Desire, Delusion & The Rise Of Magical Thinking On TikTok

Manifestation is all over my For You page, where dewy-skinned soothsayers promise to help me materialize my dreams. I’ve also noticed manifestation buzzwords like “abundance” and “higher self” seeping into the language of close friends. It’s difficult to pinpoint when these concepts took hold exactly — I’d put it somewhere between COVID and Trump 2.0 — but as our world slides further into chaos, it’s not hard to understand why millions are turning to magical thinking.

“This tendency to think that our internal thoughts or feelings can affect external events is an age-old cognitive quirk of ours, and it’s always cropped up more during times of personal or global crisis and uncertainty,” says Amanda Montell. The LA-based writer and podcast host coined the term “magical overthinking” in her New York Times bestseller, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, to describe the collision between the cognitive shortcuts the human brain has developed over millennia — for important things such as survival — and the information overload we experience in the digital age.

We can live a comfortable physical life, she explains, but if we’re “extremely online” or even just “an average amount of online” we will be exposed to more information than our brains can handle. “Navigating that is a recipe for disaster when you think about the coping mechanisms that our brains have always used.”

Mental shortcuts were very helpful for early humans: big animal = danger; strong breeze = storm approaching; smoke = fire. But now we’re applying this same cause-and-effect logic to unrelated events. “We like to think that there is a sort of cosmic calculus in the world,” says Montell. “Because if things happen for unreasonable reasons or random reasons that you can’t pin down, then the future is scary because you can’t make predictions. And that feels very, very threatening to us physically and puts us into a state of fight or flight.”

Devotees posit manifestation as a solution to our collective psychological angst. “In manifesting, at the bare minimum, what we’re going to do is we’re going to allow a person to have a positive perception of reality and overall improve their happiness, reduce stress [and] give people hope,” Sarah Perl tells Refinery29. “So I would say there’s nothing to lose. You might not see results right away, but that’s because we all have a lot of limiting beliefs we have to uncover.”

Perl is a manifestation and mindset coach better known by her handle @hothighpriestess. She’s built a TikTok following of 2.5 million and two seven-figure businesses promoting the benefits of mindset-hacking. Her videos provide advice on how to become a “high value woman,” achieve your dream body through the power of your mind or use specific techniques, such as the whisper method and self-concept, to make someone obsessed with you.

Perl defines manifestation as “the concept of turning thoughts into reality, using intention-setting, the power of belief and identity to shift your physical reality.” It requires the individual to shed any ideas about themselves that may be holding them back — also known as negative or limiting thinking — and work with the universe to “hack luck,” she explains. In her circles she’s seen people manifest proposals, children, businesses and even the most coveted American dream: fame.

If your TikTok algorithm is anything like mine, you may have noticed your feed filling up with videos from Gen Z manifestation gurus like Perl. They offer methods — usually some combination of visualizing your goals, writing them down and repeating them aloud — to manifest your dream career, relationship, bank balance or home. In short, your ideal life. One side effect of this content is that it works to reinforce some pretty normative ideas of what success looks like.

“The wellness aesthetic of manifestation aligns really well with some core, American in particular values of self-improvement,” Montell points out. “You’re not going to be susceptible to manifestation rhetoric if you don’t want, and think you deserve, a better life.” 

“That American dream mentality with a new-age flavor and a wellness flavor and a kind of feminine flavor is going to be, naturally, very appealing. Not just to us as Americans but furthermore to women living through a time when our reproductive rights are about to be taken away any second.”

Faced with the political realities of sexism, manifestation can offer an appealing opportunity to reclaim power, or at least our sense of it. “We can’t control, per se, the political climate fully, but we can control our personal realities within it,” Perl argues. She’s seen a surge in people engaging with manifestation content following the election, with a particular focus on recentering feminine energy.

“This messaging is such a sort of inspirational way to be like, ‘It doesn’t matter what the system is doing, the system is evil.’ You can take your destiny into your own hands, and the universe is actually conspiring towards you or conspiring in your favor,” Montell observes. 

At this point you might be wondering what’s the harm in thinking the universe has your back. While the benefits of positive psychology are backed by evidence, critics of manifestation say that it sets people up for failure by encouraging them to set goals without taking action toward achieving those goals. Another common critique is that it promotes a victim-blaming mentality. That $10,000 didn’t land in your bank account? Must be because you didn’t manifest it hard enough. Unlucky in love? Your limiting beliefs are sabotaging your chance of a connection. 

“Manifesters hold those who suffer misfortunes personally responsible for their sufferings. They believe that people suffer because they fail to think positive thoughts,” Dr. Anna K. Schaffner tells Refinery29. 

Dr. Schaffner is an academic turned burnout coach and author of Exhausted: An A-Z for the Weary and The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths among other titles. She recently wrote a piece for Psychology Today on the dangers of manifestation, which she describes as “a form of thinking that rests on pseudo-scientific explanations and highly problematic notions of karmic justice.” Additionally, she says, it relies on blind optimism and a dramatic overvaluation of our personal agency and power.

Other experts argue that manifestation minimizes the role of the external forces that shape our reality — like luck and privilege — as well as the effort and action required to achieve our goals. “Manifesting is a distorted version of the power of positive thinking, where you think that your thoughts alone create reality. That then downplays or dismisses all the other factors that have a casual role to play in what occurs,” explains Dr. Laura D’Olimpio, associate professor of philosophy of education at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

In Dr. D’Olimpio’s view, manifestation is based on faulty logic. Believing their thoughts have the power to shift reality, the manifester looks for evidence to confirm this rather than acknowledging other factors that might contribute to an outcome. This phenomenon is known as confirmation bias. There are other cognitive biases at play, too, namely proportionality bias (which assumes that big events have big causes) and frequency bias (when you become aware of something and start noticing it everywhere).

According to Montell, the mystical connections that a keen manifester might interpret as a sign from the universe really boil down to the brain’s hardwired tendency to look for patterns. “We’re just trying to make the world feel more organized by infusing patterns where there are no patterns,” she says.  

If you speak to people who manifest, the logical holes in the theory are explained away by the idea that there’s a magical order to our lives. “One of the more prevalent ideas among people who manifest is everything is kind of just working out for you,” Perl says, pausing to acknowledge the time on her clock of 2:22 p.m. — a sign, according to numerology or the belief in the mystical significance of numbers, that she’s in the right place at the right time. When things don’t go as planned, she continues, “you just assume that something higher or bigger than you is unfolding your reality in the way it was meant to be, you know, for some higher purpose that you might not know of.”

This spiritual aura is what distinguishes manifestation from positive thinking. In many ways, it has become a secular religion for the algorithm era where so much of our reality is shaped by digital spaces that center the self. When you’re caught up in scrolling, it can be easy to forget that there’s a world out there beyond the screen. 

“If you’re baptized by algorithm, the way that young people are, you are primed to believe in ideas of manifestation because there’s no objective truth,” Montell says. “In that state of existential free-for-all, if someone on your For You page has a business set up where they’re going to teach you how to reclaim agency amid all this turbulence [and] all you need [to do] is sign up for their course, or follow them, or go to their live thing, or whatever it is — that’s going to be extra appealing.”

Our modern tendency to hyperfixate on personal goals can distract us from the need for structural change and collective activism. More immediately, it can make us feel bad. “The rituals and thinking patterns associated with manifesting encourage a narrowing of one’s focus,” Dr. D’Olimpio says. “If you’re so fixated on one specific goal, you may be disappointed by the reality when you do achieve it and might miss other valuable things in the meantime. And if you don’t achieve your goal, you’re left devastated and full of self-blame.”

Being skeptical of manifestation doesn’t mean we have to do away with positive thinking, which science confirms is good for us. Writing down your goals or creating a vision board can be really helpful ways to orient your brain toward an optimistic outlook and quieten negative self-talk (another fun evolutionary quirk). But it’s best to set goals with the knowledge that there are many factors that can affect the outcome — some you can control through attitude and hard work, others you can’t. 

Confronted with the rhetoric of self-improvement and striving, sometimes the most revolutionary thing we can do is believe that we’re fine as we are. So try to put less pressure on yourself to hit every target, because if you’re always focused on what you want from the future, you might just miss the magic of where you’re at right now.

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This article was originally published on refinery29.com.