All the time. I know it's not real, but it's fun to try to predict when exactly the bus is gonna come. It's right after this blue car! ... well, okay, maybe it's right after this white car! oh...
There's my people! Forget these party poopers. How do you know you can't spark fire from your fingertips, or make an icicle fall just by concentrating on it if you never try?
Myself never, but there probably ... millions? tens of millions? of tiktok brained Americans that believe in 'manifesting', so being irrationally delusional is pretty trendy right now I guess.
Manifesting is a thing, though. It's not magic, but it is a way to trigger the placebo effect which is an observed phenomenon.
I can't manifest a jet, but I can manifest a new car. Just by believing I'm going to get one somehow, my brain is going to start doing a lot of subconscious things that are going to add up to getting one. You can manifest a promotion and you will start to work a little harder or more efficiently, maybe add new skills.
Why not just -do- these things? If you can, great! But if not, your subconscious is capable of things your conscious may not be... You could be in a cycle of self sabotage that manifestation can sidestep, for instance.
It's an incredibly powerful tool that people disregard as woowoo because even the people selling it don't know how it works.
Its... an incredibly powerful tool, but people don't know how it works.
But also it works by triggering the placebo effect.
Ok so can you show me maybe something like a scientific study that shows that manifesting practitioners have a 'powerful', measurable, meaningfully different ... any kind of outcome whatsoever, compared to non manifesters?
Is there evidence that manifesting actually triggers the placebo effect, as you claim it does?
You dont manifest a new car. You either make a plan to figure out how to acquire one, and it either works or it doesnt, or maybe you get lucky and you get gifted one by a friend, or you randomly encounter a scenario where you stumble across a great deal.
Compare the number of people who are manifesting that they want a car and end up with a car and the number of people who are manifesting a car and do not end up with a car vs non manifesters who do and do not end up with a car, in a given timeframe.
Im not aware of any studies on something like this because the notion is dubious on its face, not even having a proposed causal mechanism as you say.
But I would be very strongly inclined to believe that if a such a study were done, what you'd end up with is that manifesting has no statistically significant relationship to acquiring a car, and probably something like overall income or wealth and maybe number of fairly wealthy friends/family do actually have observable effects.
Look I totally am for a reasonable amount of positive self affirmation and self confidence.
But manifesting takes it to literally absurd lengths.
Yep, no hoodoo involved. You can brainwash yourself, make things happen. One time dad lost a shitload of weight after I hadn't seen him for a long time. "I brainwashed myself into believing that being hungry was a good feeling."
I think you're the only person I've seen in forum posts that actually gets it.
Weekly. If there's ever a time for magical thinking, its during TTRPG sessions. Those funny math rocks will obey me one of these days, then its gonna be nothing but nat 20s until the end of time.