personal life - the commodification of everything from relationships to happiness.

To begin the story, he visits a Wantologist. Apparently, there is a profession (well, actually a subset of psychologist, it seems) where you can be hired to figure out for someone what they want. Are we becoming so insecure that somehow we cannot even trust our selves to figure out what we want? Even DeLillo could only come up with walking and sitting classes as the pinnacle of ridiculousness - how about a class on how to figure out what you want? Now, studying why we want what we want is a difficult and legitimate cause. And I am not trying to disparage psychology or anything like that.
But, as the author notes after detailing a case where someone was helped by the wantologist, it seemed like the "client just needed a good friend who could listen sympathetically and help her work out her feelings." People do need help with seemingly very simple decisions sometimes. Sometimes, I'll ask parents and friends for advice even when I've pretty much already decided what I'm going to do, just because I want reassurance that I'm taking the right path. I think that's normal. But what is odd, is that this woman paid somebody to do this for her.

Paid services like this have skyrocketed in recent years. The author notes that not only have services like psychologists gone from 2,500 in the late 1940s to 77,000 in 2010 - plus "an additional 50,000 marriage and family therapists," but entirely new jobs have popped up - from wedding planners to dating services to life coaches. But have any of these services actually made us any happier? Aren't divorces at an all time high, despite all those marriage counselors? Why have we turned what used to be the job of our social support network of friends and family into a paid service?