How to Manifest a Thesaurus
The funniest thing about the word manifest is not its definition in a dictionary or the fact that it once had a kind of philosophical gravitas, but rather the way it now tumbles casually from the mouths of white Instagram models in gauzy linen pants who identify as lightworkers while simultaneously running lucrative side hustles that involve selling online courses on “aligning your energy” for several hundred dollars, and posting endlessly about how their dream life was conjured into existence through nothing more than mood boards, positive thinking, and the occasional turmeric latte. It is no longer the careful act of bringing an idea into being, but rather a kind of lifestyle punchline in which people convince themselves that they did not just buy, inherit, or luck into something but that they bent the entire universe toward their personal desires, a belief system that thrives most comfortably among those who were already born with the kinds of advantages that make the world bend in their favour without cosmic interference.
The everyday uses are even more comical because they reveal how ordinary needs and wants get wrapped in mystical packaging until the absurdity of the word becomes obvious. When someone says, “Even though it is sold out, I am going to manifest tickets to Odesza,” what they actually mean is that they are about to spend half a paycheque on Craigslist. When someone says, “Can you manifest bagels while you are out today,” what they actually mean is that they want you to buy bagels. When someone says, “I am going to manifest true love this year,” what they actually mean is that they are deleting Tinder and reinstalling it as soon as loneliness sets in. These examples are not exaggerations but genuine reflections of how a word that once described the clear embodiment of something abstract now gets used to disguise very simple acts of wanting.
The strangeness escalates when people invoke the phrase “manifest destiny” as though it were a playful slogan for personal growth or sculpting one’s ideal future through vision boards and full-moon rituals, because the original term was the nineteenth-century justification for colonial expansion, violent displacement of Indigenous peoples, and a war with Mexico, which makes its current use in the captions of crystal grid photos not just careless but unintentionally comic, like naming a meditation retreat after the Inquisition.
At the centre of this transformation is an entire industry that thrives on vagueness, aspiration, and aesthetic appeal. Influencers, often young white women who present themselves as spiritual guides, have built entire careers on the idea that you can manifest love, wealth, beauty, clarity, or anything else simply by adjusting your mindset, although the reality is that you can usually acquire these things only if you pay for their courses, subscribe to their Patreon, or purchase their abundance journals that promise transformation through handwriting exercises. What gets sold as spiritual awakening is often just marketing, polished with incense and sold under the glow of a ring light.
The irony is that many of these communities loudly reject mainstream consumerism and present themselves as detached from shallow material culture, yet their success depends entirely on selling crystal bundles, meditation retreats, and affirmation decks to the very people they claim to rise above. They perform transcendence while quietly building empires on the most ordinary human desires for money, stability, love, and meaning, and the real secret is that manifestation seems to “work” best when you already belong to a demographic the world is structured to reward. The dream villa, the dream job, or the dream partner arrives not because the cosmos listened to your frequency, but because whiteness, wealth, beauty, and social connection made it easier for you to claim those things in the first place.
The less glamorous truth is that life’s achievements usually come from some combination of work, luck, timing, and privilege. You can build a dream life by making plans and following through, not by chanting under the moon. You can get back together with your ex by enduring an awkward conversation rather than burning sage. You can buy bagels by walking into a bakery. You can live in a villa because your parents co-signed the mortgage. You can build a career because you had a financial safety net. None of these things are mystical. They are simply reality, dressed up as magic because reality feels too ordinary to post about on social media.
So let us stop pretending that every latte, promotion, or relationship is a divine response to a manifestation ritual. You did not manifest your abundance, you bought it, or you inherited it, or you lucked into it, or you benefited from a world that was already tilted in your favour. And while that may not sound nearly as magical as a pastel Instagram graphic promising limitless potential, it is far closer to the truth.
If you still want to call it manifestation, then at least admit the joke is part of the ritual, because nothing is funnier or more grounding than realising the universe did not deliver your dream life in a mystical pouch of stardust, it arrived through your Amex card, your trust fund, your good timing, or your skin colour, and it feels much less like divine abundance and much more like the messy, unfair, ridiculous world we actually live in.