The Instagram influencer — let’s call her Meg — gazes at the camera and shares “one tiny trick” for life success. Whatever happens in your life, she says, you need to repeat the same phrase in your head: “How does it get better?”
“That’s the thing about the universe,” she assures her 10,000 followers. “If you ask it questions it’s going to return with the answers. Where focus goes, energy flows, so if you focus on it getting better that’s what you’re going to see. You can call it delusion but I’ve never seen a version of delusion that doesn’t work. Magic is delusion, it’s the power of your brain. So let’s do this!”
On the face of things, Meg’s trick looks a lot like neurolinguistic programming, a tenuous “behavioural technology” that’s bubbled away in business circles since the Seventies. As the theory goes: change the way you speak to yourself, and the barriers to success will crumble away. But there’s clearly more to it than a bit of cod business psychology. Meg, after all, is asking us to communicate not with our subconscious minds, but with the universe itself. By the time you read the Instagram caption — “delulu is the solulu” (“delusion is the solution”) — it’s obvious she’s making a metaphysical claim as much as a psychological one.
By now, I’m familiar with this strain of spiritual-inflected self-help, having ventured deep into the Wild West of New Age Instagram. Once you click on a few videos about “delusional manifestation” or “money altar tutorials”, the algorithm begins recommending more, and before you know it you’re 10 reels in, doing a deep dive on something called “quantum jumping”. Search for the #spirituality hashtag, meanwhile, and the content proffered gets stranger and cruder. Angel numbers, repeating strings of numbers that supposedly augur great blessings, feature prominently.
So too do pictures of deities — take this reel of Jesus superimposed over an ocean sunset — that must surely have been generated by AI. Some posts are vaguely therapeutic in tone: “Don’t forget your own power just because they didn’t see it.” Others resemble the spam you might receive from Nigerian princes: ‘‘Smile because Large Sum of Money is Coming To You right Now. Type ‘Amen’.” It’s a similar story on Tiktok too, except the influencers here are younger and sassier. For every person claiming that “you CAN manifest the most illogical things”, another posts in warning. “No wonder,” says one, that “this app induces psychosis.”
This, then, is the place that online spirituality intersects with the bewildering world of “delulu”. Starting life within the K-Pop community, as an insult for obsessive fans, by 2023 it had morphed into a term for radical optimism. Don’t just aim high, aim utterly delusional, and watch your dreams come true. There are currently more than 170 million posts tagged #delulu on TikTok, and though most of this content is light-hearted, as soon as the message gets metaphysical things start to get very weird indeed.
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SubscribeIt used to be that the New Age was about coming to terms with the universe. Now it’s about forcing the universe to come to terms with you.