“Everything always works out in my favour.”
“Everything just always works for us.”
“I always get what I want!”
If you’ve opened TikTok this resolution season, you may well have encountered a slew of young women making demands like they’ve got platinum credit cards in hand, and the universe is their beleaguered retail worker. This gimme rhetoric – mainly used for hotness, getting the bedroom you want or, in one video, winning $900 on Sportsbet – has catchy new moniker: “Lucky Girl syndrome”.
Being a lucky girl essentially means telling yourself everything will work out in your favour. Then, through the power of putting it out into the universe, you watch it come true.
The hashtag #luckygirlsyndrome has more than 100m views on TikTok but affirmations are nothing new.
Whether you call it the law of attraction, the law of assumption or simply manifesting, the tantalising idea that you have the power to shape reality simply by getting your vibes right is not a secret (it is, however, The Secret).
With origins in the early 20th century New Thought movement, the most extreme interpretation of this kind of manifestation practise is the most literal: that positive thought is a genuine force in the universe – like gravity or entropy – and that you, as an individual, have the power to harness it.
This idea has no scientific basis. While that should probably go without saying, it cannot. Mostly because of how many manifestation proselytisers – from Louise Hay to The Secret – publish claims about how effective their ideas are against cancer.
It is not clear how many lucky girls believe their own luck this concretely – hopefully not many, given the layers of irony and nodding winks to “self-delusion” present in plenty of the TikTok content. But the wrong kind of positive thinking can still be pretty toxic, even when it’s not taken to extremes.
Manifestation’s flipside is as insidious as it is pervasive: the idea that you get what you deserve.
On an individual level, another, better term for this concept is victim blaming. On a societal level, cultural theorist Lauren Berlant described it as cruel optimism: the great lie that you can find individual solutions to structural problems. That you can solve global heating by becoming a better recycler (when 20 firms are behind one-third of global emissions) or that less indulgent cafe breakfasts are the best way out of a housing crisis.
This flavour of positive thinking serves as a comfort to those who already have power, while trapping the oppressed in a cycle of recrimination that obscures the real cause of their problems. It is the opposite of solidarity, community-building and empathy. It’s also just plain inaccurate.
Put in the vague terms of say, a 30-second TikTok, new age thinking can also bear a superficial resemblance to real therapy. Cognitive behavioural therapy and gratitude journaling share some basic features with manifestation (writing things down, visualising, reflecting). This is unfortunate because those sensible enough to be put off the latter might end up wary of the former too.
Unlike wishful thinking, cognitive behavioural therapy is an evidence-based intervention that can genuinely help people experiencing anxiety and depression. Gratitude journaling, while no magic bullet, can be helpful too.
Reframing your thinking to challenge negative biases is not the same as believing that if you think positively enough, everything will just work out. One invites you to blame yourself when things go wrong. The other accepts the inevitability of things going wrong – and gives you scaffolding to cope when it happens.
The reality is, luck is never evenly distributed and the #luckygirlsyndrome TikTok trend inadvertently illustrates that. Two of the earliest popularisers of the idea that I spotted scrolling the hashtag were both creators of colour. They posted their videos in August and November of last year and had 3.4m and 1m views respectively. The women who eventually sent the concept viral, currently sitting on 4.7m views, were a pair of white college girls. They did not attribute the source of their practice.
