Wishes are for Fishes and Other Longings

The manifestation craze covers us our deepest doubts

If only wishes really did come true.

If only we could manifest our deepest longings merely on the strength of our desires.

Don’t we all, secretly, want the world to work this way?

I fervently wish humans would stop slaughtering one another. I wish, with equal might, that an agent would scoop up my new novel.

But wishes are not muscles or even levers. They do not obey the laws of thermodynamics. Immovable objects (or, say, objectives) will not yield once sufficient pressure is applied because the notion is null and void in dreamland.

So what?

TikTok has racked up over 46 billion views of people explaining how to manifest wishes (#manifestation). The longing to realize longings clearly runs deep.

Manifestation is a secular form of faith: It’s about believing mightily in future outcomes you cannot see, hear, taste, or touch—but which you are intent (perhaps hyper-focused) on conjuring.

There are methods for doing this. Scripting, for instance, involves writing out a scene as you deem it to unfold in your favor—for a job interview, say, or pitching a film. Journaling is a written diary of wishes, as specific as you like. 

The WOOP system (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) offers a step-by-step method that features its own app and videos.

Then there is the 3-6-9 method:

“So you write down what you want to become, like, you already became it. So you write it down 3 times in the morning, 6 times in the afternoon, 9 times at night, and you read it before you go to bed. So you read it 9 times before you go to bed.”

The manifestation phenomenon also goes by the moniker Lucky Girl Syndrome, which is “based on the law of assumption, which says that should a person assume and believe something to be true, that concept becomes a reality.”

(Dwell a moment on why this centers on girls. Hmm.)

Anyway, this is old news, thinly repackaged. Lao Tzu’s quote, probably bastardized, gets a bit of credit: “Your own positive future begins in this moment….Every goal is possible from here.” So does Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. And Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book, The Secret, which blew up internationally, making at least some of Byrne’s wishes come true (Wealth? Fame? Influence?). According to reporter Rebecca Jennings, “Shut up, I’m manifesting” was a defining meme of 2020.

The question is, why has manifestation come roaring back?

Scientists acknowledge there’s a measurable upside to the positive thinking that manifestation requires. According to the Mayo Clinic, for instance, positive thinking can lead to lower rates of depression and better coping skills during periods of stress.

But there are downsides as well. Manifestation ignores the value of hard work and the benefits conferred by privilege.

“Manifestation culture places the burden of success solely on the individual's mindset and actions,” says clinical psychologist Dr. Therese Mascardo, “ignoring the impact of systemic oppression, inequality, and other external factors that can influence our success.”

She adds: “The notion that we create our own reality suggests that if you don't achieve your goals, it's because you didn't manifest them well enough or you weren’t thinking positively enough.”

Here’s where I land:

The hordes investing their time, energy, and perhaps money in manifestation make me sad because it’s plain to see that the latest Age of Manifestation is a cry for help.

We are boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly, swamped by doubts about our capacity to survive another day, another shift, another year, another climate disaster, another war, another innocent death by gunfire.

We fall back on wishing as a last resort—hoping to finally remake the world in our own image, to exert control where control is never to be found.

At the heart of the matter, manifestation practices are a form of “self-owning” that reveal the existential crises of doubt hiding in plain sight among us.

I think the trend is here, this time, to stay.