Have you tried manifesting your desires? It’s hard to avoid it on social media – the idea that you can turn your desire into reality through the power of belief. It could be financial success, romantic love or sporting glory.
Singer Dua Lipa, who is set to headline Glastonbury Festival in June 2024, has said performing at the festival on Friday night was “on her dream board”. “If you’re going to put yourself out there, be specific – because it could happen!”
Manifestation gained rapid popularity during the pandemic. By 2021, the 3-6-9 manifestation method had become famous. For example, a TikTok that has over one million views talks about this “no-fail manifestation technique.” You write down what you want three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon, and nine times before bed and repeat until it comes true. Now, content creators are touting countless ways to turn your dreams into reality.
But the idea that if you wish for something hard enough it will happen is not new. It evolved from the self-help movement. Some of the earliest popular books promoting this idea include Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) and Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life (1984).
This trend actually started with Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a book published in 2006 that claims you can get whatever you want through the power of manifestation. It has sold over 35 million copies and has many celebrity fans. Citing the “Law of Attraction,” Byrne declared: “Your whole life is a manifestation of the thoughts that run through your mind.”
Manifestations of intellectual debility
But manifestation also has a dark side. Popular trends like the 3-6-9 manifestation method promote obsessive and compulsive behavior patterns, and they also encourage faulty thinking habits and faulty logic.
The expression is a form of wishful thinking, and wishful thinking often leads to erroneous conclusions through a misappraisal of evidence. The wishful thinker exaggerates his or her optimism about the likelihood of the preferred outcome. In philosophical terms, this kind of thinking is called an “intellectual flaw”: it blocks a rational person’s attainment of knowledge.
Manifesting encourages people to dream big and visualise every detail of their desires. It sets people’s expectations unnaturally high, setting them up for failure and disappointment. It is arguably a form of toxic positivity.
If you think your own thoughts have the power to create reality, you may underestimate or ignore the practical actions and efforts of others. You may manifest this by saying: “I attract positive things to myself”. But in doing so, you may not see or understand the role that luck, chance, privilege and circumstance play in explaining why some things happen and others do not.
Logical errors
Manifestation leads to logical errors. Someone who practices manifestation—and finds that what he has manifested has come true—may attribute these desired results to his prior hope or wish. But this does not mean that the hope caused the result. Just because one came before the other does not mean that the other was the cause: correlation does not mean cause-effect.
If you believe that the power to desire something causes it to become true, you will attribute more causal efficacy to your mental activity than to other causes.
For example, if you study hard for an exam and get good grades, you might attribute this result to your daily mantra or frequently repeated affirmations, rather than to the effort you put into studying. For your next exam, you might continue the expression, but study less.
And when an expected outcome doesn’t happen, you may find yourself accounting for it in positive or fatalistic terms: the universe has something better planned. The negative outcome becomes additional evidence that you should still think positively, and so you won’t change your approach.
While this may be initially appealing, disclosure may promote victim blaming: that if someone had thought more positively, the outcome would have been different. It also does not encourage people to make backup plans, leaving them vulnerable to fate and circumstance.
Manifestation is very self-involved. The desires of the manifester are the focus of their attention and use of their mental energy and time.
If you rely only on mental strength to achieve your desires, you will not succeed. Try to consider the various factors that support and oppose your goals. Finally, remember that sometimes the thoughts we have are imaginative, imaginary, fictional, or fantastic. It is enriching and positive that in many cases, our thoughts do not come true.
,Author: Laura D’Olimpio, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Birmingham)
,disclosure statement: The paper on which this article is based, ‘What’s wrong with wishful thinking? “Disclosure” as a cognitive flaw’, derives from the ‘Educating responsible believers’ research project, which was jointly funded by the University of Birmingham and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and published in the journal ‘Educational Theory’.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
