Lucky girl syndrome and the endless rebranding of “The Secret” | Hacker News Reader

Lucky girl syndrome and the endless rebranding of “The Secret”

vox.com

47 pointsherbertl26 comments

Life is generally hard - very few people experience a charmed life from birth to death, where they follow all the steps, play by all the rules, get handed a great career, have wonderful relationships, great health, and die surrounded by loved ones after a long fruitful life (although likely HN has more than your typical share that fit this blessed existence).

What “The Secret” encapsulates is one manifestation of the human predisposition towards hope.

The current culture is telling people their society is hopelessly corrupt, racism is endemic, nothing they do matters, oh - and if you happen to succeed it was either by luck or exploitation. Nothing you do matters and all is meaningless anyway.

Hope, along with realizing you have free agency and can fix your own circumstances, is what helps you get up in the morning when life is punching you in the nose.

I also anticipate a resurgence of religiosity in Gen Z - the current mainstream secular world has nothing to offer those that are being beaten down by life.

Some of the happiest countries in the world are also some of the least religious. That either validates or contradicts your last paragraph, I’m just not sure which.

> [Religion] is the [...] realization of the human essence [in fantasy], since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. [...] Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

There's definitely an element of secular faith, in institutions such as science, the march of progress, the market, justice, freedom etc. I don't think which altar you kneel at matters as long as you feel there's an invisible hand called inevitability moving things in a good direction.

Not necessarily. Religion as a coping mechanism for struggling people is surely documented?

True happiness is found by relationship with other people. This has been true since the beginning since we are all born to a mother. The infant needs connection or it will die. This is true for all humans and that need does not diminish or sever as we grow.

So we have to connect with others. We make friends, find partners, have kids. Society is the collection of relationships and religion is one way to create, organize and maintain those relationships. It is not the only way. Some find connection in nationalism and fascism for example.

Capitalists and politicians have transformed American exceptionalism into a focus on individualism. Failure is an attribute of the individual. Ironically, capitalists avoid failure by incorporation (collective groups of individuals) which allows them to socialize the losses amongst the shareholders or if too big to fail, the general public. But this focus on absolute individualism has not always been true in the USA. The USA has had significant periods of humanistic growth and those reforms have benefited society. That is what we need to return to. I think generationally the millennials are more humanistic but there is certainly a nationalist rise taking place. Personally, I think Scandinavian countries are happier in general because of their collective humanism which is embodied in support services.

I've heard it in some podcast, neuroscientic probably, but I can not find it anymore who was interviewed and I would appreciate some clue about it, he said something in the sense that religion may be some regulative mechanism imprinted into brain - so if everybody has it the same and follow it then everybody is happy. Technology, CCTV (soon AI trained on #$%@) etc. would be an external control mechanism used instead.

The world is yearning for a new religion, similar to the yearning for Christianity in the Roman empire.

Personally I wish people could become more obsessed with being right, instead of being obsessed with having the right ideology.

Sadly I think the neurology of your typical human isn't suited for this behaviour.

People are so obsessed with being right that they’re unwilling to be wrong. It undercuts your whole vision.

The odds that you were raised right into an accurate model of the cosmos is quite low. Hence to be right you have to be able to change your mind all the time.

The way in which many young people engage with climate change is more religion than not. To be sure there is scientific consensus of our impact on the climate and over time we need to continue to transition to less polluting industries, but there's a vibe that is very much similar to church nuts.

That could be a simple “not enough science to express things rationally.” Or even dark, they’ve seen so much bad and no counter to it in their formative years that naked hope is a sort of lunge point. (Politics really has gone from “roughly responsive and representative” to pretty close to one party rule even when they’re out of power.) Like how people will turn to the more or most extreme options if they feel desperate.

It's complex.

On the one hand, we don't actually experience objective reality, but in a subjective world of ideas and experiences that's very much shaped by the thoughts we think and our whole grammar of concepts and ideas. Anyone who has struggled with something like depression or anxiety will attest to how much how thoughts shape perception. In this light, hope can be revolutionary.

On the other hand, I think it's easy to oversell this and make it sound like it will deliver things that it can't. Most claiming to sell hope are in fact selling snake oil.

On the third hand, some people have an interest in keeping you feeling angry and hopeless and unable to solve your own predicaments. This is in part the ugly backside of democracy. People who are content, who aren't worried about some threat on the horizon or indignant about some insult just can't be compelled to act. This has created an entire industry geared toward keeping you feeling helpless, afraid and upset all the time and it's all somehow on you to fix too, but you can't, so for the love of god keep scrolling or you'll never be mad enough to fix this. In this light, hope is revolutionary in the other sense of the word. It can be almost subversive to consider that maybe things will turn out well on a political plane.

On the final hand, I dunno. Maybe Epictetus was onto something with that whole "[i]f you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed"

The article is a perfect encapsulation of our current cultural pathologies.

The author pathologizes "manifestation". Well, is it pathological? No. It won't "affect the universe", or whatever, but it gets people to have hope, and focus on their goals. It's a reaction to a world where the media (defined loosely) constantly harps on the opposite: you're ugly, plus you're fucked, and the world is fucked, here's an advert. Suicidal ideation has gone up dramatically in teens, especially girls, and this "manifestation" stuff is a small part of people's defense mechanisms against a sick culture. But the piece never reflects on that.

It keeps bitterly harping on about "thin, beautiful, privileged women". Now, are they privileged? Sure. But that's for journal articles to discuss. You feed terms like "privilege" into pop-culture, and all you do is reify the gap. The vast majority of people, including women, including "thin, beautiful women" have tragically low self-esteem. This constant talk of "female privilege" accomplishes nothing but increase girls' guilt and shame over something they can't control. Incels might be the most unexpected consequence: they, more than anyone, have internalised this idea that beauty is everything for sexual, social, and financial success. And they're killing themselves in droves over it.[0] The way Vox uses it, "privileged" is just a way to stereotype and dismiss these girls as shallow, brainless, undeserving. That's a total misuse of the concept. I don't expect mainstream media to produce analytical cultural critiques, but this is just awful. It's like a Stoic trying to interact with a grieving person. Misses the mark completely.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/09/us/where-the-...

Middle aged people I know seem to be into the affirmation horseshit too.

I am not clear if anyone who really pushes it believes it, or it's just a substitute for Herbalife or Tupperware.

You know those positive things your parent said to you when you were younger by the time you are middle aged you don't hear anything positive and often endlessly have seen so many ads the reenforced so many negative views that affirmation restores that balance. Plus people discover most battle are 90% mental.

Some people just gotta have a distraction.

To me life is a combination of what you're given (e:g brains, opportunities, motivation, responsibilities) and how you play it. An analogy is the card game "Oh hell", which resembles Bridge but much simpler. You have to say how many tricks you'll make. After a round you receive a point for each trick you make, plus 10 extra if you make exactly what you said. This means a great hand is one with high cards that'll obviously win points combined with high /many trumps to control things. A crappy hand i:e all low cards, might also be a good hand if its easy to call 0 and therefore get 10 points easily. Some hands are hard to play - say you hold ace and many cards in one suit but no trumps, so someone might trump you, hard to call , 0 is dangerous because you might win a trick. If you go over your predicted half way through a round, it then makes sense to change strategy and get as many tricks as you can, throwing other players into disarray. In this situation a bit of luck may compensate somewhat for having had bad luck with a hard to call hand initially. Its quite a fun interesting game and I do feel life is like that. Also, I've met a bloke in is 20s who had an accident and ended up in a wheelchair for life. Amazingly to everyone who heard this, he said he didn't regret the accident, because before it he'd been on the wrong track in life, and afterwards, he'd met a lot of great people, made better friends, had a better life, done things he never thought he'd do. Most of the rest of us found it hard to imagine feeling like this. So.... its complicated ;)

The article and I expect the sentiment on HN to be cynical of “manifesting”.

But how is this any different from telling kids they’re gifted, which I presume most of you were told, and that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy ?

Being told you're gifted often isn't a self fulfilling prophecy, and can easily lead to failure or giving up when being gifted isn't working.

"Giving up when things get too hard" is a gift in itself. Not everyone is good at knowing when to stop.

I'd say that applies extremely rarely. When success depends on putting in the work (which is most often the case, especially if you have a higher aptitude than most), giving up easily is a major impediment.

I say this as someone who had this problem myself. Always being told "things come so easily to you" made me immediately avoid everything where I didn't excel out of the gate.

Not answering your specific question, or strawman to discredit cynicism, but to your point, the cynicism comes from manifesting not being something that can be substantiated by any metric.

“Having a goal” doesn't need telekinetic abilities or a connection with a sentient universe that alters other people’s behaviors for your benefit. Whereas manifesting and similar concepts rely on this. Additionally, they rely on any positive outcome to be retroactively attributed to what was manifested. And negative outcomes to be attributed to not manifesting hard enough. Both the manifesting and the outcome are unilaterally made by an individual and have no ability to be part of any statistic to judge its utility, hence the unsubstantiated nature, in fact it exempts itself from being able to be substantiated.

That's a great point, and this is a documented effect in education:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_effect

Generally, people treat us differently when they expect more or less from us (based on what they've seen from us or facts they know about us). People also experience a tendency to rise to high expectations or fall to low ones. See also:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/10/hi...

Yeah these ancient Hindu ideas that became popularized around the new thought movement with notable people like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Now mainstream through even shorter best sellers and 15 second TikToks.

Can you really reduce the idea down this far and still have success with it?

The book, Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill) is the oldest book I know that fairly explicitly proposes the idea that your thoughts shape your reality. I believe there were other people in the 1870s-1930s also discussing this concept, so there may be something before his book.

A point worth considering, even for those who think this concept is "horseshit" (as another commenter says), is that the actions we take in life are usually dependent upon what we think and believe.

If you believe life sucks and everything is unfair, and that there is no possibility for upward mobility, then you will not make any serious effort to improve your situation.

The challenge is that it's very difficult to "believe" something before you've seen proof in your life. So these affirmation preachers are basically telling you to pretend to believe something, consistently, and to take steps as if you already believed. Somewhere along the way, the faith becomes an embedded belief. And judging by very devoted religious followers, someone with a strong belief can be unstoppable.

One common assumption is that people who are rich or successful are smarter than others. Occasionally that's true, but we can turn on cable TV to see ample evidence of very stupid people in positions of power and wealth. If you look at the one person I'm specifically thinking of, you will see a reality of a lifelong history of failures, but that individual seems to absolutely believe he is successful and powerful. And by outward appearances, he is.

I also like to consider the top performing artists or athletes. Anatomically and by athletic metrics, some of the top athletes should not be as successful as they are (relative to their peers). Sure, maybe their mind is sharper at times in some ways, but they also seem to share the belief that they can consistently do things which require such precision and environmental luck that others would call it unreasonable.

I wouldn't promote Elon Musk as a life role model, but he did believe something ridiculous and take enough steps to prove it was possible (building a successful new car company in a market already dominated by absolute giants). Sure, he had government funding, but we can look at plenty of tech startups who have received tons of investment and still failed. So it wasn't just luck.

There's another book that is not about success (unless you define success as "being happy in life"). How We Choose To Be Happy - Rick Foster and Greg Hicks. The authors of this book sought out people who were known to be unreasonably happy all the time in an attempt to understand how happiness could be chosen instead of just randomly experienced (when lucky).

Like the entrepreneur who believes they can build the unicorn despite the extreme odds, the person who chooses to be happy "simply" decides that a scenario or possibility already IS, before they have seen evidence. And because that shapes their behavior that follows, when they encounter other people, the other people recognize them as successful/driven/happy.

So we normal people, when we encounter one of the unusual(ly positive) people, do we want to be around them or do we want to avoid them? Angry people will be repeled, because angry people don't like to see others having success or joy. But the rest of us will be attracted to them - vaguely or specifically (perhaps to absorb some of that "luck" that they seem to have). Or the others have a similar mentality, so their movements and actions are somewhat similar and thus more likely to mesh with others like them. You see entrepreneurs with friends who are entrepreneurs. And you see angry conspiracy theorists with other angry conspiracy theorists. We're just naturally attracted to those we feel some common ground with, and many times we "accidentally" meet those people without specific intention or effort.

Whether there is some magic in the universe or not, it is clear that the way we think does impact our options in life. And since we (through some effort) get to choose what we think, why choose dead-end thought paths?

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