If you hate your reality so much, why not create a new one?
We are in a time period where truth is so hard to come by and is difficult to dig up from under the depths of everyone’s opinions. The line between reality and belief seems to get thinner every passing day, the more clickbait titles that are reposted without the article being fully read, the addiction we have to outrage rather than altruism, and the harder it has become to be right, when that’s what we try to prove to others everyday. Every day feels like a struggle to not project, not lie accidentally and not expel your subconscious imprinting onto other people.
I’ve found that humans are entirely too confident for their well being. The opinions that most people carry are that in and of itself — merely opinions. It is not based on an educated perusing on multiple sources to eventually come to a conclusion. No, it is based on the first thing that they read, then they play a sick game of confirmation bias and group think. Individuality is not evolutionary, but for some reason, that is a very hard pill to swallow. They agree with what the people they follow post or speak out against, because we are social creatures.
The reason for this is quite simple. This is the easiest path to go down. It requires little growth or critical thinking, while letting you be praised in a group of people who believe the exact same thing as you. Debates are not even debates anymore, nobody is aching to learn, but everyone is wanting to prove to everyone how much kinder or smarter they are than the other person.
I know I talk about the subconscious in every post I make, but there’s good reason for it. That’s because most of our actions actually are subconscious.
You wonder why you don’t care about the truth, but care more about being right. That is your subconscious eating away at you and winning. You wonder why you do things you don’t agree with or don’t know why you say. All you are doing is losing a fight against yourself.
How? You say, I feel so in control of my beliefs and I truly think all my opinions are the correct ones.
I want you to look in the mirror and say one affirmation: “Everything I do is a footprint of my imprinting.”
Would you be upset if I told you your beliefs were not your own? In my government class, I learned about this term called structure, and it is what gives strength to countries in power. There is an overarching structure that ties all the citizens together in a country, whether it be a hatred for another country, patriotism, pride, or boasting. But, states necessitate this structure, or else their citizens won’t be under their control. Countries are more than aware about the power of the collective, so they use it to their advantage, and make the collective ideology the one that they want everyone to believe. This is evident in propaganda, as it is basically subconscious hypnosis of a population to believe the structure that their country wants them to believe.
In that same fashion, opinions are the same way. It’s similar to hypnosis, in that people have these innate beliefs, but have no idea why they feel like that. It’s almost as if someone is manipulating their subconscious to make them believe what they want them to believe.
This is evident in pop media and pop scientific articles. These give the illusion that they provide the truth in easy bite-size format, but in all honesty, the truth is never bite-size. Sometimes the truth is so impossible to chew that it breaks your jaw, or you lose a tooth, or you get mouth cancer. It’s so much easier to believe that these articles are all there is to know, because that’s what everyone else is reading. But when everyone reads the same media, do they not turn into robots? How are we so focused on advancing with robots, when we should be focusing on the current mechanization of human thought?
One example of this is the recent trend of “healthy delusions.” I’ve seen this concept on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, science articles, and podcasts. There is a following of this trend, and is about as publicized as manifestation or affirmations are. Many people found out about this topic and without doing research, openly praised it on all of these different platforms and encouraged other people to do it.
I have no problem with the new spirituality movement. If anything, I’m so happy people are getting interested in the subconscious. I love that people are talking about shadow work, inner child work, meditation, yoga, crystals, breath work, manifestation, affirmations, and the like. I love that, especially since the main ‘aesthetic’ before then was being depressed, purposefully not getting better and encouraging others to go down their downward spiral with them. This is why cigarettes made a comeback, this is why underground music is cooler now, and this is why so many people you didn’t even knew liked philosophy are ranting about Nietszche now. In comparison to that, at least the spiritual movement promotes self help rather than self destruction.
From this spirituality scene has spawned lots of use of psychology terms, since I suppose a lot more people are reading that now. As someone who read the DSM-5 in sixth grade and has wanted to be a therapist since that time too, it’s rather hard to watch in all honesty. I see people misuse the terms gaslighting, manipulating, narcissist, anxious, depressed, bipolar, schizo, and so many other words all the time, while they think they are smart for mentioning those words at all. That’s because that’s the problem with aesthetics — it’s not who these people truly are. They don’t want to heal themselves, because at their core, they still want to be a victim. They still don’t want to work on themselves while maintaining the guise that they are.
One term has recently gotten popularized and it was my breaking point. The concept of healthy delusions that these ‘spiritual gurus’ on TikTok are trying to promote is the notion that if you don’t have something you want in your life, you just need to be ‘delusional’ and pretend you already have it. Their idea is that you can control your reality, like a delusion, where reality is unimportant to you and you create your own world inside your head. People have found that they have things about themselves that they want to change, and they’ve found that these qualities are deep within there. They have no idea how to get them out, so instead of digging in that hole, they decide to dig in another one with softer clay. It’s like when Earth is so degenerated that we move to Mars.
Maybe you guys are saying ‘Amanda, that doesn’t sound so bad. Let these people have their fun. They’re not harming anyone and they’re trying to improve their lives. How they do it is really none of your concern.’ And, I totally get it. I debated writing this article for a long time. But, after a lot of reading, I realize we need to talk about schizophrenia a lot more.
Schizophrenia has and always will be considered the ‘ultimate mental illness.’ The first labeling of schizophrenia was actually called dementia praecox, and they used to believe schizophrenia was a disease of the brain, and was early onset dementia. This first notion shows that schizophrenia has always been associated with deterioration of the brain, similarly with nerves and many organs, which are all not true. Schizophrenics in the first half of the 20th century used to be considered genetic defects and suffered eugenics in many countries. People talk about schizophrenics as if they are funny, as if they are the most traumatized and as if they are not people. So, to hear people try and romanticize this illness when people who have genuinely had it were killed and persecuted because of it, is very off-putting.
The aspects of schizophrenia are hallucinations (auditory or visual), delusions, paranoia, disorganized cognition with a multitude of positive and negative symptoms. Positive symptoms are ones that are added to their conscious experience, such as the hallucinations, delusions and disorganized thoughts and speech. Negative symptoms are ones that are taken away from conscious experience, such as alogia (a lack of speech), anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure), and avolition (lack of motivation).
What I want to focus on is the symptom of delusions. There are six different types of delusions. There is erotomania, where you believe someone is in love with you. There is megalomania (or grandiose delusions), where you believe you are the greatest person out of everyone and nothing can change your mind. There are jealous delusions, where you believe you are being cheated on. There are persecutory delusions, where someone believes they are being wronged in some way, such as being stalked, drugged, harassed or hated. There are somatic delusions, where one believes they have a medical condition. And the last kind is mixed, where you possess more than one of the above delusions.
When I read this, I don’t get jealous. I don’t get excited. And I certainly don’t want to recreate it. So, what is this “healthy delusion” trend that has been floating around? And what does it mean for people who suffer real delusions?
The law of attraction states that people’s intentional thoughts about something happening attracts those events to actually happen in real life. Healthy delusions are similar, in that people want to lie to themselves about their life circumstances, and live in their own reality in their head. By thinking you are living the life you’ve always wanted to, the law of attraction dictates the events follow the intended thoughts. I’ve written a quote before that is very similar to this, “The world is your canvas.” I wrote it when I was very manic, so I could have actually been delusional when writing it. The funny thing about delusion is you are never cognizant if you are being delusional or not. In essence, people got tired of the pre-drawn landscape of the world, and felt limited by it, so they decided to create a new reality in their head.
I’ve found that this isn’t a delusion at all, and is yet another misused term for something that the general population doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to read about themselves. It’s easier to hear about it on Tiktok and not do any additional sleuthing. It’s easier to give every word you hear the full benefit of the doubt than to doubt at all.
What people are trying to do is change their subconscious. They are realizing they have these imprinted beliefs from their parents and their peers, and they have no idea what to do with it. People are living with galaxies inside of them and have no idea what to do with all of it. They hate the way others have made them to be — afraid of the world, afraid of rejection, afraid of living, afraid of commitment, afraid of attachment. Everyone is afraid of something, and it drags them along like an owner pulling a dog roughly when it’s stopped to smell the flowers.
You know that therapy isn’t helping people adequately when they want to be more mentally ill and special than they are.
They realized that they are hating the trajectory of their life and to change it, they must change themselves. The only way to make meaningful change is to change from the inside, and that flows into your outside. But people are trying to hack this and make it easier. They are trying to align their outside, to thus fix their inside.
What you are trying to fix cannot be fixed with multiple sleeping partners, or a whole new wardrobe, or a ton of events you go to. Because when you do all of these things, you are still the same person you always were, except now you are imagining you are the main character. Well, let me tell you, you’re not. You’re not special and you never will be.
What people are trying to do is create something that can’t be created, a personality, but is instead fostered. People have found that when they turn off their phone, they hate themselves. They hate looking in the mirror, they hate being with themselves and they hate the way their life is going. The center of this all is comparison, and what comparison breeds is jealousy. The emotion you need to change yourself is not jealousy or anger at yourself. It will not come to you by making Pinterest boards or mood boards or writing all the things you want in your journal.
The reason why? You don’t deserve it. People are wanting to become these specific people who have worked tireless years to get to that spot mentally in days. It’s instant gratification at its worst — we now see self help as something to rush, rather than seeing it as simply the process of growing up.
I see manifestation and ‘healthy delusions’ as someone trying to force a puzzle piece into a piece that doesn’t fit just so they can get to the end of the puzzle faster so they can tell people that they did it. It feels like people do things simply to tell others about it, to associate an aesthetic to them in the minds of others, and to build the reputation they want of themselves in their heads.
The only delusional thing about it is they think that growth will fall into your lap simply because they want it. The harsh reality is that my generation loves growth, but has no idea how to get there. They want to bypass life. And when I phrase it like this, would delusion not make more sense for them? If you hate your reality so much, why not create a new one?
This follows the James-Lange theory of emotion, that physical sensations bring rise to emotions. For example, when you see a bear, you start shaking, and from that shaking, your brain realizes it is scared. These healthy delusions work the same way, in that people believe if they act as if they are the person they are jealous of, then they will suddenly feel the emotion and thought process of the person they are jealous of.
I hate to tell you this, but it won’t work. You will go to bed in the same personality every night and will make no progress. The reason why is you are alleviating growing up to the universe, when the only thing that can grow up for you is you. Growing up involves living in reality and figuring out how to survive in it.
The feeling that someone deserves good things to happen to them by the universe arbitrarily? The feeling that everyone believes their problems are the most special? The feeling that one inherently deserves privileges or special treatment? No, this doesn’t sound like delusion to me. It sounds a lot like entitlement, though.
The funny thing to me about praying is that it insinuates people believe their problems are really that important that an omnipotent God would listen to them. In a sense, this is a form of praying, as praying is alleviating the hard work onto another form as well. But, the thing is, religion has been decided to not be a delusion. That is because it has a social component, so people actually have an incentive to follow it. Real delusions provide no incentives and only can hurt you.
Delusions are something that someone subjectively believes about their reality that nobody else does, yet nothing anyone says can convince them otherwise. They see clues in everything confirming their hypothesis, they become disconnected from everything not deliberately and they can lose their jobs and loved ones over their obsession. It can make them scared for their lives or others scared for their lives. It is absolutely not something to romanticize, want or force yourself to have.
There is no healthy version of this. This is the version that you get. Even by trying to mimic delusional thoughts, these people are copying someone else yet again. They cannot be alone with themselves, so they must colonize other people’s thought processes since theirs bore them so much. Trying to leave reality will not make you more interesting; it makes you a strange copy-cat, attempting to copy something that nobody should want at all. You claim to want to get better, but it only regresses you further.
You say you want to change, yet you are so terrified of what that entails. So instead of doing that, you take the easy route and try to become someone else yet again. But this won’t make you feel full either and it won’t make you special. You are purposefully lying to yourself to create a delusional mindset. You are separating your true self from your subconscious more than before. You drop dirt back into the hole you’ve been digging.
I never thought I would see people try to have delusions. I am inclined to believe we have way too much free time on our hands, yet we spend none of it doing what we should do. It will not make you do better in reality — it will only disconnect you further. You will be years behind all the people in your grade who were busy living in reality and growing.
There’s a reason schizophrenics were persecuted so much — they don’t contribute to society. They don’t live in or abide by the laws of reality like most of us are able to. In the eyes of higher ups, they don’t make them any money. Because of this, it’s easier to get rid of them. Now, tell me, how can this be positive? How can a delusional mindset make you do better in the real world? How will you ever become the person you want to be while masquerading around as someone you’re not?
The goal of growing up is to find out subjectively what you agree with and what you don’t. You sort through all the opinions that were forced upon you and you get to decide which morals you live by and what you spend your time doing. If you never figure yourself out subjectively, you can never grow up. You are reading someone else’s journal trying to find the pieces of your psyche in there, yet you’ve never written a page yourself. You’re taking credit for someone else’s hard work.
I promise real delusions are nothing compared to these ones that these people are discussing. If anything, because they are so different, I am inclined to believe that they mean the adjective “delusional” as an insult.
What separates healthy delusions from real delusions is healthy delusions are basically being one foot out and one foot in reality. You are trying to change yourself so you can live better in reality, and thus, that does not make you delusional. Lying to yourself does not make you delusional either.
What all of this is is a very dumbed down version of subconscious imprinting work. There is a point in everyone’s lives where they look around at their life and realize that they hate everything about it. What some people have done when this happens is not to change their mindset, but to change their intentions. But, intentions mean nothing without the action behind them. What people are trying to change is how similar they are to everyone. They realize that they are not special and that upsets them, because they see so many special people every day. They want to be just like them, so to cope, they create a new reality and lie to themselves about what goes on in the other reality.
This is not delusion. This is suppression. That’s the whole problem with this; you are not delusional or schizophrenic by doing this. All you are doing is what you have done your whole life --- live by your subconscious defense mechanisms. You are defending yourself from the pain that comes with growth. You don’t want to get your new jeans dirty, so you never get on the ground and dig. But, what if I told you you would dig faster if you got closer to the ground? Would you do it then?
In all honesty, I’m a bit scared what other movements could arise that are similar to this one. I’m terrified of defense mechanisms being marketed as self help.
I have trouble verbalizing this in the most important way I know how but I will do my best. The reason why you are not the way you want to be is because of your subconscious imprinting. You have been lying to yourself your whole life and it’s the only thing you know how to do. So, when this catalyst emerges and you have to change, you don’t want to. You want to keep doing what you’ve always been doing. You want to keep listening to the same music as you always do, read the same books as you always do, watch the same Tiktokers as you always do, yet you want to be different than you are now. This is no environment to grow.
I would argue that changing your external circumstances is not self help, but is instead merely a distraction. If anything, it keeps you more tied to reality, as you contribute to the economy to buy new things and you boost social media numbers highly every day. You are so sane and normal that it’s funny. You are organizing your room in Feng shui fashion then complain when your life isn’t balanced. Now, that doesn’t make much sense now, does it?
Delusions are being romanticized and commercialized. But, real delusions are not someone purposefully lying to themselves. Schizophrenia is mostly due to suppressed trauma, so they do the only thing they know how to do — suppress. So in order to distract themselves from the thoughts they don’t want to deal with, their brain creates problems for them to solve. That, as my theory, is why I think delusions exist. They are a distraction from the truth.
I don’t believe healthy delusions are delusions at all, but they are also a distraction from the truth. Manifestation, law of attraction and healthy delusions are all pop terms that essentially mean that people want to continue being distracted from the truth of growing up. Change is scary, and realizing that you have so much suppressed seems like a lot of work to go through. It’s so much easier to put dirt over the hole and walk over it.
I argue that the spirituality movement at its core is just trying to undo your subconscious. Meditation helps you sit with your thoughts and realize that they are not as important or pivotal as you thought they were. Specific yoga poses, for me, have generated epiphanies and left me sobbing as I uncovered something I deeply suppressed, but has come to light because I freed my body. Breathwork is an excellent anxiety exercise, as during panic attacks it can help you realize that you can be in control of your breath if you want to be. Shadow work is basically psychoanalysis, which means trying to uncover your ‘shadow,’ or the suppressed dark parts of yourself by asking yourself deep questions. Inner child work is the act of unsuppressing your childhood and coming to terms with how much you remember or how much you do not remember. Hypnosis is the act of abusing your sleep/awareness brain waves to tap into your subconscious. Journaling taps into stream of consciousness, which is purposefully dissociating and the subconscious can come out when one is dissociating.
All of these actions operate under theta brain waves, when your brain is in-between REM sleep and awareness. Does this mean this is where the subconscious can come out, like a hibernating bear that comes out of its cave after winter is over?
All of the current self help trends have to do with uncovering the subconscious, yet healthy delusions seem to only want to make that problem worse. Their core problem is they hate their subconscious, and instead of trying to learn about it and befriend it, they are trying to suppress it further. But it has nowhere else to go. It wants to come out, and the thing about the subconscious is that it will, but if left neglected for too long, it will act out like a disobedient child. It was sabotage you and your growth.
The subconscious is afraid of growth, and it seems that everyone at their core is too. The only thing we have known about ourselves is the parts of ourselves we want to know. The only things we think about are the things that we wish we had but we don’t.
Remember, the subconscious is like a mop; it soaks up everything, the good and the bad that you learned throughout your life. All those habits you mimic from people you dislike, all that insecurity you feel when someone disagrees with you, all those parts about yourself that make you not want to be friends with yourself… they cannot be fixed with a new aesthetic and it cannot be fixed by lying to yourself more than you already are.
Also remember that suppression is the only conscious defense mechanism.
The ‘healthy delusion’ trend is the last thing we need. I can hear it, can’t you? Everyone’s subconscious selves crying and screaming to be set free… It knows things about you that even you don’t know. I know how scary it is to be known like that, but you have to be okay with being known. You have to be okay with not being as special as you thought you were. You have to be okay with seeing your soul be a black hole, so dark it sucks all the light out of everything, because you can change it. You are the only thing that can change you. And thus, that means you are the only thing stepping in the way of living the life you want.
It’s not that your prayers aren’t being answered or your thoughts aren’t desired enough. You cannot sit on your phone all day and wonder why your head hurts. You cannot put your head playfully on a guillotine and wonder why you’re headless.
Your subconscious is not your fault, but you ignoring its pleas is your fault. What was imprinted on you is not on you, but it’s on you to heal from it. You cannot hike Mount Everest with your backpack from high school, still full of all your textbooks. It’s much too heavy to be carrying around your unresolved childhood with you wherever you go. Those textbooks were helpful in getting you to this location, but you can give them away now.
I see everyone as a hoarder of our subconscious impulses and maybe that’s why nobody wants to be helped. We are scared if we alleviate ourselves of our past that we will not have anything. We are scared that our pain is all that we are.
But I promise you, one thing I’ve realized is that my poems have sounded so much better after I got over my suppression. I was reading my writings from 2019, and mostly what they all said was how I couldn’t write about the things I needed to write about and it physically hurt to even think about them. Now that everything I suppressed has risen to the surface, I can see the horizon a lot clearer, but before, the fog had obstructed me so badly. While I wasn’t the one who turned the fog machine on, I was the one who turned it off.
Stop trying to run away from your past and your subconscious. Stop doing drugs every time you think a sad thought. Stop going on social media immediately when you get bored. You are running away from something, and no amount of birthday wishes will make that stop. The thing about suppression is it truly is fight or flight. It’s either you or the suppression — one of you has to win, and I’m really rooting for you.
