Whow do these two news stories connect? The first: “manifesting” has been declared Cambridge dictionary‘s word of the year. The self-help practice, based on the magical belief that spiritual rituals can move the universe in your favor, has exploded in popularity.
After kicking around for years, it became mainstream during the pandemic, when Google searches for the term rose 600%. Since then, manifesting courses and retreats have sprung up everywhere, and celebrities from Dua Lipa to Simone Biles now claim to have “manifested” their success.
The second news story: Jordan Peterson’s We who wrestle with God have the top spot on Amazon’s bestseller list last week shortly after its release on Tuesday. On the face of it, it is a dry, pseudo-academic journey through the books of Genesis and Exodus – although now and then it delves into the themes of Terminator 2say, or The Lion King.
Critics agree that the writing is almost incomprehensible. But the source of its success, I think, is that, like Peterson’s previous works, it comes up with a set of spiritual “rules of life,” which in this case he claims to find encoded in various religious texts. The tone may also be part of the appeal: it is grandiose, pompous and sometimes almost hysterical, but also enchanting in the manner of an evangelical preacher, who whips his audience into a spiritual frenzy.
Manifest. Jordan Peterson. The phenomena are noted with different consumers – Peterson’s audience leans right and male. But at the core, they offer a similar thing: self-improvement wrapped in spirituality, a belief system that also promises to help you achieve your personal goals. And in this they are part of a rising tide of what we will briefly call “nonsense”. With mainstream religion in the west in long-term decline, something else is emerging. Not quite religion, not quite self-help – but a tantalizing mix of the two. Where self-improvement sections of bookstores once contained simple advice about dating, dieting, or getting rich quick, they now ask you to buy into a whole canon of spiritual beliefs. Call it mystical self-help.
You see this, for example, in the astounding popularity of astrology among young people. For my generation, for whom reading your horoscope is embarrassing, it can be shocking. At a recent party, I was surprised to stumble into a serious astrology conversation between people in their late 20s, bonding over the fact that two of them were Capricorns, and analyzing their moon signs in great detail.
Really, of course, it was a starting point to open up about their lives, connect with each other and explore how they tended to deal with problems. No wonder Generation Z seems to find it therapeutic. The global market for astrology was worth $12.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to nearly double in the next decade.
Then there is tarotwhich is also on the rise, mainly driven by TikTok. More young people are turning to spiritual readings “as an alternative to therapy”. Meditation techniques used to be advocated as a method to calm down; now they are sold, via semi-Buddhist beliefs, as a route to complete personal transformation. See for example the great success of The Power of Nowa book that asks the reader to believe in a system of universal energy flow. Wellness, meanwhile, has fused with a set of anti-scientific beliefs, including the idea – dangerously advocated by Elle Macpherson – that you can think yourself better, through your “inner sense” of what will heal you.
It sits alongside a group of celebrities on the right — Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, Peterson — tapping into the self-improvement market among young men and advocating religion as a route to the answer. The market is growing: the largest segment of buyers of self-help books is now men aged 25 to 34 years. They are sold as a new brand and cherry-picked belief system, drawn from various religions and packaged to suit their needs.
Why is this happening now? Here is one simple explanation: with the decline of mainstream religion in many parts of the world, all kinds of human needs – community, meaning – are left unsatisfied. Enter the new gods. Amid increasing loneliness, declining relationships and global uncertainty, people are desperate for a sense of control and achievement. It is responsible for the rise of self-help. But that’s not quite the whole picture, I think.
All of these trends stem from social media, the same place that spawns copious amounts of conspiracy theory and misinformation. This is also where an increasing number of people are getting their facts: including 80% of 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK.
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But living on social media, seeing the world through its lens, is like returning to a pre-information age. First, because everything is current. Records of past bookings fade quickly – miss a day and it’s almost impossible to catch up. Instead, as with cycles of oral history, memories of the past are collective and changeable.
As history fades, so does the truth. If information is about extracting signal from noise, social media is about increasing the noise. Under the stream of questionable facts, it can be difficult to determine what to cling to. Meanwhile, the mob mentality increases the risk of speaking against the beliefs of a large group.
It is in such environments that meaning becomes tribal. Your beliefs are not really about the external facts, but about which group you identify with. People rely less on their own capacity for reason and more on each other. This is the petri dish from which belief systems have always tended to emerge.
Mystical self-help can be largely harmless, but we need to ask what its popularity says about us and where we are headed. After all, we owe almost all modern progress to the struggle against religion, which allows rational deductions to sway over tribally mediated beliefs. Are we now witnessing the dawn of a post-information age?
