Instagram Manifestation Is Fake. The Real Thing Is Weirder.

Photo credit: Katelyn Perry for Unsplash+

I’ll be honest, when manifestation content started flooding my social media feeds a few years back, I mostly rolled my eyes.

You know the aesthetic. Young women in designer athleisure, sitting in luxury cars they claim to have “manifested.” Gratitude journals with affirmations written in perfect brush lettering. Vision boards covered in magazine cutouts of beach houses and Chanel bags. The promise, always the same: change your thoughts, change your life. Think positive, get rich. Align your energy with the universe and watch abundance flow.

It all felt like prosperity gospel for the Instagram age—shallow, materialistic, maybe even predatory. Good vibes only, but make it a business model. The whole thing seemed designed to sell courses and coaching packages to vulnerable people by promising them the psychological keys to wealth and success. And lurking underneath all that pastel positivity? A pretty dark implication. If you’re not manifesting the life you want, well, that’s on you. Your energy is wrong. Your vibration is off. You’re not worthy enough, abundant enough, aligned enough.

So yeah. I was super skeptical.

But then I started talking to Rachel Carbonara, a religious studies scholar at Princeton who spent years studying manifestation culture—particularly a program called To Be Magnetic (TBM)—attending meetups in Chicago and Boston, doing the practices. And she told me something I wasn’t expecting: “The people whose voices are loudest are the ones selling you something. That’s not most practitioners.”

Turns out, manifestation isn’t some recent TikTok craze at all. It’s got roots stretching back 150 years into American religious history, from nineteenth-century “mind cure” movements through Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, all the way to Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and today’s neuroscience-flavored self-help. The names change. The packaging updates. But the core idea persists: your thoughts create your reality.

That history matters, Rachel insisted, because it helps us see manifestation for what it actually is: a religious practice that’s learned to speak in secular dialects. Sometimes it sounds like psychology (”reprogram your subconscious!”). Sometimes like physics (“quantum vibrations!”). Sometimes like neuroscience (”neuroplasticity proves it!”). But strip away the scientific costume and you find metaphysical claims about how mind and matter interact, how desire connects to destiny, how individual consciousness co-creates with a benevolent Universe.

Which means my initial knee-jerk academic critique (that manifestation is just neoliberal ideology dressed up in spiritual language) isn’t wrong exactly. It’s incomplete. Because when you actually talk to practitioners, not just the entrepreneurs selling courses, something more complicated emerges.

Rachel convinced me I’d been dismissing something I didn’t actually understand. So let’s dig in.

It’s Not New, It’s New Thought

Here’s what most folks don’t know: manifestation has a name in religious studies. It’s called New Thought, and it started in the 1840s with a New Hampshire clockmaker named Phineas Quimby who believed all disease was “an error of the mind.”

Quimby’s big idea? Change your thoughts, cure your body. He called it “mind cure” or “mental healing,” and it caught fire across nineteenth-century America. Mary Baker Eddy studied with Quimby before founding Christian Science, which taught that illness itself was an illusion that right thinking could dissolve. Other students spread variations of the gospel of mind power through books, journals, and churches.

By the early 1900s, New Thought had spawned an entire religious ecosystem. Rachel walked me through it: New Thought churches with names like Religious Science and Unity, preaching mental healing and the Law of Attraction. Then the whole thing jumped denominational boundaries. Black Spiritualist churches in urban areas blended New Thought with Pentecostalism and Vodou practices. Prosperity gospel preachers grafted it onto evangelical Christianity. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) sold it to businessmen as success psychology.

“Manifestation shows up in spaces you’d assume have totally different values,” Rachel told me. Progressive New Age wellness culture and conservative megachurches. Corporate self-help and anti-capitalist spiritual seeking. The packaging shifts wildly, but the core philosophy stays consistent.

That philosophy, in case you need the CliffsNotes version, is thoughts are forces. They have energy, vibration, power. When you think something intensely enough—when you visualize it, feel it, believe it—you’re sending out energetic frequencies that interact with the Universe. And the Universe, being fundamentally benevolent and responsive, returns to you experiences that match your mental transmission. Like attracts like. Abundance attracts abundance. This is presented as natural law, as reliable as gravity.

By the twentieth century, this metaphysical claim had learned to speak American. It promised wealth without mentioning God. Success without organized religion. Spiritual fulfillment through individual psychology. Self-help that sounded scientific.

Which brings us to today, when manifestation teachers cite neuroscience studies and quantum physics to explain why their techniques work. The religious roots get buried. But they don’t disappear.

The Problem With You Create Your Own Reality

Okay, but here’s where my initial skepticism wasn’t entirely off base.

There’s something troubling about a worldview that says you create your entire reality through the quality of your thoughts. Because the flip side of “you can manifest anything” is “if you don’t have it, that’s your fault.”

Rachel’s dissertation walks through this problem carefully. She calls it “psychological individualism,” the idea that your mind is both the source of your problems and the solution to them. Manifestation takes this to an extreme. Lost your job? Your scarcity mindset attracted that. Can’t pay rent? You’re vibrating at the frequency of lack. Struggling with chronic illness? You haven’t released the emotional blockages creating disease in your body.

It’s the ultimate privatization of suffering. Systemic problems (racism, poverty, healthcare access) just vanish. What remains is your individual responsibility to fix your thoughts.

Rachel gave me a perfect example from her own life. She’s on the academic job market (which is just brutal right now, as anyone in the humanities can tell you). At a manifestation meetup, she mentioned looking for work. Her fellow manifesters didn’t ask about the scarcity of positions or funding cuts. They asked: “Are you in your worth?” and suggested she try a meditation that’s intended to connect the listener to feelings of deservingness.

The assumption? If Rachel’s not getting job offers, the problem isn’t that universities have spent decades slashing tenure lines, exploiting adjunct labor, and attacking the humanistic disciplines. The problem is Rachel’s subconscious feelings of unworthiness.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that mindset matters. Of course it does. Confidence helps in interviews. Believing in yourself probably makes you a better candidate. Sure. But there’s a difference between “your attitude affects outcomes” and “your attitude creates all outcomes.”

Manifestation entrepreneurs consistently argues the latter. Anyone who genuinely desires an academic position and embodies self-worth will receive it from the Universe? I’m just not buying that.

This is where manifestation spiritualizes creeps into conservative politics. It takes the neoliberal insistence on individual responsibility (you’re on your own, pull yourself up, your success or failure is yours alone) and makes it cosmic law. The Universe wants you to thrive! Abundance is unlimited! You just have to align your energy.

Which sounds empowering until you realize it means structural inequality is just a thought problem. A vibration issue. Something meditation and affirmations should fix.

So yeah. The critiques aren’t wrong. Manifestation does erase systemic barriers while appearing to empower people.

But, also…

What the Critique Misses

Here’s where Rachel complicated everything for me.

“The manifestation you see on social media is almost exclusively produced by entrepreneurs,” she said. “People selling courses, coaching, apps. Their voice is loud because they have something to sell. But that’s not most practitioners.”

Rachel spent years doing actual ethnographic work, attending TBM meetups in Chicago and Boston, sitting in living rooms and coffee shops with women working through the practices. And what she found didn’t match the Instagram aesthetic at all.

Most women weren’t trying to manifest handbags. They were manifesting clarity about what they actually wanted versus what they’d been told to want.

This is what the work looked like. Women in their twenties and thirties, gathering monthly, talking through their “alignment.” Is this relationship actually good for me or just what looks good to others? Do I really want to climb the corporate ladder or is that just the script I inherited? Should I stay in this city, this job, this marriage?

“There’s a lot of boundary work in manifesting,” Rachel explained. “Getting clear on what you will and won’t accept. And I’ve watched women use that process to expect more and put up with less in relationships.”

This connects to something I explore in Beyond Wellness: the importance of aligning spiritual practices with core values. When practices aren’t rooted in what you actually value, they lead to what moral psychologists call moral injury, the distress of living out of alignment with yourself.

Maybe that’s what’s actually happening in manifestation, beneath all the talk about vibrations and Universal energy. Not magic. Clarification. Using the vocabulary of manifesting to get crystal clear on core values.

Take a mundane example from my own household. December was early decision notification time for elite colleges: MIT, Brown, Harvard Yale, places like that. My daughter applied ED to Cornell, as did TONS of over kids from her public high school. The odds weren’t great. One kid got in ED last year from our school (a recruited rower). We joked that we needed to manifest a good outcome for her.

But after talking to Rachel, I realized: the more substantiative version of manifestation isn’t think positive thoughts and Cornell will accept you. It’s figure out what you value about Cornell in the first place—the academic rigor, the campus culture, the programs, whatever drew you there—and then make sure the school you end up at actually has those qualities, whether it’s Cornell or somewhere else entirely.

Manifestation as a clarity practice, not a magic spell.

And here’s the kicker: To Be Magnetic, the manifestation brand that Rachel studied, explicitly teaches this distinction between “authentic desires” and “ego desires.” Ego desires are things you want because they’ll impress others, make your ex jealous, prove you’re successful by society’s standards. The example Rachel uses in her dissertation is manifesting a trip to Iceland to make your ex see how great your life is = ego. Manifesting Iceland because it genuinely calls to you = authentic. Or in my daughter’s case, manifesting an acceptance to Cornell to make her grandparents happy = ego. Manifesting an acceptance to a college that is a good fit for her socially and academically = authentic.

So the practice demands you ruthlessly examine which desires are actually yours.

Do you want the million-dollar house or do you want safety and stability? Do you want the prestigious job or work that aligns with your values? Do you want the relationship that photographs well or the one that actually nourishes you?

Women in Rachel’s study were asking: what if I stopped performing the life I’m supposed to want and started building the life I actually want?

Which might mean less money. Less prestige. Less conventional success.

The TikTok entrepreneurs aren’t selling that version. But some practitioners are finding it anyway.

The Science Costume

Meanwhile, manifestation keeps trying to prove it’s not religious at all. It’s science! Brain science!

Enter the neurosurgeons and the fMRI scans.

James Doty, the late Stanford professor of neurosurgery, spent his final years arguing that manifestation works through “neuroplasticity.” His book Mind Magic is packed with explanations of the default mode network, the salience network, how visualization literally rewires your brain. He cites studies. He uses phrases in his book like “value tagging” and “large-scale neural networks.” His work screams: this is legitimate! Peer-reviewed! Nothing woo-woo here!

Except...Doty can’t quite help himself. Even while insisting it’s all neuroscience, he writes constantly in Mind Magic about “opening your heart” (not the biological organ, the metaphorical, spiritual heart). He frames his childhood encounter with “Ruth” at the magic shop as a mystical initiation. He talks about manifesting as ancient wisdom found in Vedic scriptures.

Dr. Tara Swart does the same dance. Psychiatrist-turned-business-school-professor, she’s another favorite “scientific” validator for manifestation communities. Her book The Source argues the whole thing can be explained through neuroscience. No spirituality required!

And Rachel told me Swart goes on podcasts and talks about leaving offerings for fairies in tree stumps.

“They never actually shed the spiritual language entirely,” Rachel laughed. “Even when they’re explicitly claiming it’s just science, the metaphysical claims slip back in.”

Which tells you something important: manifestation is making claims about how reality works that go beyond science. It just keeps trying to dress them up in lab coats.

Manifestation as Clarity, Not Magic

So what is happening in these practices, beneath the entrepreneurial noise and the neuroscience window-dressing?

Rachel’s answer surprised me. Most practitioners, she said, are “one foot in, one foot out.” They’re not true believers with unshakable commitment to manifestation cosmology. They’re experimenting. Trying things. Seeing what helps.

“People think that spiritual-but-not-religious folks have this complete, unnuanced buy-in to whatever practice they’re doing,” Rachel said. “That’s just not the case. Most people are like, I don’t know, I’m kind of interested in this, I don’t really know if I believe it.”

They love hearing new perspectives, from neurosurgeons like Doty, from their fellow practitioners, from critics. They’re figuring it out as they go.

And the work they’re doing in those monthly meetups? It’s not about attracting luxury goods. It’s closer to what therapy promises: clarity about desires, honesty about needs, accountability to yourself. Women helping each other answer hard questions about their lives.

Do I actually want what I’m chasing? Why do I want it? Who benefits if I get it? What am I willing to accept? Where are my boundaries?

“The manifesting process requires you to be radically accountable to yourself,” Rachel explained. “Very clear about what you will and won’t accept.”

You can do that work in therapy, in religious community, with close friends, through old-fashioned introspection. You don’t need metaphysical claims about vibrational frequencies to ask yourself what you genuinely want.

But here’s what I’m taking way from my conversation with Rachel: for these particular women, in this particular cultural moment, manifestation language is the vocabulary they’ve found that gives them permission to prioritize their own desires. To say no. To expect more. To stop performing a life that looks successful and start building one that feels aligned.

Is it the best framework for that work? Maybe not for everyone. Does it erase structural barriers in troubling ways? Absolutely. But is it doing something meaningful for actual practitioners that the easy academic dismissal misses?

Yeah. I think it is.

So where does this leave me?

Still skeptical of the Instagram version. Still uncomfortable with the way manifestation erases structural inequality. Still suspicious of anyone promising that positive thinking is the secret to wealth and success.

But I was wrong to write off the whole thing as empty good-vibes capitalism.

Because what Rachel showed me is that manifestation, like most practices I’ve studied for Beyond Wellness, works differently when it’s embedded in actual community and historical context. The lonely scroll through TikTok manifestation content is one thing. The monthly meetup where women hold each other accountable to their genuine desires is something else entirely.

The religious studies lens matters here. When we recognize manifestation as religion—not just self-help, not just psychology, not just pseudoscience—we can see both its problems and its appeal more clearly. We can critique the neoliberal individualism while also understanding why smart, thoughtful people find meaning in the practice.

We can hold both truths: it’s capitalistic and it sometimes helps people question capitalist values. It erases systemic barriers and it helps individuals clarify boundaries. It’s deeply American and it’s more complicated than it looks.

Want to learn more? You are in luck! Rachel is teaching a course on manifestation that’s open to the public through the YouTube channel Religion for Breakfast January 9th - February 27th. It's called Intro to Manifesting and is a space for critical thinking about manifesting as a cultural phenomenon. If this piece got you curious about the actual history and practice, not just the Instagram version, that’s your next stop.