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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SubscribeThis whole discussion reminds me of that atrocious Megalopolis movie.
It 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.
Not so much “The dawning of the Age of Aquarius” as the yawning of the age of the multiverse.
Thanks for the warning. Otherwise I might have, you know, todally changed my life ‘cos of what someone said on the internet.
Throughout the entire quantum-connected universe there is perhaps only one iron law which always and everywhere applies:
Grifters Gonna Grift
Medieval monks selling pieces of the True Cross. Victorian spiritualists offering access to the departed. Celebrity well-being gurus peddling aura candles. Delulu tiktokkers farming likes. Its all the same con.
The world is always full of scared, unfulfilled, vulnerable desperate or just under-occupied people hungry for easy spiritual answers to why they feel so shit a lot of the time.
Where there is demand, supply will find a way to meet it.
There are fraudsters and loons on the net? I never guessed.
?
Frankly, I find this article intellectually very feeble.
As some commenters say, there is nothing particularly eye-opening in describing the fact that on social media one can find some New Age stuff or some astrological “advice” – similarly to what one could read in many popular magazines, especially women’s magazines. Such publications would be a more appropriate platform than UnHerd for such an article.
As for the phrase below, it sent my eyes rolling towards my brain:
“[The influencer], after all, is asking us to communicate not with our subconscious minds, but with the universe itself. “
The author should know that the subconscious mind is not a proven concept. This is why in serious literature we see referrals to “unconscuous” rather than “subconscious”.
One could believe in the latter, but no-one has proven its existence. The same as with God. Or the universe meeting our needs, or astrology predicting our future, etc.
Disclaimer: I do believe in God. At the same time, I am aware that we cannot prove His existence scientifically.
Being clear what is knowledge and what is belief (Epistemology 101).
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Off-topic: Am curious to see if this comment of mine will disappear, like many others, and then re-appear two days after it was posted.
PT Barnum is as correct today as he was way back in saying that a sucker is born every minute.
Influencer = Narcissistic
sorry that is not Jesus… that is Ryan Gosling! LOLOL
The religious world view is ubiquitous, people everywhere look for meaning and purpose and connection and something as simple as ‘rightness’. And doing so has helped humanity become more intellectually capable than any other animal on Earth. If you want to explain religion just understand evolution. This current crop of flapdoodling is just the same as mediaeval monks debating angels dancing once was; all religions do the same four things, the exact details vary a bit – they explain the ‘creation’ of the Universe, they maintain death is not the end of us, they assert that intentional supernatural agency is real and active, and they give you a rather obvious guide as to how you should treat other humans. Err… that’s it. No big deal.
If young folks are finding solace in some of the New Age or New Thought ideas that they are finding on their phones, let them have at it.
I challenge any reader in the midst of a personal problem that they can’t ruminate themselves out of to try saying to the sky “how can it get better than this?’ and not find out that a solution has presented itself to them. I learned this about 20 years ago at a workshop and it saved me hours and hours of inner annoyance.
Whether the ‘answer’ comes from God or the Universe or my Guardian Angels doesn’t really matter. The fact that I stopped ruminating for a minute to open up my mind to another way of looking at the problem likely caused a neurological shift in my brain to arrive at an answer I probably already knew and that to me is no less interesting. I’m all for young people having access to little mind-hacks like this if it will help improve their lives. I had to learn this one at an expensive workshop 35 years ago. They can have it for free in the palm of their hands with a click! Back off and leave them alone.
The true ‘well-rounded spiritual journey’ involves decades, a life-time. Most folks who are truly on this path don’t stay too long in the world of crystals and The Secret. Spiritual Materialsm IS a thing and I think that is what the author is getting at…using so-called spiritual practices for selfish purposes but everyone starts somewhere and at some point, the true seekers will find their path.