Picture a softly lit bedroom, white linen, diffuser trailing lavender mist into the late afternoon. A woman is speaking into her phone in a low, confiding voice. Behind her, a corkboard studded with magazine cutouts. Range Rover, beachfront villa, stacks of cash fanned out beside a crystal water bottle. She's writing the same sentence fifty-five times in a gold-leafed journal—the 55x5 method burns your desires into the subconscious and the universe, she explains. She's reciting affirmations over and over. I'm so lucky. Everything always works out for me. I don't chase, I attract. The comments are full of emojis and angel numbers. Hundreds of thousands of people are watching. Millions, depending on the day.

This is ✨ #MANIFESTATION ✨ on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Gorgeous, warm, aspirational, cozy. There are tarot readers in fairy-lit rooms pulling cards just for you. Psychics explaining what your energy is currently attracting and how the universe rearranges on your behalf. Life coaches walking you through vision board tutorials and the 369 method and pillow techniques.

The aesthetic is soft, golden, and feminine. The promise is total: think the right thoughts, and reality will bend. And there is scientific literature about how this could possibly be a psychological disorder.

Let's back up and start from the beginning.

Where Did All This Come From?

Manifesting is not new. Most of its believers understand these practices as ancient Eastern wisdom, exotic and timeless (a problematic framing I'll come back to).

The actual origin is much more recent and American. New Thought began in the United States in the early 19th century, rooted in the work of a Maine clockmaker-turned-healer named Phineas Quimby, who believed that illness originated in the mind through erroneous belief. A mind "open to God's wisdom" could overcome any disease. There was the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the "Mental Science" of Swedenborgian minister Warren Felt Evans, and eventually an entire ecosystem of churches, Unity denominations and self-help philosophies.

By the 20th century, these ideas would mutate into The Secret, the Oprah industrial complex, and the TikTok wellness feed.

Manifesting mostly comes from Neville Goddard, a Barbadian-born dancer and mystic who moved to New York in the 1920s and studied esoteric philosophy under a mysterious Harlem teacher named Abdullah. Goddard spent the next four decades lecturing in Los Angeles on what he called the "Law of Assumption." Enter a drowsy, hypnagogic state and inhabit your desired reality as though it is already true. The subconscious doesn't distinguish between what you vividly imagine and what actually happens. "An assumption," he wrote, "though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact." Goddard interpreted the entire Bible as psychological allegory, Christ as the human imagination, the Crucifixion as the spirit buried in matter. He preached to overflow crowds and television audiences of 300,000 until his death in 1972. His books, which had been out of print for decades, are now ubiquitous in the manifestation corners of TikTok and Reddit.

Spiritual, Not Religious

If manifestation was simply about positive thinking and optimism, I'd absolutely have no problem with it. I myself believe in the good of many things and others, and have an astounding amount of faith in uncertain things.

The appeal of new age, "spiritual but not religious" eclecticism is not irrational. Organized religion has historically been a mechanism for women's subordination and oppression. The Abrahamic traditions use the story of Eve to justify everything from denying women education to withholding pain relief during childbirth. When women began leaving those traditions, they didn't leave the hunger for the sacred, finding it elsewhere, in a holistic milieu that centred them. That impulse is understandable.

But as a tragic result, there's now a billion-dollar industry built on cherry-picking practices from marginalized cultures, stripping them of meaning, and selling them back as lifestyle accessories. The chakra system derives from Hindu scripture written between 1200 and 1500 BCE. Smudging with sage is sacred ceremony in many Indigenous North American traditions. The 369 manifestation method is rooted in a Hindi philosophical concept.

The bastardization of these practices has resulted in people charging $80 for a charged crystal water bottle, or $300 for a manifestation course, while the cultures whose knowledge made those products possible receive nothing.

This is orientalism dressed in linen and rose quartz. The East (and Indigeous Peoples) as a source of exotic spiritual raw material to be refined into Western wellness content.

I want to be clear that some of these practices are good, such as meditation and gratitude, some are harmless such as believing crystals emit vibrational energy that interacts with the body's energy fields or moon rituals, but some are not only extractive but extremely harmful.

The Gendering of Spirituality

Manifestation culture skews heavily toward women. The TikTok aesthetic is almost entirely feminine. Beige and blush tones, the "lucky girl" framing, vision boards plastered with luxury handbags and dream bodies.

Those who downplay and dismiss new age spirituality as a "white woman thing" are practicing misogyny and hiding it under criticism of race. When society oppresses women, when systemic change is impossible, when the structures of oppression feel immovable, an individualized framework of spiritual empowerment has obvious appeal. For then you don't need to change the entire system, you just need to change your own frequency.

I understand why that's seductive and feels like power. But a movement telling women the reason their material conditions haven't improved is that their thoughts aren't positive enough is not empowering at all.

When you look at the dominant faces of "Lucky Girl Syndrome," they are uniformly white, straight, conventionally attractive, and affluent. Their "manifestation wins" are the casino jackpot, the brand trip, the Cartier bracelet. All predictable outcomes of existing privilege, just merely rebranded.

The True Believers

Most believers of manifestation have some relationship with this spectrum of harmless to extractive. But true believers of manifestation take the idea to its logical conclusion, believing they can literally alter reality and that every action that happens to someone, good and bad, is due to their thinking and manifesting of it. This is the hidden cruelty of the law of attraction and manifesting.

For me, this is where the buck stops. For if your thoughts create your reality—all of it, not just the good parts—then what happens when something terrible occurs? Cancer survivors did not manifest their cancer, abuse victims are not responsible for the abuse that came into their lives. People in car accidents were not consecrating themselves toward collision.

I worked in a children's hospice. I've sat with children who were dying and with the families who were holding them. The idea that anyone could believe a child manifested their own terminal illness, whether through insufficient positivity, or a karmic contract their soul signed before birth, or through the wrong thought—is repugnant. Nearly everyone has lost a loved one to terminal illness, including myself. Manifestation hands the most vulnerable people in the room a mirror and says, "this is your fault." I cannot think of anything more cruel and less spiritual.

I am someone that believes in God, and I completely understand the frustration and outrage somebody could have thinking a God would allow something so cruel and evil as childhood cancer, and that the "mystery" is bullshit. But there is a wide, oceanic distance between wrestling with a universe that allows childhood cancer, and simply believing the child themselves are responsible through manifestation.

The first is honest. The second is a spiritual bypass, a way of immunizing yourself against the full horror of other people's pain by converting their tragedy into a lesson about their own failure of consciousness. The belief system "simply doesn't give people the space to just be with our genuine and authentic human emotions when life's inevitable and uncontrollable struggles hit." Devoted practitioners become terrified that feeling grief or fear or rage will manifest more of the same, instead pushing the feelings down. This toxic positivity is, funnily enough, physiologically worse for the nervous system than simply allowing the feelings to move through.

From true believers, you will hear sentiments such as "your souls contracted for this experience" or "there’s an energy exchange between abuser and the abused, and if the abused wasn't putting out that kind of energy they wouldn't attract this experience." Or that "your thoughts create your reality, therefore, your victim mentality created this situation." It is literally victim blaming.

An Actual Answer

If you are somebody in the throes of manifestation, if you're somebody who is desperately trying to conjure a better life for yourself and it isn't working, then I am going to be the person to tell you that it isn't actually your fault. You are trying, and you're trying hard. There are real systematic barriers and harms that we all endure. While we all have the ability to cultivate resiliency and grit—and that's incredibly important to do—but this certainly does not mean we're anywhere close to being on an even playing field.

The psychology behind manifestation is real, there is research and evidence on how goal visualization can focus attention and prime behaviour. But directed attention toward your goals and your thoughts are the only reason you don't have what you want is the difference between a tool and an ideology. And ideologies that locate the cause of systemic suffering entirely within individual consciousness are ideologies that protect the system.

You can cultivate joy and still be structurally disadvantaged. You can practice gratitude and still be owed something by the world. You can hold faith and still be furious. We are full of contradictions and that's perfectly okay.

The prosperity gospel is manifestation in a megachurch, and it tells the poor that their poverty is a moral and spiritual failing. It is no surprise most believers in manifestation attempt to conjure personal wealth and prosperity instead of bettering others and the world or healing the many systemic horrors—this is the rugged individualism of the American dream where New Thought originated from, after all.

But the billionaires of our world did not manifest their abhorrent fortunes. They were obtained through exploitation of the working class, full stop. A cursory search into the Epstein files demonstrates how unjust and cruel our world can be and continues to be. To put it bluntly and bleakly, no amount of manifesting has stopped human trafficking, indentured servitude, or the widespread abuse known and documented.

Do not add to this cruelty by blaming victims of suffering and horrors, please.

The universe, if it's anything, is something we're in together. Not alone. Not just vibing toward individual escape from a system none of us designed. We can try, not manifest, to fix the system instead.