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.
While it’s hard to say how many younger people use social media for spiritual sustenance, there are plenty of stats around their social media usage in general. In Britain, 15-24 year-olds spent an average of 58 minutes a day on TikTok in 2023, as well as 52 minutes on Snapchat and 48 on YouTube. We also know that younger people are growing wary of traditional forms of religious expression. In the UK’s latest census, over half the nation’s twenty-somethings said they had no religion, compared with around a third of the population overall.
As a 2022 report by Theos makes clear, however, that doesn’t necessarily translate to atheism. Of the “nones”, 36% agreed that humans are spiritual beings at heart, while 42% believe in some form of the supernatural. That, in turn, is sparking a rise in alternative spiritualities, which in many cases blur into (or emerge from) secular spaces. Consider, for instance, the overlap between spirituality, wellness, and self-care. Mix them together, and you get Instagram crystal healers promising to heal your trauma; “cord-cutting rituals” on WitchTok; YouTube astrologers explaining how Librans should deal with eclipse season. The spiritualities that have found the most traction online have a distinctly therapeutic bent.
For some practitioners, though, there is more at stake than boosting mental health. Rather, they’re interested in harnessing spirituality to improve their material circumstances. That might involve asking the universe for your dream job or dream house or dream partner, exactly tailored to your specifications. At its most grandiose, it can mean hacking the source code of the cosmos, using whichever mystical tools are at your disposal to “manifest” the outcome you want.
“We’re intrinsically connected through quantum entanglement,” says one TikTok creator. “Your thoughts, through this cosmic web, can link with your desires, influencing reality in the vast quantum field… Think wisely and let your desires manifest in this interconnected universe.”
At its gentlest, delulu has less cosmic ambitions. It’s a playful concept, self-consciously silly. For many young people, posting “delulu is the solulu” is basically self-effacing, helping them embody a self-confidence that would otherwise elude them. Truly believe that you’re destined for greatness… well, that might be hard to achieve without a narcissism diagnosis, especially if you’re a spotty teenager who’s never been snogged. But embrace the delusion that you’re the next Dua Lipa? Suddenly you have carte blanche to apply for that job or smile at your crush in the canteen.
While I wouldn’t want to trample on something so harmless, once it gets mixed up with all the stuff about quantum fields it becomes rather less benign. The world of short-form video content is not exactly known for prizing nuance. Rather, it favours the simple, the splashy, the outrageous. Apply that to your cosmology, and you’re left with something hollow: a jumble of bold promises and magical thinking that fails to engage with the human condition at all.
As many people online have clocked, “delulu” is basically a rejigged form of the Law of Assumption: “Whatever you assume to be true will become your reality.” Together with the Law of Attraction — “Whatever you focus your energy on will come back to you” — the principle can be traced back to the 19th-century New Thought movement. Associated with the American mesmerist Phineas Quimby, the movement held that the mind was more powerful than previously recognised. To quote the modern New Thought principles, our thoughts “can be carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living”.
Through the 20th century, the concept recurred in self-help bestsellers such as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, the latter supposedly a favourite of Donald Trump. Yet if older iterations of the concept tended to invoke God, or at least divinity, today’s Instagrammers are more likely to talk about “the universe” in general — sometimes invoking cod quantum physics to give their claims a sciencey sheen.
The basic point, in each case, is that our successes or failures are far from random. Rather than being at the whims of chance, we are powerful beyond our wildest imaginings. In fact, it’s only the strength of those imaginings that determines whether we become a street cleaner or a billionaire. For some Instagram influencers, that might be a positive message. It’s certainly an algorithm-friendly one. And it’s no surprise that, as social media makes spirituality more decentralised, we’re seeing a shift towards interpretations that emphasise personal agency. What could be more individualistic than controlling the actual universe with your mind?
Yet look through the comments section of these videos, and buried among the chorus of assent you’ll spot at least a few naysayers. “Girl I’m trying but my dream jobs are not emailing me back,” reads one. “I was always delulu but it never worked. Something is wrong with me,” says another.
The less-acknowledged reality here is that if your big wins are all your own doing, then so too are your losses. On some level, they’re appropriate penance for your thought-crimes. This is clearly a recipe for neurosis or worse. As one commenter on the Law of Attraction subreddit put it: “It’s extremely damaging. It put me in the worst depression imaginable.”
Not, of course, that delulu is alone in disappointing its followers. Each spiritual tradition, across time and culture, has needed to grapple with the fundamental unfairness of life. But while each has come to its own conclusions, there’s a reason most have responded with something more nuanced than, life is fair actually — or, in the comforting words of one Redditor, “Sorry but this is all your own fault.” Most have dealt seriously with the reality of suffering, rather than trying to usher in happier circumstances with mindless positivity. Few have claimed that life’s hardships can be eased by begging the fates for a Ferrari.
More often, spirituality has been touted as a way to transcend our earthly privations (“storing up riches in heaven”), or else to ride out the storm of aversion and desire. No less important, everyone from Baha’is to Baptists generally offer some kind of underlying moral code. This is something conspicuously lacking on TikTok. You might learn how to manifest your dream job, but you won’t find much about how to improve conditions for the wider labour force.
Far from helping you transcend anything, then, #delulu spirituality is very clearly a product of consumer capitalism, in which the hyper-atomised individual is enshrined as the ultimate point of focus. In a cut-throat society of winners and losers, #delulu simply calls you to join the winning side. Social media only makes this worse. However well-intentioned these online communities are in theory, TikTok and Instagram aren’t ideal temples for well-rounded spiritual reflection. And in a world where the most clickable content rises to the top, it’s surely inevitable that angel numbers are prospering where richer attempts at meaning-making struggle to be heard.
Call me a realist (a curse word as far as the #delulu are concerned); call me an elder-millennial grouch. But I can’t help feeling that, at a time of economic precarity, young people aren’t well-served by a philosophy that offers to magic it all away. And comforting though it might be to slip into a haze of delusional thinking, it sounds oddly lonely too: just you in your mystical bubble against the power of the universe. Either that or I just need to quantum jump a little bit harder.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/