Magic is Real But ~Manifesting~ is Delulu.
And also other words we’re all sick of like: toxic, violent, and neoliberal.
A few months ago, I found myself at a festival in Mexico City where everyone was drinking psilocybin cocktails and listening to talks about Web3, NFTs, and ~manifesting~. There’s a huge culture of tech hippies, Burning Man people, and remote workers who are very into this unholy combination of things. A dark and utterly perfect joke at this festival: there was no water coming out of the sinks (#MéxicoMágico!), so everyone had peepee hands. But who needs water when you have NFTs?
I ended up listening to the ~manifesting~ talk because the line for the bathrooms went through the room it was held in. While an old Mexican lady cleaned the toilets between people using them, a tall, skinny, young, white, able-bodied, beautiful woman babbled on about how “you can do anything! Only your limiting beliefs are stopping you!”
I wanted so badly to ask the speaker if she would be willing to tell the old Mexican lady cleaning the toilets to ~manifest~ a better life for herself. If, as the speaker suggested, the old lady said affirmations to herself in the bathroom mirror and recorded her affirmations and played them in her earphones while she slept, would she be able to get a better job?!
(~~~No!~~~~!!!!)
At the time, I wrote a rant about it on my instagram and thought I had exhausted the subject. But I spent last week traveling with a friend who is very into ~manifesting~––it was hard, we butted heads (🤕🍑🍑🤕)––and now I am angry and sad about this whole doctrine for a whole host of new reasons, too.
~Manifesting~ has so many hallmarks of our time: magical thinking, self obsession, psuedoscience, cold-hearted neoliberal disregard for poor people. I really cannot with ~manifesting~ (“~” because ~~woowoo~~ I’m being ~~~petty~~~). I find it antithetical to everything that allows me to have fun in the apocalypse. This is a big, long honkin’ essay about why.
But first,
In case you have somehow been spared this insidious bullshit, the basic tenets of ~manifesting~ are:
Ask the universe and you shall receive
You can change reality with your thoughts because intention is energy
Good thoughts make good reality; bad thoughts make bad reality (a.k.a. the Law of Attraction)
The universe is a mirror reflecting what you send out
You can do anything, it’s only your limiting beliefs stopping you
Saying affirmations to yourself and not speaking in negative language about yourself can change your life
I will concede a few things: Thoughts can determine how you feel and how you perceive the world. Believing in yourself, being kind to yourself, being clear about what you want, and having a positive, can-do attitude are all good ideas. Does consciousness create reality? Quantum physicists disagree. So maybe! OK, that’s everything I can concede. Now, allow me to commence shit talking.
The world is actually horrible, most things go to shit, and accepting that is helpful.
At some point on our trip, my ~manifesting~ friend said something to me about hoping for the best. I replied that I prefer to prepare for the worst—that it’s the Jewish way.1 They warned me to be careful doing that because “the universe is a mirror.”
Half-jokingly I asked, “So we manifested all of those genocides?” My friend just kind of gave me a look that I interpreted (perhaps, I hope, ungenerously) to mean “yeah, kind of.” I don’t actually know their answer to this, but I know mine.
Implying that people cause the bad things that happen to them is awful. The law of attraction can suck my forever pessimist dick.
We are living the last 50 or so habitable years of this planet. We are running out of water, soil, and fish. (As far as I’m concerned a world without sardines is uninhabitable.) Nothing is going to be OK.
Jews teach our children that the world is horrible and to prepare for the worst. There are obvious reasons for this. Drilled into me as a child was: “Don’t ever believe that it could never happen now. It could always happen again.” (The Holocaust is only the most recent genocide in a long history of massacring Jews, which stretches back to time immemorial.)
There’s a scene I adore in the show Marvelous Ms. Maisel in which the Jewish protagonist, Midge, prepares goody bags for her son's fourth birthday party. Midge’s father says, “So, everyone gets a gift, everyone gets a compliment, everyone gets a hug. You're not preparing these kids for the real world!”
She replies, “Don't worry, we'll teach the kids how cruel the world is next year––when they're five.”
Entropy is the law of nature and most things go to shit, but most people go around expecting things to go well and getting upset when they don’t. When you expect the worst, you end up pleasantly surprised pretty often, since most things merely go poorly and not as poorly as possible. I can only imagine that if you not only expect but also try to ~manifest~ the best all the time, it’s extra disappointing when things are not that. Yes, the world is also beautiful, but you don’t need to prepare for the good. Preparing for the bad is simply pragmatic.
I tend to go overboard, borrow problems from the future, and get anxious. I should find a middle ground. But my dark worldview does not prevent me from seeing the light. Jews have a word for when something good happens, which I have tattooed on my ankle: dayenu. It means “it would have been enough,” as in “I already had so many blessings and now this, too.” I say it every time I see a nice ass go by. It's possible to live with deep gratitude in a world that horrifies you.
A heart broken open is more easily filled up than a closed one. You know, the whole “cracks are where the light gets in” thing. Leonard Cohen was a Jew.
(I’m straining very hard not to add “(butt)” in front of “cracks.”)
~Manifesting~ is selfing and selfing doesn’t make people better or happier.
Another central tenet of Jewish culture is a focus on tikkun olam—repairing the world, social justice. I love this about us. (Rebecca Solnit was incorrect when she wrote that pessimists excuse themselves from acting. You do not need hope to be an activist.) And maybe I’m a dinosaur for not wanting to deconstruct my vALueS, but I think any system of spirituality should include a moral imperative to be of service or at least to be ethical.
~Manifesting~ lacks both. It’s almost always about self-improvement, realizing your own dreams, or getting what you want. This is a flaw in a spiritual system not only on moral grounds but also because helping others makes people happy and self-obsession makes people unhappy. ~Manifesting~ may preach against negative thinking but it implicitly invites people to ruminate on their inadequacies. Doing that makes people … feel inadequate and, like astrology (not sorry!), often amounts to navel gazing. I call it selfing.
Selfing takes us out of the present and blinds us to our surroundings. It makes our hearts dead to the wonders and horrors of the world—to the things that remind us how little we matter, the things that can deliver us from ego. Stop making vision boards, go outside, look at some fucking plants. Everything is waiting for you.
Selfing also weakens social ties, which precludes both collective political action and living in spiritual relation to others. These are the same two reasons you can often catch me talking shit about identity politics and trauma culture, though I’m not actually against either. David Brooks articulated something I’ve been exasperatedly trying to say for years in his (otherwise spectacularly myopic)2 August 10 New York Times column, “Hey, America, Grow Up!”:
“… [People] don’t build secure identities on their own. They weave their stable selves out of their commitments to and attachments with others. Their identities are forged as they fulfill their responsibilities as friends, family members, employees, neighbors and citizens...”
Yes! Connection gives life meaning! I think we are mass forgetting this. Or at least my internet algorithm and IRL social bubbles are.
~Manifesting~ overlaps with another part of selfing culture: self optimization, which I have always found very sad.3 Yes, the productivity obsession is capitalist––this point has been made. (Fun to think about what it would look like if we optimized for meaning, nurturing, peacefulness.) But also, it does not seem to make people feel good. Its premise “you’re not good enough” does not account for how hard it is just to be alive. I’ve seen people drown in the project of optimizing. They cease to enjoy the natural chaos of life. They get addicted to the dopamine kicks of meeting quantified metrics. They get into this consuming, smoking-like loop of “it feels so good, I want to do it, I’m anxious I didn’t do it, I did it and it feels so good.” 🔄🔄🔄 Selfing. 🔄🔄🔄
~Manifesting~ is the inverse of the Serenity Prayer.
I grew up in Al-Anon and love the prayer that closes every meeting:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Both optimization and ~manifesting~ seduce people with a false sense of control over The Great Senseless Chaos and a less abstract sense of agency in this cesspool of surplus labor we’re all swimming in. Unsurprisingly, I put “manifesting” into Google Trends and searches for the term skyrocketed right at March of 2020. Obsessing over improving ourselves makes us feel less helpless in a realm of intractable external problems. It also amounts to soothing our anxiety by shoving our heads up our asses. And I’m pretty sure the path to inner peace is about ceding control––the Buddhist thing about surrender––not about convincing ourselves we have more of it.
Also, whether or not we actually have control over the universe, the world is burning down and we should be storming our capitals demanding climate action and wealth redistribution. But that wouldn’t be as fun as collaging vision boards, would it? ~Manifesting~ lets people both not accept what they can’t change and hide from the things they actually can. Lord, help us.
~Manifesting~ uses spirituality in service of capitalism.
Most people talk about ~manifesting~ in the context of success, career, money. It invokes religion and spirituality in the name of maximizing value in the capitalist marketplace. Connect with the universe … to get more money. Dark! Capitalism as religion, anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Marx?
~Manifesting~ gaslights poor people and is also terrible financial advice.
Someone please explain to me the difference between “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “manifest a better life.” Both ignore the unequal playing field. Both implicitly blame people for their conditions. Are poor people poor because they’re not working ~manifesting~ hard enough? ~Manifesting~ makes a great neoliberal alternative to discussing redistributive policies. The far left and far right agree on far more than Covid conspiracies these days.
Many people have made the point that manifesting often actually means familial financial support. (I have known a lot of rich kids, and I have seen how having limitless options and never having struggled debilitates them. So I understand why it seems like a miracle to them when they manage to take their parents' money and do something with it … or to ask their parents’ rich friends for money and do something with it.) Crediting self-conjured magic rather than startup capital and social connections for success gaslights regular people.
Directly telling people their “limiting beliefs,” rather than their limited access to capital are stopping them from realizing their dreams isn’t just dishonest. Encouraging people to follow their dreams without respect for their actual class position is also terrible financial advice. Creative pursuits and entrepreneurship––two spheres big on ~manifesting~––are both high-risk endeavors that are much higher-risk endeavors when there’s no safety net.
The math isn’t hard. If you start with one hundred and you bet fifty and lose, you’re left with fifty. If you start with fifty and you bet fifty and lose, you’re left with zero. This does not occur to upper-middle-class people because they can’t see down. They can’t see down because upper-middle-class (which is a euphemism for “rich” when you consider what the distribution of wealth actually looks like) people tend to only know other upper-middle-class or wealthy people. They call themselves upper-middle class because they’re comparing themselves to the wealthy or ultra-wealthy people whom they know. Social proximity to wealth should confirm for them that they actually are rich, but instead it just makes them think they aren’t.
These people don’t see their social networks, the money and property they will inherit, or the fact that they are financially responsible only for themselves as the substantial safety nets that they are. They have no point of reference for the acute bodily stress, the humiliation, the scars on your soul that come with actual zero.
I believe in betting on yourself to get what you want. But if you are going to tell a bathroom attendant to manifest a better life for herself (please don’t do that, it would be extremely cruel), or say it to any middle-class person for that matter, ask yourself if the bets you're telling that person to make might be very different than the ones you’re congratulating yourself for making.
I wonder constantly whether the bets I make on writing will bite me in the ass so hard they will literally kill me one day. I work in advertising as a freelancer to pay the bills, but not enough to save for retirement. (Yes, I could stop traveling, eating at restaurants, and taking Ubers, but I’m pretending that’s not an option, OK?! 🤫) Seeing as I’m not going to inherit property or enough money to buy any, and I doubt Social Security will exist in 2052, I really may be setting myself up for some serious financial straits down the line. Holding on to this dream of writing, continuing to do it instead of securing my financial future, sometimes feels very frivolous. I’m making this bratty, imprudent decision but at least I’m doing it knowingly and warily..
It guts me that people much worse off than I am are making bets on unrealistic career paths, based on the recommendations of people who do not understand the implied risks, because they’re “choosing to trust the universe.” It’s not just upper-middle-class people falling into this. It’s also middle-class people, which makes me nervous for them and angry on their behalf. This is third-wave capitalism. Health care is not free, AI is coming for our jobs, and we should really plan accordingly.
On my tattoo of a fucked up foot-hand holding a spoon with a tree growing out of it…
My dayenu tattoo is also an inside joke with myself. It’s under another tattoo that did not come out right. I went to a second artist to try to fix it but he made it worse instead. It was once a hand holding an olive branch. It is now what an ex-boyfriend called “a fucked-up foot-hand holding a spoon with a tree growing out of it.” A friend recently said it looked like it was drawn by AI. The joke (it would have been enough) was me telling myself to stop overdoing things. Another ex used to call me fuerzadiscos, as in someone who tries to shove a CD into a CD player when it won’t go in. At that time in my life, I was learning how to be less more-is-more about everything. I still am. But I don’t want to change the part of myself that always wants to at least try to do or fix things, even if they seem hopeless.
I do believe in magic. Bees are magic, birth is magic … other things that don’t start with b are also magic. But we don’t ~manifest~ or fix things through magic. We fix things by doing. I don’t want politicians to send thoughts and prayers after school shootings; I want them to pass gun-control legislation. And I don’t want us to sit around selfing about how to ~manifest~ our own creative ambitions or startup ideas. I want us to take care of each other and look at plants and organize around climate change and getting bathroom attendants better pay.
~~~
PS I had to fight an incredibly strong urge not to sign off “OK BYE, BARBIE!”
PPS For the record, some more-sustainable fish to eat are: Pacific Cod, Atlantic Mackerel, Alaskan salmon, Atlantic herring, Pacific sardines.
Jewishness - as in Ashkenaz Jewish culture. I can’t speak for the actual religion or other groups of Jews who exist and have very different cultures.
This column could only have been written by a cis het white man. He ends it by suggesting people should “be mature” and simply have more patience when others do “something stupid.” Lol like hate you, deeply, and show it? Dismiss you entirely? See right through you? Make you fear for your physical safety? Has that ever happened to you, David? And then concludes, “The best life is a series of daring explorations launched from a secure base. The therapeutic culture undermined that inner security for several generations of Americans.” Daviddd. 😂 I’m pretty sure that was the white supremacist patriarchy that did that. But, hey, tomato, racism.
Jenny Odell did a great job of tracing this culture back to its eugenic origins in her new book, Saving Time.