Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Manifestation

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Host Amanda's new book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality is out TODAY!!! Get your copy wherever you buy books (including audiobooks). The book is about magical overthinking in the Information Age—how our deep-rooted cognitive biases are clashing with contemporary culture to create a new era of delulu. Themes covered in the book include celebrity worship, nostalgia, and today's topic of discussion... the cult of manifestation. This special episode features an exclusive excerpt from Amanda's new audiobook! It's a portion from the chapter titled “I Swear I Manifested This: A Note on Proportionality Bias,” which explores how radical conspiracy theories and New Age ideas of manifestation are actually both motivated by the same psychological quirk, all the while telling the story of a cult-followed online manifestation guru 👽 Turns out, we all have a pinch of conspiracy theorist in us. Tune in to find out how🤞 Get the audiobook here! Purchase the book in hardback. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from THE AGE OF MAGICAL OVERTHINKING by Amanda Montell, read by the author. Copyright © 2024 by Amanda Montell. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Catch Amanda on tour this week:April 9: Los Angeles, CA — feat. Pauline Chalamet (tickets here) *few tix left* April 12: Brooklyn, NY — EXCLUSIVE VARIETY SHOW feat. Ceara & Griff from Petty Crimes (tickets here)  April 16: Philadelphia, PA — EXCLUSIVE VARIETY SHOW feat. Kelsey McKinney from Normal Gossip (tickets here) *new promo price* May 1: Atlanta, GA — Wild Heaven – West End with A Cappella Books (tickets here)

The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host, Amanda Montell, author of the new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, out today. Every week on our show, we analyze a different culty group from the modern days at Geist. Today, we're talking about the cult of manifestation.

To try and answer the big question, this group sounds like a cult. What is it really? Today is such a special day for me and for Sounds Like a Cult because my new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking that I've been working on so hard for three years, is finally out!

And I am so over the moon. I actually can't even find the words to describe how I feel to be sharing this book with you. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different. It's about the Cult of Manifestation and I'm going to provide some background, like a normal sounds like a cult episode. And then I'm actually going to share an excerpt from my new audio book for the age of magical overthinking, which I got to record myself from a chapter that directly addresses this subject matter. The chapter is called, I swear I manifested this a note on proportionality bias, which is the psychological inclination underlying ideas of

manifestation, but also much more hardcore conspiracy theories. I am getting to share this excerpt thanks to my publisher, Simon & Schuster, Simon Audio. Thank you so much. So please stick around because I'm so excited to share it with you. But first I wanted to tell you a little bit about this book because I've been working on it for all these years and I can't believe it's finally out today. The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality is about cognitive biases in the information age. So digital age de lulu, if you will, where every chapter is dedicated to a different cognitive bias, one of these deep rooted mental magic tricks that we unconsciously play on ourselves in order to make sense of the world enough to survive it.

Except my argument in the book is that these cognitive biases are clashing with the information age to cause us a lot of existential turmoil. Hello. Basically, it's a book for overthinkers. I identify as an overthinker, a thought spiraler, to help us explain why our minds are such a mystery to us right now and causing us so much pain and conflict during this particular time in history, all through the lens of cognitive biases. So some of the more famous cognitive biases that you've probably heard of that have

also come up on this podcast before include confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy. And I actually started learning more about cognitive biases because of the research that I was doing for my last book, Cultish. As I was sort of researching the mechanics of cult influence, I kept coming across psychology and behavioral economics studies that made mention of confirmation bias or our tendency to seek out and internalize and remember only information that validates what we already believe or sunk cost fallacy, aka our proclivity to think that resources already spent on an endeavor justify spending even more. So these biases could explain the choices of a lot of the cult followers that I was

looking into, but I couldn't help but notice that they also explained scads of my own irrationalities, including my decision to stay for many, many years in a very cult-like one-on-one relationship in my early twenties. And I beat myself up for that for the longest time for being so irrational until I read this research about the sunk cost fallacy. So that was really validating because it felt like there was brain science and like an adaptive reason why I had made such a poor decision for myself. And these cognitive biases definitely explained

a lot of the delulu that I was noticing in the zeitgeist at large, from conspiracy theories to celebrity stan behavior to people taking astrology too seriously, to even just something as simple as having a fight or flight response, to an experience as objectively non-threatening as like a salty email. So every chapter of the book is dedicated to a different cognitive bias, from confirmation bias to zero-sum bias and the IKEA effect. Some of them

have these really interesting names and I use each one as a lens to explore and explain and reckon with some mysterious irrationality from the culture at large and my own personal life. So some chapters of the book include one called, Are You My Mother, Taylor Swift? A Note on the halo effect, which explores the psychological inclination underlying the extreme cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement that we see in our culture so much these days,

and how that actually connects to parent-child attachment. Fascinating stuff. There's another chapter called Nostalgia Porn, which explores the role that nostalgia plays in our own mind. And then there's the chapter that I'm going to be excerpting from today called, I Swear I Manifested This. And this chapter makes the argument that ideas of manifestation are not only kind of culty these

days, but are actually motivated by the very same cognitive inclination that underlies the most extreme and destructive conspiracy theories. So this book is out today. I encourage you to patronize your local indie bookstore, but the book is also available on the massive famous book retailer with fast shipping that shall not be named. It has been name checked on this podcast before. But thank you so much Amazon because they did choose the book as a pick of the month. Despite me calling Amazon a cult all these years. Thank you very much.

The book is also available on audio. It was actually just picked as an Apple Books Must Listen. All these cults that I've critiqued in the past are embracing me. I couldn't be more thankful. And the audio book is especially meaningful to me because my partner, Casey, is a film composer. You're already familiar with his work.

He composed the Sounds Like A Cult theme music. So thank you very much. He's so talented. He actually composed the intro music to my audiobook, which I will be sharing with you shortly. It is so beautiful and dreamy and goes perfectly with the book. And I think I'm also going to use it as the intro music for my new podcast. So I'm just so excited about this, as you can probably tell. And I'm also starting my book tour today. So in addition to buying the book, if you would please very much,

if you live in LA, New York, Boston, Philly, DC, Portland, Atlanta, check out the links in our show notes to come catch me on tour because I would love to be able to bring this parasocial relationship to the real world and start the cult of my dreams once and for all. I'm kidding. But before we get into this chapter about how manifestation is its own kind of conspiracy theory, I wanted to provide a bit of background, just setting up the episode

like a classic sounds like a cult ep. Thank you so much for celebrating this week with me. Here we go. ["The Cult of Manifestation"] The cult of manifestation is a cult that we've been dancing around on this show for years. We did the cult of self-help. We've done the cult of life coaches. Manifestation is kind of the culty ideology that slithers through all of these groups.

The idea of manifestation is obviously not new. You can certainly argue that modern day ideas of manifesting, creating your own luck can be traced back to the new thought movement of the 19th century that we've talked about when discussing the origin stories of many different cults, most notably the cult of multi-level marketing. Manifestation always experiences a spike in the culture, a little rebrand whenever we

really need it. There was a big manifestation resurgence in the Nautis. Hello, nostalgia, my childhood. Due in large part to the 2006 self-help book that Oprah selected as her book club pick, Oprah or Grilly, she loved a good cult. The secret, oh my god remember that book cover with like the wax stamp it's like freaking wax stamped into my brain forever, which has sold over 35 million copies worldwide. I think I remember when I was in middle school I gifted one as

like a holiday present to my mother. Not her vibe. Denise is not out here trying to manifest. She's like, I'm a scientist. I am not making a vision board. I have my microscope, honey. Anyway, it was post 9-11. Bush was in office. What a fucking mess. Political polarization was polarization-ing. By that I mean it was ballooning in a huge way in the US and we needed the secret apparently to help us feel like we could regain some agency and that everything would all be okay. And the same cultural need slash I guess desire for manifestation emerged during the pandemic. We were scared. We were isolated. Life was unpredictable. We were scared, we were isolated, life was unpredictable. We were on TikTok where a whole generation of manifestation guru types were popping up

on everybody's For You page like, hi, spiritual girly, are you on your highest vibration? If this video is on your For You page, then it was meant for you. TikTok brought us so many spiritual pseudo mental health influencers. It brought us the whole delulu trend. You got to be delulu to make your dreams come trillulu with the magical salulu, et cetera, et cetera. So even if millennials and zoomers had not read the secret, Zoomers had not read the secret, they were getting served manifestation content in a new and fresh way online.

In 2020, Google searches for manifesting went up 600%. On TikTok, manifestation content surged beyond 9 billion views. And on Instagram, the hashtags manifest and manifestation made up a total of 15 million posts. All of these stats are according to a Guardian piece titled Making Dreams Come True Inside the New Age World of Manifesting. Another TikTok trend that I read about lol dating myself, not on TikTok, but I read about the discourse in publications like Psychology Today.

Another TikTok trend that popped up was called Lucky Girl Syndrome. Again, just a rebranding of classic new age manifesting. Lucky Girl Syndrome promoted this idea of unrealistic optimism, blind faith in luck as a key to success, which may seem positive, like a sort of counter to imposter syndrome, if you will. The idea is like, you know what, being reasonable, that isn't working out. Let me try being whimsical and cuckoo bananas for a while and see if that works better. Who is it hurting? But of course, spoiler alert, and this is kind of the risk of cult-followed figures who weaponize ideas of manifestation, it not only creates unrealistic expectations by encouraging people

to believe that everything can magically fall into place for you if you just fully commit to the idea that your positive thoughts will affect external events, it also discourages action, you know? And it also frames failure as this personal problem. If you're encountering poverty or illness, it's not because of dumb luck or a systemic issue. It's because you did not manifest hard enough. Your vision board is not colorful enough. You are not collaging hard enough girlfriend. So yeah, the motivations for wanting to believe in manifestation, I think, are really human and understandable and relatable. There is absolutely some truth to the idea that your attitude can affect outcomes. But in this particular hyper digital, seemingly connected, but actually very lonely era, a

lot of people are using these ideas of manifestation for their personal gain. When you start branding it and commercializing it, perpetuating manifestation as an ideology, that's where it gets culty. Manifestation could be categorized at this moment in time as a subsection of the health and wellness market, which according to a 2023 health and wellness global market report that I found in Yahoo Finance, grew from $4.9 billion in 2022 to $5.3 billion in 2023. And in recent years, online businesses

that sell manifestation related products have really skyrocketed. So there are businesses like House of Roxy, which sells everything from manifestation rings, which are priced at nearly three grand each, to manifestation kits. Those are $106 each and include things like, you know, sage bundles, a quartz crystal, a white candle,

a product called the moon bitches inhalation salts that actually sounds appealing. I would inhale anything to send me to the moon. So you know, it's delulu with a price tag. A quick little casual Google search will yield endless courses and retreats that teach manifesting as a practice. Courses for manifesting creativity, love, financial prosperity.

There are even courses for those who are having issues with their manifesting. Like, why does the law of attraction not work for me? Sign up for this course and you'll find out why. There is truly something for everyone. Then, to get a little more specific, and I mentioned this group in a little more depth in my book, there is the mother of all manifestation companies to be magnetic. I actually have a friend who

has dipped a toe in this culty group, allegedly. One of my dear friends actually taught me about to be magnetic because she at once feels like there are positive things to be derived from this group of women who are all, you know, trying to improve their negative self-talk and things like that. But also the founder of the group is problematic in their view and a lot of the members of To Be Magnetic get together on Reddit and other forums and sometimes in person to talk about that. Very interesting. To Be Magnetic is this multimillion dollar business that, according to a Vice piece titled, The Manifestation Business Moves Past Positive Thinking and Into

Science, dig that title with a grain of salt, boasted 18,000 paying members or what they call pathway members as of 2020, big year for manifestation, including To Be Magnetic. Pathway members fork over about $324 annually for access to an 18-course bundle and private community group where they can sort of crowdsource advice on how to energetically unblock to attract what they're calling in. Okay, cultish language.

To Be Magnetic is not the only one of these, you know, marketing savvy online wellness brands that push for manifestation to be recognized as scientifically backed. Another manifestation girly that you might have heard of in the past is this woman named Gabrielle Bernstein who wrote this New York Times bestselling book called The Universe Has Your Back. I would even count like Jay Shetty as a manifestation girlie.

These people have such cult followings. To Be Magnetic describes itself as radically different from the old school spiritual bypassing model of manifestation, aka just sending good vibes into the world. Their neural manifestation involves a series of exercises that necessitate sometimes unpleasant, painful memory jogging, okay? This memory jogging, also called deep imagining, is promised to target and unblock

inhibiting thought patterns that you could then ostensibly overwrite by imagining a more magnetic experience that, to be magnetic, claims will raise your self-worth and help you step into your unique authenticity. So if this is reminding you of Teal Swan, if this is reminding you of Scientology Superlight, that's reasonable. A psychotherapist and author of a bestselling book called Toxic Positivity named Dr. Whitney Goodman talked about the dangers of this type of cult-followed manifestation. She said,

I think particularly for people who have been abused, who have lived in poverty, who have dealt with real traumatic hardship, it can feed into and deepen this belief of like, I am the reason that bad things happened to me. She says they really believe these things in their life were caused by their beliefs. And I think all kinds of culty leaders from Kiel Swan to Keith Ranieri to MLM recruiters have weaponized phrases like, oh, that's just a victim mindset, or you need to sit with that, or you need to just em that or audit that or whatever culty terminology that particular group uses and when the desired goal doesn't manifest well you just didn't try hard enough. An Instagram follow that I really appreciate is

Alex Ebert. He was the lead singer of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, if you remember that band, and he now critiques a lot of new age ideology grifters and gurus online. And I found a post where he said, the problem isn't the belief in human potential or charge or crystals. The problem is when manifestation adopts the voice of capitalism and the myth of the self-made man that you create your own reality. In other words, if you're poor, that's your fault. That's because of your own reality. In other words, if you're poor, that's your fault. That's because of your own negativity.

Thank you so much for listening to this diatribe where I pop the literal fuck off about the Cult of Manifestation. I feel passionate about this shit. Don't get me wrong, I love a vision board, I love a delulu board as a little like craft activity, but shit, this can sometimes go way too far. The question is how far is it really going right now? Is it a live your life, a watch your back, or get the fuck out? We're going to find that out in a little bit of a different way this week by diving into this excerpt from my new book out today. Please, please buy it. This chapter is probably the most thematically similar to Sounds Like a Cult type stuff, which is why I decided to share it. But the book talks about so much. It's also really,

really personal to me. I talk about my mom in it. I talk about my brain. I feel like if you listen to the audio book or read the book in hardback or ebook, you'll be able to get to know who I like really am a little bit more. And I think anyone who's into reading about psychology, but from a more personal and pop culture angle will probably enjoy it. But for now on today, my pub day that I've been working towards, please enjoy the first two thirds of I swear I manifested this, a note on proportionality bias in which you will learn how bad the cult of manifestation can really get because this chapter is all about what manifestation and conspiracy theories

have in common and I make that argument through telling the tale of one cult followed Instagram manifestation guru so I'm so nervous for you to hear my book personality but to get you in the mood first, please enjoy the age of magical overthinking audiobook music that these sounds like a cult theme music composer and the love of my life, Casey composed. Simon & Schuster Audio presents The Age of Magical Overthinking, notes on modern irrationality Now, read by the author. I was a conspiracy theorist once. Sometimes I still am. The universe is out to get me was practically my tagline during the restless decade of my

adolescence when it felt like the only sensible explanation for why I felt so insecure all the time had to be a cosmic plot against me. What is a conspiracy theory other than the intuition that some powerful force is out there plotting to sabotage you or save you? The psychological craving for big events and big feelings to have equally big causes is instinctive. It's called proportionality bias. And while behavioral economists regard this inclination as the driving force behind extreme conspiracy theories like QAnon, it fools even the most rational minds into overestimating cause and effect relationships. Proportionality bias explains how the Manifestation Doctor

got so popular on Instagram. As of the 2020s, Manifestation may very well be the slyest conspiracy theory of them all. If we could sum up the healing in a single short phrase, what would that be? asks the famous pseudotherapist known online as At the Manifestation Doctor. Several names, places, and other identifying details in this chapter, including this one, have been changed. And let me tell you, coming up with a halfway intelligible Instagram handle that wasn't already taken proved to be one of the most harrowing creative challenges of this audiobook. Her tie-dye headscarf contrasts skin the color of raw cashews. Her voice, stage frightful and coated in a blue-collar Boston accent, doesn't match

the self-actualized, just-back-from-Tibet vibe of her posts, but this perfectly imperfect every woman's schtick is part of her charm. For the past two years, the once-licensed psychologist-turned-holistic mental health influencer has offered followers newly interested in therapy, but either unable or unwilling to access traditional treatment, the opportunity to learn about shadow work, the mother wound, and how to regulate your nervous system without pharmaceuticals, all in the form of bite-size explainer grams. Ensconced before a high-tech audio rig, The Manifestation Doctor is currently live-streaming

a virtual launch event for her million-dollar new self-help book, The Art of Self-Healing, Release Your Trauma, and Manifest a New You. At the time of this broadcast in 2021, her online following has ballooned to 4 million. She proceeds to answer her own question. I'll give you two words that those who've been following me for a while have heard me say a million times, holistic self-empowerment.

Precisely 117 of the Instagram accounts I personally follow are following The Manifestation Doctor. Old coworkers and classmates, well-known activists and authors, the singer-songwriter I listened to as I brushed my teeth this morning, my favorite neighborhood barista. I do not follow the page, not for my public account anyway,

but I have been surveilling it for about a year now from a fake profile christened after an old pet in a street I used to live on, like a porn star name. I cannot get over how big the manifestation doctor has gotten since the start of the pandemic, blowing up from an out-of-practice shrink with a lapsed Massachusetts license to a bonafide Dr. Phil-type star living in a mansion by the beach. It was an impressive business pivot, no doubt. I'm simply unsettled that marketing psychospirituality to millions of internet strangers became such

big business at all. The Manifestation Doctor's Fortune Cookie advice features absolutist maxims no other therapist I cross-checked for this chapter would dare make in public. People-pleasing is unconscious manipulation. Overexplaining yourself is a trauma response that stems from an unresolved childhood fear of conflict. Disease doesn't run in families. Habits do. Such sentiments seem like digestible sugar cubes of wisdom, but dispersed en masse by a mind-body hotshot, they risk aggravating anxious followers'

existing concerns about their own minds. We tend not to speak in absolutes like that, explained Dr. Erin Weiner, an Illinois board-certified psychologist on a phone call in mid-2021. The scale of the manifestation doctor's growth was unique. Her message, however, was not. At its core, it met all the basic criteria of a conspiracy theory. A classic story of good and evil rebranded for the modern mental health crisis. Her fundamental thesis was that traditional therapy and medications are keeping you unwell, but you can self-heal

your way out. You just have to learn how to make the universe bend in your favor. Sick? Poor? Not living your best life? Don't blame your mean boss or abusive ex. That's what victims do. Don't blame the blood-drinking elites. That's what actual conspiracy theorists do.

Instead, blame your unresolved childhood trauma. And then, for $26 a month, enlist in this self-empowerment circle, where you'll learn how to manifest the life you deserve for a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. This basic pitch was presented not just by the manifestation doctor, but by a whole class of new-age mental health figures who surged into the market throughout the early 2020s. The nation's psychological state was in collective nosedive. Increasing mental health discourse made folks who'd never been interested in therapy before

hyper-aware of their malaise. Between March 2020 and September 2022, Pew Research data found that 58% of adults ages 18 to 29 had experienced high levels of psychological distress. But licensed therapists across the country were either too expensive or overbooked to accept new clients. So patients started looking for solutions with less paperwork. In 2022, the New York Times reported that teenagers self-misdiagnosing mental disorders on TikTok had become a grave concern.

American life had grown so psychologically disorienting that fringe paranoias were passing as conventional wisdom. In July 2020, Pew Research determined that 20% of Americans, both liberal and conservative, suspected COVID-19 was manufactured at least partially on purpose. An NPR Ipsos poll revealed that 17% of respondents believed the QAnon claim that Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media, and another 37% said they didn't know if the myth was true or not. The term conspirituality, a portmanteau of conspiracy theory and spirituality, went from

a niche academic term to a subject of popular discussion in magazine op-eds and top-charting podcasts. On January 6, 2021, the QAnon shaman made headlines for invading the U.S. Capitol in a horned headdress and pagan body art. Suddenly, the once unfathomable image of young mothers in hand-dyed tunics marching shoulder to shoulder with Holocaust deniers, all united in the fight for a paradigm shift away from the government's totalitarian plot, became a widely recognized archetype, our new reality. By the manifestation doctors' rise to fame, trust in the US health care establishment,

which was supposed to keep us safe from things like deadly plagues, had fractured so severely that plenty of citizens didn't even want conventional shrinks. They were sick to death of red tape, insurance policies, and waffling chief medical advisors in $2,000 suits. They wanted a relatable populist who spoke their language and whom they could access for free on their phones, to tell them in certain terms that there was one big on-purpose reason why they were feeling terrible and the world couldn't breathe. Not a haphazard miscellany of tiny reasons that look different for everyone.

Consumers clung like baby marsupials to this crop of influencers whose definitions of unresolved trauma provided a cause for followers' distress that felt proportional to its magnitude. The term conspiracy theorist does not typically trigger images of beloved therapists with book deals and celebrity fans. Until recently, I was under the impression that conspiracy theorists were either incels with rat tales and UFO obsessions, or Facebook-addicted Karens who think essential oils are a personality trait and vaccines make you gay. My understanding was that conspiracy theorists don't have friends or jobs, much less Ivy

League degrees, millions of followers, and large publishing contracts. They spend their days on 4chan, exchanging proof that the moon landing was faked. 9-11 was an inside job, climate change is a hoax, the CIA killed JFK, the royal family killed Princess Diana, Avril Lavigne is dead, Steve Jobs is alive, and Katy Perry is actually Jean-Béné Ramsey all grown up. They're convinced that the Earth is flat, and Bill Gates is a Satanist, and studies disproving their quote-unquote theories are not compelling because scientists are mind-controlled lizards.

I always found the term conspiracy theory overly flattering. Special relativity is a theory. The Big Bang is a theory. That aliens help build Stonehenge? Not a theory. These Big Bang is a theory. That aliens help build Stonehenge? Not a theory. These are flashy examples. No matter the political flavor, though, a conspiracy theory can be defined as a sense-making narrative that offers a satisfying explanation for some confounding turn of events. Such incidents can be either global or personal, anything from a pandemic to financial collapse to a sudden bout of depression.

In 2019, a British review of the current literature on proportionality bias gathered that small, mundane explanations for important events, for example, Princess Diana died because her limo driver was drunk and speeding to avoid paparazzi, are generally not as satiating as more dramatic explanations. She was murdered by the British government. In spirit as in aesthetics, the human mind enjoys harmonious proportions. Faces that meet the golden ratio. Photography that follows the rule of thirds. Anyone who's ever come up with a sensational origin story for a high stakes outcome, certainly negative ones like big pharma is hiding the cure for cancer,

but also positive narratives like I manifested my success has a pinch of conspiracy theorists in them. Natural selection favored a paranoid mindset. For survival, the brain evolved for an environment replete with unseen dangers and hostile intentions. To detect meaningful patterns in a topsy-turvy world became a unique human forte, but sometimes we take it too far. Anyone is capable of drawing an oversimplified conclusion about cause and effect if it matches their pre-existing worldview.

The same bias that convinces QAnoners the elites are covertly trafficking children, is also what pressures prosecutors to bring home quick splashy guilty verdicts for high profile criminal cases, satisfying the public's hunger for a singular supervillain to blame. I think of the infamous Amanda Knox case. In 2007, the Seattle-born 20-year-old was studying in Perugia, Italy, when her flatmate was murdered, a crime for which Knox was swiftly and ostentatiously convicted, labeled a satanic sex-crazed killer with

eyes of ice, despite flagrant deficiencies in evidence. Knox was acquitted and freed in 2011, but a shocking percentage of the European public remains convinced of her guilt. Big tragedy, big blue eyes, big press treatment, big punishment. Her fate was simply proportional. On a more private stage,

proportionality bias shows up in our lives every day. An acquaintance told me she recites the same incantation every time she boards an airplane, because even though she doesn't sincerely believe in prayer, it's not worth skipping the ritual to test its relationship to her safety. After her husband's death, Joan Didion refused to give away his shoes, spiritually convinced that if the loafers remained in their proper place, he might return. I don't consider myself a superstitious person, but whenever I experience a stroke of dumb luck, my natural inclination is to pinpoint some astral rationale behind it,

like the only reason I found $20 in my pocket or was offered a free eclair at the coffee shop this morning was because I'd let someone merge in front of me at rush hour on the way there. In virtually every context, we cannot seem to rest until we find some intentional force either to fault for our misery or credit for our success. The greater the effect, the greater we desire the cause to be. Paranoia is a profitable disposition. While the belief that our government is running villainous underground mind control labs might be a smidge far-fetched for most,

you can build a whole brand on the suggestion that your own diseased brain is to blame for your poor health and dwindling bank account. During the mental health crisis of the early 2020s, hundreds of holistic wellness brands seized the public's proportionality bias by the gonads. In COVID lockdown, a close friend of mine joined To Be Magnetic, a self-help program led by Lacey Phillips, a struggling actress turned neural manifestation advisor. Phillips, who does not have any sort of therapy accreditation

but lots of wide-brim hats, claims to specialize in unblocking your subconscious self-sabotage through deep imaginings, where followers learn to reprogram old memories in order to align with what they truly desire. In 2022, I learned of Peoplehood, a therapeutic but not therapy business from the founders of SoulCycle that organizes group oversharing events, like a slumber party meets AA meeting. At Peoplehood, hour-long spill sessions labeled gathers invite strangers to divulge their darkest fears and loftiest goals to each other, supervised not by licensed counselors but by performers recruited as guides and described by the New York Times as charisma bombs.

The same year Peoplehood launched, so did Munko, an exclusive NFT-powered artist collective on Discord. What a time to be alive. Founded and helmed by controversial artist David Cho, Munko beckoned a devoted, mostly male audience to surrender their most shameful failures and heal through Cho's pithy tips for overcoming addiction and self-loathing. And in yet another pocket of the New Age sphere, inspirational life coaches like Jay Shetty and Gabrielle Bernstein were turning their cult followings into multimedia empires.

Powered by a BFA in theater and an endorsement from Oprah, Bernstein penned the New York Times bestseller The Universe Has Your Back and produced podcasts on how to talk to angels and become a major manifester. Shetty, whom I can only think to describe as a male girl boss, authored the self-help blockbuster Think Like a Monk, though he is not himself a monk, stating on JSheddy.me that his purpose is to make wisdom go viral. This is just a tiny sampling of the mental health influencers who found a modern audience, never mind all the aspirants.

As I was writing this chapter, feeling fidgety and unsure if my argument even made sense, I checked my Instagram notifications to find a new comment from an account called at priestess underscore Naomi underscore. The profile picture displayed a white woman with snaking blonde extensions and a rhinestone bindi. Her bio read, Healer, pure Bio-Energy Therapist, Soulmate, and Twin Flame Expert, Spiritual Coach, Mother of One, Daughter of Light." The Priestess's comment, I see glory and blessings in you and you are destined for greatness directly from birth. I have an important message but I will need your honest permission to proceed because

your ancestors have been trying to reach you by revealing some signs to you, maybe through your dreams or the repeated numbers that you normally see. 222-4-4-4-11-11-15-15. I also see your throat and sacral energy blocked, so kindly reply once you get this message with a picture of your right hand palm, my dear, if you want to know the message I have for you, namaste." Sometimes after tossing it around an idea to death, I'll start to think I've lost my mind and have nothing to say. You could call this comment from Priestess Naomi a sign from the universe to keep writing. All I had to do was check Instagram to find it. While men's taste in conspiracy theories often point them in the direction of UFOs

and Satanic cabals, educated women are more likely than anyone to embrace New Age concepts like moon bathing, crystal healing, and manifestation techniques, including the law of attraction. Emerging in the late 19th century from the New Thought Movement, this pseudoscientific perspective argues that positive or negative thoughts bring on either positive or negative experiences. Many hit self-help books riff on this law, including 1952's The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peel, Donald Trump's childhood pastor, and the 2006 mega-bestseller The Secret by Australian TV producer turned world-famous spiritual diva Rhonda Byrne.

Combining mysticism with polysyllabic DSM buzzwords like dysregulated, neural pathways, epigenetics, and vasovagal response, these teachings feel like a delicious cross between a tarot reading and a medical diagnosis. At first blush, promises of self-healing seem empowering. While classic conspiracy theories place followers loci of control entirely outside themselves, blaming external forces—the government, the elites—for whatever happensestation redirects loci of control back to the individual. I find this flip of the script even more insidious.

Most conspiracy theories argue that a mysterious outside evil is trying to control you. By contrast, conspiracy therapy says that the evil force is your own mind. Self-healing is a new age abstraction that commodifies the Tibetan Buddhist teaching that we all create our own destinies. The original tenet says that we may not be able to control other people or events, but with our own reactions, we can abate suffering. One problem with the neatly packaged for Instagram version of this principle is that it can lead to an obsessive focus on personal responsibility.

A key message of conspiracy therapy centers on the universal dangers of trauma, framed simplistically as unhealed wounds from childhood. Certain influencers have overgeneralized the link between unresolved trauma and disease—a teaching which starts to feel especially hairy when you consider, say, childhood cancers. This flattened attitude toward suffering discounts systemic factors like medical racism or generational poverty as well as random misfortune, which may or may not be traumatic. Equally, it over-credits personal efforts for auspicious outcomes. The tendency to explain away complex issues with metaphysical doctrine

is sometimes labeled spiritual bypassing. Covertly, this outlook discourages people from seeking external care, like medication or even support from loved ones, since its underlying tenet says misery is yours alone to attract or repel. Its popularity has made psychologists' clinical work more challenging. Dr. Serajee Waghage, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Los Angeles, told me in 2023 that treating disorders like OCD, PTSD, and depression is and has been harder when clients show up to one-on-one therapy with only inaccurate, sometimes insulting, stereotypes about what they mean. That's if a client makes their way off social media at all.

Rather than providing a helpful starter pack of resources for followers to carry into the real world, some mental health accounts establish a guru-style power dynamic. On the surface, it can seem like they're empowering the reader with information, but it risks building a kind of psychological dependence on the content creator. If I teach you how to think for yourself, you don't need me anymore, and I'm out of business, offered Dr. Dina DiNardo, a Pennsylvania-based licensed

psychologist and family therapist. But these possibilities are not obvious at first. Unless you're a trained practitioner, you might scroll through an engaging explainer carousel about attachment theory without picking up the conspiratorial attitude between the lines. A new follower of the manifestation doctor might not immediately find that their new favorite wellness expert was connected to a clique of much more violent conspiracy theorists. A few clicks away from her heavily monitored comment section would reveal a disquieting

subplot. In establishing her brand and website, The Manifest manifestation doctor took cues from Kelly Brogan, known as the holistic psychiatrist. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British nonprofit, named Brogan one of the Disinformation Dozen, a group of 12 people responsible for spreading 65% of all vaccine-related misinformation online. Brogan has falsely claimed that coffee enemas treat depression and infectious diseases caused by mental illness rather than pathogens.

Controversially, she also served as a functional medicine expert and trusted contributor to Gwyneth Paltrow's goop. Throughout the pandemic, the Manifestation Doctor openly supported content from alt-right extremists, like Sean Whalen, a men's rights influencer and owner of the clothing brand Lions Not Sheep, known for its Give Violence a Chance message tease, which attracted a $211,000 FTC fine for containing bogus Made in the USA tags. Often pictured holding machine guns, or posting images of Jesus holding machine guns, Whalen endorsed real masculinity as a prevention against COVID,

declaring that medical masks were for little bitch asses. In 2021, the Manifestation Doctors media manager spent many weeks promoting a crowdfunding campaign from Michigan gym owner and Holocaust denier to pay for state fines he incurred after establishing a no masks allowed rule at his gym and promising free memberships to anyone who renounced vaccination. Not every member of a new age therapy group will end up in no masks allowed territory. However, their doctrine remains dangerous because of how conspiracy theories function. When an influential figure cracks your faith in one foundational idea, be it as broad as the media or as specific as antidepressants, suspicion seeps in like root rot.

Radical conspiracism might start with the art of self-healing, but from there the vaccine awareness movement is not too far a leap, and before you know it, well, how do we know the moon landing wasn't faked? These risks are not theoretical. I spoke to a few of the Manifestation Doctor's early admirers, for whom the account ended up being a direct QAnon gateway, like Heather,

a new mother from Utah, who found the Manifestation Doctor in 2019. At the time, the account only had around 50,000 followers. Heather was struggling with postpartum depression and didn't have much support. The child of absentee addicts, she was drawn to the Manifestation Doctor's succinct discussions of codependency, attachment theory, and the idea that one could DIY their own brain chemistry like an IKEA dresser. I was trying to understand my dysfunctional upbringing while navigating parenthood myself, Heather said. The account made me feel empowered, like there was a reason I was suffering. A few weeks after following the manifestation doctor, Heather mentioned the account to her

dad as something he might enjoy. Having spent a tumultuous childhood in the LDS church and an adulthood in and out of rehab, Heather's father was finally sober for the longest stretch of his life. He had begun therapy and antidepressants for the first time. I started to see the light in his eyes, Heather recalled. Committed to his new healing journey, he created an Instagram account just so he could follow the manifestation doctor. He'd never used social media before.

I feel so guilty about that now, says Heather. Within six months, Heather's dad had entered QAnon waters. If far-right conspiracy theories were the open ocean, social media algorithms were the riptide, and the Manifestation Doctor's posts were tempting wavelets lapping at the shoreline. Things took a turn when Heather's dad joined the self-empowerment circle, her online subscription community. For $26 a month, devout manifestors could ostensibly learn what her most transformative version of the healing looked like. Her father enlisted

and stopped taking his medication shortly thereafter. In the manifestation doctor's world, antidepressants dull your senses, Heather recalled. Her dad announced that he didn't need therapy anymore because he was doing the healing instead. Whatever the healing is, said Heather. He never gave a definitive answer. One weekend in mid-2020, Heather's dad accompanied her and her kids on a camping trip. While sitting around the fire, he asked if she'd heard about the elites who drink blood to stay young. Heather recounted,

He stopped and looked at me like I was the crazy one who wasn't awakened to all this. Shortly after that trip, her father's life was fully consumed by right-wing conspiracy theories. The last time Heather saw him was Thanksgiving 2020. He's still really disconnected from reality, she said. That light in his eyes is just gone. said, that light in his eyes is just gone. In the two decades between 9-11 and COVID-19, paranoia tendreled through America's morale like a fungus. In 2018, MIT found that true stories take six times longer to reach 1,500 people on Twitter than false ones.

That's because false news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information. People who share novel information are seen as being in the know," said Sinan Aral, the study's co-author. Conspiracy therapists are not motivated to share nuanced facts, but rather content that will paint them as supremely wise. One-sided sentiments like, over-explaining yourself is a trauma response that stems from an unresolved childhood fear of conflict, are far better for engagement than people

justify their actions in different ways for different reasons, or all traumatic events are stressful, but not all stressful events are traumatic. Furthermore, information transmission research suggests that folks with higher anxiety are quicker to engage with and slower to disengage from negative information. So as a trait and state, anxiety itself perpetuates paranoid thinking. Certainly social media therapists with pure intentions and careful executions exist. They are forthright about what posts contain facts versus anecdotes, and their presence helps destigmatize mental health care.

However, some experts still feel squirmy about the mix of brain health and brand building. Thank you so much for listening to this excerpt. If you would like to hear the rest of this chapter as well as the book in its entirety, The Age of Magical Overthinking is now available wherever you buy audiobooks or ebooks or hardbacks. The links are in my show notes. This book really means a lot to me and I hope any overthinkers out there or anyone who just struggles with why it sometimes feels so difficult to exist as a human in the world right now will feel comforted by it and

Also stay tuned because I am launching a magical over thinkers podcast later this spring to continue exploring the subjects I can't stop overthinking about from Narcissism to monogamy to nostalgia. I will be back with a regular episode of Sounds Like a Cult next week, a hilarious and eye-opening episode about the cult of Stanley cups, but in the meantime I can say with confidence that I think Manifestation is a watch your back and if you want to finish hearing exactly why I came to that verdict, tune in to the rest of this chapter. Anyway, back with a new cult next week, and in the meantime, stay culty, but not too culty.

Come and join me for the cultiest event of the season. Oh, hey, it sounds like a cult host Amanda here to invite you this April to New York, Boston, and Philly, where I'm putting on a culty variety show that you are not going to want to miss. This show, Cult Gathering Extravaganza, features guest appearances from the cult-followed podcasters behind Normal Gossip, Petty Crimes, Love Letters, and Strange Customs, plus drag burlesque performances, a musical guest, exclusive merch, a meet and greet, and more! And this just in, for the New York event use the code

cultmagic, no spaces, at checkout for 10% off your ticket. A copy of my new book is also included in the price. It's going to be a hootenanny. Recruit your friends. Ticket links can be found at the link in our Instagram bio at Sounds Like a Cult Pod or on our website soundslikeacult.com.