Recent reports in The New York Times and the Guardian have noted that at least one-quarter of Gen-Zers believe in the idea that you can attract the things you want — luck, money, love, anything you want — by repeating certain mantras. The practice is called “manifesting.” Most of these believers are devoted adepts of Rhonda Byrne’s self-help mega-seller The Secret, which appeared in 2006 and has been translated into fifty languages. Byrne urges them to understand the “hidden untapped powers” within, and pledges that these latent powers will help them to “eradicate disease, acquire massive wealth, overcome obstacles, and achieve what many would regard as impossible.” Ask, Believe, Receive — so goes the mantra. Answers are available within you; you need only will them into existence. My Gen-Z daughter, a thoroughgoing skeptic, tells me that I should check out something called witchtok (a subdivision of TikTok), where people of her generation “do witchcraft” to prevent bad things from happening to them. The keyword has over six million posts and over fifty-five billion views — many of which were apparently made during the Covid-19 lockdown when this kind of magical thinking flourished. Occult practices, it seems, are not primitive or medieval, but a large part of modern society everywhere: Ask, Believe, Receive.
