What links these two news stories? The first: “manifesting” has been declared Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year. The self-help practice, based on the magical belief that mental rituals can move the universe in your favour, has exploded in popularity.
Having kicked around for years, it surged into the mainstream during the pandemic, when Google searches of the term rose by 600%. Since then, manifesting courses and retreats have sprung up everywhere, and celebrities from Dua Lipa to Simone Biles are now claiming they “manifested” their success.
The second news story: Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God took the top spot on Amazon’s bestseller list last week shortly after its release on Tuesday. On the face of it, it’s a dry, pseudo-academic journey through the books of Genesis and Exodus – although it lurches now and then into the themes of Terminator 2, say, or The Lion King.
Critics agree the writing is nigh on unintelligible. But the source of its success, I think, is that, like Peterson’s previous works, it comes up with a set of spiritual “rules for living”, which, in this case, he claims to find encoded in various religious texts. The tone, too, may be part of the appeal: it is grandiose, high-flown and at times near-hysterical, but also mesmerising in the manner of an evangelical preacher, whipping his audience into a spiritual frenzy.
Manifesting. Jordan Peterson. The phenomena are pitched at different consumers – Peterson’s audience leans right and male. But at core they offer a similar thing: self-improvement wrapped up in spirituality, a system of faith that also promises to help you achieve your personal goals. And in this they are part of a rising tide of what we will, for short, 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 tantalising mix of the two. Where self-improvement sections of bookshops once contained straightforward advice on dating, dieting or getting rich quick, now they ask you to buy into a whole canon of spiritual beliefs. Call it mystical self-help.
You see it, for example, in the astonishing popularity of astrology among young people. For my generation, for whom reading your horoscope is an embarrassing secret, this can be jarring. At a recent party, I was surprised to stumble into an earnest astrology conversation between people in their late 20s, bonding over the fact that two of them were Capricorns, and analysing their moon signs in great detail.
Really, of course, it was a jumping off point to open up about their lives, relate to 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 valued at $12.8bn in 2021 and was projected to nearly double in the following decade.
Then there is tarot, which is also on the rise, driven mostly by TikTok. More young people are turning to spiritual readings “as an alternative to therapy”. Meditation techniques used to be advocated as a method for calming down; now they are sold, via semi-Buddhist beliefs, as a route to complete personal transformation. See, for example, the huge success of The Power of Now, a book that asks the reader to believe in a system of universal energy flow. Wellness has meanwhile fused with a set of anti-science beliefs, including the idea – dangerously championed by Elle Macpherson – that you can think yourself better, via your “inner sense” of what will cure you.
This sits alongside a cabal of celebrities on the right – Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, Peterson – who are 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. They are sold a rebranded and cherry-picked system of faith, drawn from various religions and packaged to fit their needs.
Why is this happening now? Here’s one simple explanation: with the decline of mainstream religion in many parts of the world, all sorts of human needs – community, meaning – are being left unmet. Enter the new gods. Amid increasing loneliness, declining relationships and global uncertainty, people are desperate for a sense of control and achievement. That accounts for the rise of self-help. But this isn’t quite the whole picture, I think.
All these trends spring from social media, the same place that is breeding vast amounts of conspiracy theory and misinformation. It is also where an increasing number of people get their facts: including 80% of 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK.
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 previous discussions fade quickly – miss a day and it is almost impossible to catch up. Instead, as with cycles of oral history, memories of the past are collective and mutable.
As history fades, so does truth itself. If information is about extracting signal from noise, social media is about turning up the noise. Among the flow of dubious facts, it can be hard to determine which to cling to. Meanwhile, mob mentality ramps up the risk of speaking up 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 systems of faith have always tended to arise.
Mystic self-help may largely be harmless but we should ask what its popularity says about us and where we are going. After all, we owe nearly all modern progress to the fight against religion, allowing rational deductions to hold sway over tribally mediated beliefs. Are we now seeing the dawn of a post-information age?
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
