For years, I’ve been fascinated by this phenomenon. I keep noticing that people have a tendency to create something in their life simply through the act of thinking about it. I have yet to find a name. I’ve always called it “that thing where you bring about the thing you fear simply by fearing it.” Or “that thing…” for short. It applies to more than fear of course. My sense is it tends to be more obvious with fear because fear is such a strong emotion.
it's like that except with drama instead of iron
What "that thing..." is not
It sounds like I’m talking about “the law of attraction” or “manifesting” or “The Secret” or “prayer,” but it’s not that. It’s not woo woo life advice. Those concepts are directionally correct. They observe that the phenomenon exists, but they build up this whole framework for how to make it happen, because it's about self-help. Their goal is to help people help themselves.
But that's not my goal. I’m interested in the mechanism. What is the physics of it? The way a cue ball hits a billiard ball. If you know the mass of the balls and the friction of the table and the velocity of the cue ball and the angle that it hits the billiard ball, the billiard ball will go in a specific direction. It won’t suddenly jump straight up in the air. What's the Truth (with a capital T) of how this works?
Working backwards from examples
Here’s an example: A company institutes some form of surveillance because they’re concerned about employee productivity. I find it useful to assume that people aren’t dumb. They may wind up doing dumb things, but they do them for understandable reasons. Perhaps the leaders are seeing a dip in revenue or growth or productivity. Maybe they’re worried that employees aren’t doing anything when they’re working from home. So they add software to everyone’s computers to track their clicks or what’s on their screens. Or they make a “cameras on” policy. Or they track people’s meetings.
Maybe they’re worried that people aren’t as effective at communicating or collaborating because they’re not in the office. People are social creatures. There is nothing like the energy, subtle social clues, and high bandwidth communication that comes from being in the same room. People in high-ranking positions tend to get into those positions because they thrive in an in-person setting. Now that companies are hybrid or remote, those high-ranking employees might not perform as well (or feel like they perform as well). So they require all employees to “badge in” 3 days a week at certain times. After all, if it works for the high-ranking employee, it must work for everyone, right? Right???
"hello fellow employee, don't you love being required to come to work?" "yes fellow employee, I certainly do."
But adding surveillance and strict attendance rules takes away people’s freedom and autonomy. It saps them of motivation and makes them less self-directed. Start telling people what they have to do and how they have to do it, and they will only do what they’re told. They’ll do less. It will take longer. They’ll spend more of their time trying to circumvent the authoritarian controls and less time doing important work. Productivity will go down. Ironically, leaders will then see their fears confirmed and respond to the decrease in productivity by doubling down on surveillance which only decreases productivity even more. And so it goes.
Here’s another example: Two people (let’s call them Mark and Clara) are in a relationship. Mark thinks Clara is cheating on him (let's imagine in this case she’s not even thinking about it). He starts looking for evidence to confirm his suspicions. He reads into things she says and wonders why she doesn’t immediately text back. Mark doesn’t want Clara to spend time with any of her close male friends. Clara feels this sudden pressure. It’s not fun spending time with Mark, because he’s always angry and suspicious of her. She feels isolated from her friends. One day Clara meets someone randomly. He’s nice to her. He’s interested in what she has to say, asks curious & non-accusatory questions, and loves meeting her friends. She feels comfortable with him, especially in comparison to how she feels when she’s around Mark. She knows it’s wrong to cheat, but forces are pushing her away from Mark. She starts leaning into the positive feeling and away from the negative ones. This creates more evidence that confirms Mark’s suspicions and he doubles down, which causes Clara to actually start a physical or emotional affair. And so it goes.
One more example. Scams, pyramid schemes, and con artists. Everyone, regardless of background and intelligence, is susceptible to scams (because everyone, regardless of background and intelligence is human). People who are paranoid that other people are trying to scam them or think they're smarter than everyone else tend to fall for scams at a higher rate. James Shelley puts it succinctly:
A timeless trick for duping people into following you is to convince them that someone else is trying to dupe them.
for sale, by owner
🚨 Caveat 🚨
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying here, because it’s very easy to misinterpret, especially if you’re on guard for something that smells like victim-blaming or an excuse not to care about other people.
I’m not saying that people who get hurt are “asking for it.”
I’m also not saying that thinking or fearing something will guarantee it will happen.
I’m also not saying that you might as well not help other people because the only thing that will change their life is if they help themselves.
I’ve simply noticed too many examples of this phenomenon happening for it to be a coincidence and I’m interested in the mechanism that makes it work.
Ok fine, one more example
One useful analogy comes from Visakan Veerasamy. Visa is a Singapore based writer who is an incredibly trenchant observer of how humans interact with the internet. He’s also one of the most talented and prolific Twitter users I’ve ever encountered (yes, better and more prolific than the person you’re thinking of). I highly recommend exploring his threads of threads. They form a web of thought that you can get joyously lost in.
pick a thread, any thread
Visa observes how when users complain about social media (and he includes all public social media, not just Twitter: Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.), they literally talk about the things they hate. They like and repost and reply to conversations about topics they dislike.
Algorithms are tuned to optimize for engagement. More engagement on a platform means more attention and more attention means more valuable advertising and more valuable advertising means more $$$. If a user signals to the algorithm that they are engaged with a topic through likes, reposts, and replies, the algorithm gives them more of that topic. It doesn’t matter whether the engagement is positive or negative. What matters is the intensity of the engagement (and often negative engagement is more intense that positive engagement).
So start with the fact that social media platforms monetizing through advertising, which means they optimize for engagement. Now mix throw in the fact that the frictionless nature of the internet means that anyone can post anything, which means that the things that stand out are the most extreme (the funniest, the fastest, the meanest, the best, the worst), which means everything quickly becomes polarized and you can find an extreme opinion on just about any topic you can think of. Finally, sprinkle in the fact that people enjoy talking and connecting with others about shared interests (whether they like or dislike a thing).
Now you’ve got a powerful positive feedback loop for any signal you give the algorithm (by positive I mean "self-reinforcing," not “good for you or society”).
If you focus on something on the internet, the algorithm will give you more if it. If you focus on something in your life, the world will give you more of it.
Some people describe Twitter as a “hellsite.” It can be, if you interact with it in a certain way: if you follow people who post with rage, spite, and sorrow about the things and people that vex them, and if you post that way yourself.
Ok, you get it by now. That's enough examples and metaphors.
Time to get into the real thing.
I think I’ve cracked something about the mechanism, but it’s going to a bit of a journey to get there. It involves cognitive science and I’m not a cognitive scientist by any stretch of the imagination, so it might even be a completely ill-informed and pointless journey. Here’s a little treat to get your energy up before we begin. One of those energy gel packs as we embark on the craggy, meandering mountain of my mind:
OK, you’re back. At least this whole thing won’t have been a complete waste of your time.
After I watched this I immediately thought of Sheila O’Malley. Sheila is a friend of a friend. We’ve met once or twice. We don’t know each other very well, but she's got a blog and I like her writing and her passion for the things she's passionate about. Sheila would fit in that weird, modern grey area called “Facebook friend.” In a world without the internet, she’d be someone I’ve met before. I’d recognize her if I saw her again. But in a world with the internet, she’s someone I encounter much more often. You know what I mean?
Anyway, when I saw the video, I thought “this feels like it was made in a lab for Sheila” and shared it with her. She (unsurprisingly) replied that others have shared it with her as well.
And that’s when I realized why I was struggling with understanding the mechansim of “that thing…” It’s because I was missing a key piece of the puzzle: other people.
Here's the tl;dr if you want to skip the next few thousand words: the mechanism is the humans brain’s selective attention, but scaled up. Multiple brains networked together. Like the way a data center is multiple computers linked together. Or that shot in the matrix, but less post-apocalyptic.
manifesting...manifesting...manifesting...
It works something like this.
An extended detour into my amateur understanding of brain science
In cognitive science, there’s a phenomenon called Hebbian learning. Explored by a Canadian psychologist named Donald Hebb in the late 1940s, it’s summed up by the phrase “neurons that fire together, wire together.” People learn (connections in our brain are made) when two neurons fire together. Technically one neuron fires slightly before another, not at the same time. There's a causal link between the two.
When this happens repeatedly, the connection between neurons is reinforced and the link becomes stronger. The next time one neuron fires, the other neuron is more likely the fire and on and on. Creating lots of these links is how a series of physical and decisional tasks that were once difficult and nerve-wracking (like driving) become easy and instinctive.
But this doesn’t just work with physical actions and decisions. It also happens with ideas. It’s why repetition and salience works to convince people that things are true (even if they are not true). When someone loudly and repeatedly claims that they are rich or or a genius or talented or beautiful or whatever, people hear those concepts paired together. The neurons for the concept of “rich” will fire together the neurons for the concept of that person. What matters it that the person encounters those two concepts paired together over and over again.
It doesn’t matter if the association is factually true or not. What matters is how strongly the two concepts are linked. In fact, if the association is not true, it can be even more effective because others will repeat and amplify the concept of “rich” and the concept of that person even more. Saying “that person is not rich” still associates the concept of “rich” with the concept of the person. By denying the pairing is true, they make the pairing salient to more people.
a fun guessing game would be "space or the brain" #wearestars
This is the way our brains work. It’s not good or bad. As you can probably observe about the state of the world, lots of unfortunate consequences are downstream from this fact.
These associations in the brain aren’t one concept to one concept though. They’re organized into a lattice network as neurons are constantly firing and pairing and associating concepts with each other. These mental frameworks are called “schemas” (or "schemata" if you're feeling fancy).
Game this constant schema updating millions of times over someone’s entire life and you can see how this would lead to something like stereotyping, especially for something we see all the time (i.e. it’s salient, so we're repeatedly making an association). Something like, oh I don’t know, skin color. If you see lots of depictions of someone with a specific skin color doing bad things, when you meet someone for the first time who has that skin color, you will tend to associate those bad things with the person even if you know nothing about them. This happens even if the concept association has mostly happened in movies or books that we know are pretend. Because when it comes to the link, the truth doesn’t matter. Repetition matters.
However you feel about “word policing” this is why people feel strongly about updating language. Put aside the obvious fact that language is always growing and evolving, so changing the words we use isn’t a big deal. Using a word like “whitelist” for desirable things and “blacklist” for undesirable things associates the words which are also commonly used to describe human beings with the concepts of desirable and undesirable. I’m not saying you should replace them with “allowlist” and “denylist.” You can do whatever you want. I’m just pointing out why people want to do something like this.
One level further up, the human brain links these different schemas together into something called “semantic networks” – linking together concepts into a web of connections between seemingly disparate topics. When a concept is encountered, the different nodes of the network activate through a phenomenon called spreading activation, like ripples on a pond when a stone is dropped into it. It’s the causal link between one neuron firing and then another firing, but scaled up several levels. You can imagine the power and the inertia of those causal connections scaling up as well. Strong connections stay strong and weak connections have trouble taking hold.
what it feels like the think (artist rendering)
Humans are not just “concept creatures” labeling things, putting them into buckets, updating those buckets, and associating those buckets with each other. We’re also social creatures and do this bucketing with each other. Just as we encounter too many concepts to process them anew every time, we also meet too many new people to encounter them anew every time.
So we associate individuals with concepts. One friend is “the artistic friend” another is “the empath” still another is the “movie lover.” These labels are then reinforced through our social connections. If I know someone who is “good with computers” and you have a problem, I tell you about them and see if they can fix your problem. They might, but even if they don’t, they’re now the “computer lady” to you. Viewing it from the outside looking in, this phenomenon is called “social labeling.” But colloquially we just call it someone’s reputation.
The fancy way of describing what this feels like from the inside is called the “availability heuristic.” This is a shortcut (cognitive science word: “bias”) that our brain uses. If a concept comes up more frequently or is more important to another concept, we assume that the two are intrinsically linked. So when we encounter one concept, we immediately think of the linked concept as well. It's the causal link again, one level higher up.
Another wrinkle to throw in is the brain’s tendency to remember unique concepts (cognitive science word: “distinctive”) more than commonplace or boring ones. This sounds obvious, but can lead to some skewed outcomes. Which threats do people tend to be more scared of? Riding in a car or getting eaten by a shark? What about the fact that 42,000 people are killed in car accidents/year vs. 6 people killed in shark attacks/year?
Sharks are a lot more distinctive than cars. We encounter them a lot less and they look scarier, even though a car is 7000x more likely to kill you.
Yet another wrinkle is related to something called “emotional valence.” Concepts that are related to strong emotions are more likely to be remembered. If you imagine the brain like an onion with layers, the cerebral cortex is the outermost part. This is where memory, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, consciousness, and attention takes place. It is literally layered on top of the limbic system, which controls emotion. Our rational thought is like a house built on the foundation of our emotions.
this kitten is very proud of you for making it all the way through my amateur summary of brain science
The reason I went through this little cognitive science detour is because I want you to notice something. The same causal mechanism that happens at the neuron level happens at each subsequent level of scale.
A neuron repeatedly triggers another neuron that it's associated with.
A concept repeatedly triggers another concept that it's associated with.
A schema repeatedly triggers another schema that it's associated with.
A network repeatedly triggers another network that it's associated with.
A person repeatedly triggers another thing that it's associated with.
An aspect of people repeatedly triggers another thing that it's associated with.
A person repeatedly triggers another aspect of people that it's associated with.
it's neurons all the way down
Network effects
At each level of scale, the associative effects become more powerful. The nature of network effects is basically this: as the number of nodes in the network goes up linearly (2, 3, 4, 5…) the connections in the network go up exponentially (1, 3, 6, 10).
Imagine yourself at a party. Maybe it’s an "intimate wedding" with 80 people. There are 3,160 one-to-one connections in that group. The average Indian wedding has around 500 people. That’s over 124k connections! This the reason why products like Facebook and Google are not going away no matter how many upstarts come up with a better way of doing what they do. The number of connections (their network effect) is the source of their power.
A soup of causal links
There's a final tweak that allowed everything to slot into place for me. It has to do with causality. We can't say "if I just think really hard about making something happen, it will happen." That's woo-talk. And yet, when people who've made something happen, they often talk about it in causal terms – "I focused on this thing, made it my goal, wrote a note to myself and looked at every day, and manifested it."
Things seem causal when you look backwards, because in retrospect you can see the path that led from one thing to another. But you can't predict exactly how the causal chain will work in the future. Because the future is, by nature, uncertain. It's similar to the classic Wait But Why illustration of your life path looking forward and backwards:
hey! it's me!
What's happening is all the up the scale from the neuron level, all these causal connections are being made. But by the time we get to the scale of our experience, all these little causal links are thrown into the pot with tons of other causal links:
everything else you're thinking about
everything else that everyone else is thinking about
what is likely to happen based on your circumstances
what is physically possible
Your own thoughts about what you want are just one ingredient in this soup of causal links. They're not alone, so they can't make something happen. But what they can do is increase the chances that something will happen. It's only in retrospect that we can see the deterministic chain of events that led to where we are. Looking forward, the nature of the phenomenon is probabilistic.
yummy causal links
This is why asking someone with experience for their life story when asking for advice is pointless at best and counterproductive at worst. It's why there's so much woo in all the "law of attraction" talk. In some cases, it's being described from the perspective of someone who's already achieved success. In other cases, the person hasn't even achieved success, they're just repeating frameworks they've heard from others.
The truth is: there is no framework, no formula, no hack, no how for success, because even though the underlying mechanism is causal, success itself (whatever that means to you) isn't deterministic. It's probabilistic.
And that's because of the simple, obvious fact that we are not the only brain in the world. There are other people out there, with brains of their own.
Deterministic process + network effects = probabilistic process
Which brings me back to Sheila and the video. She brought the lab-made video into her life. More specifically, she dramatically increased the chances that it would happen. Here’s how:
Sheila loves Eminem. She writes about him constantly (availability heuristic) and passionately (emotional valence). She also writes about movies a lot (in fact it’s her job as a movie critic). Why does she do this? Because she wants to. She enjoys it, so she does it a lot (repetition and salience).
She’s also become very good at writing and knowledgable about both movies and Eminem (Hebbian learning), which makes her stand out (distinctiveness), especially to other people who also like Eminem and/or movies. People associate her with those two things (social labeling).
So the concept of movies, Eminem, and Sheila are all bound up together (semantic network) both in her brain and, crucially, in other people’s brains as well.
When a video comes along that also combines movies and Eminem, the astronomically large numbers of neurons in the brains of everyone who’ve constructed the semantic network between movies/Eminem/Sheila are lit up. All these people see the video and think “Eminem” + “Movies” + “Sheila.” Of course, there's billions of other semantic networks all firing at the same time in other people's brains, so not everyone Sheila knows shares the video with her. But because of network effects, Sheila has had enough connections that some of them do.
Through simply doing what she loves, she’s created an extended linked semantic network in a bunch of human brains that contains the connects the concept of herself with the concepts of the things she loves. When something she loves encountered that network, it activated and brought it to her. She literally brought it into her life.
This Eminiem example is just a small silly one, but it exemplifies how this all works. Anyone can do it.
And it’s actually quite simple: do, write, talk, think, share, express, experience the things that bring you the feelings and experiences and thoughts that you want. After I got a previous job, I asked the recruiter why he reached out to me in the first place. Of course, I was qualified and had the right experience, etc. etc. But he also noticed that I mentioned that I make sourdough bread in my bio. I do! I love it! He mentioned it in his message to me.
Did that get me the job? No of course, not. But it increased the chances.
The more specific with the things you focus on the better. It can be very easy to pull the opposite of what you want into your life, by focusing on a proxy for the thing, rather than the thing itself. For example, in this anecdote from a Hacker News thread via Matt Birchler:
“A few months ago I started using AssemblyAI to read YouTube videos (by running speech recognition on them) instead of watching them. Then I realized, there were usually only a few pieces of useful information in the video. So I’d copy-paste the transcript into ChatGPT and ask it what they are. For longer videos it doesn’t fit, so I made a tool to turn them into bullet points in 2 phases (summarize each chunk, then take that and summarize it).”
The only reply to this so far is perfect: “Genious move into outsource critical thinking, lol.”
The endpoint of extreme productivity is to become so productive that you don’t actually do anything or learn anything, but you check all the boxes that make it look like you did.
Now if what you actually wanted was to look like you’ve learned something instead of learning something. Good on you! But if what you wanted was to learn something, then you've basically done the opposite.
It's important not focus on proxies for what you want, but to get really clear on the the thing you want and focus on that. For a long time, I wanted to feel close to others and so learned to make them feel good about themselves. It makes logical sense, people will be attracted to people who make them feel good. The problem it doesn't work. A passage from an essay called Artifacts of Power that I have sadly lost track of explains why:
Your ability to make people feel good can corrupt you such that you can’t not make people feel good. You have to have it be that everyone is happy with you at all times. You feel compelled by the power of artifact to avoid and hide from conflict and bad feelings. And in the end you’ll find that your maniacal focus on creating harmony has cost you some part of your soul, it has backfired such that people don’t trust you to be honest with them, such that you lose track of your true preferences and convictions.
PSA: telling someone they have "the Midas touch" is not a compliment
Another caveat: focusing on what you want is not the same as negating or denying the feelings you don’t want. That’s a classic trap and one the ancient Greeks knew so well, they created a whole genre called “tragedy” devoted to it. Sealing your fate through the act of trying to avoid it is the story of Oedipus in a nutshell.
Again from Artifacts of Power:
One path is to throw the artifact away, to reject its power. To stop ever trying to make people feel good, to just “be raw” and “tell it like it is.” That you’ll leave bad feelings and social ruin in your wake is orthogonal to the goal of being honest and true to your preferences and convictions.
But that’s the insidious power of this artifact.
You try to throw it away, but in reality the artifact still has hold of you. It’s simply inverted its power and its weakness while maintaining ultimate control over your actions. Now you can’t not be raw, you can’t subordinate your preferences to the greater good.
Next question: what should I focus on?
welcome to the unsatisfying part of this post
Unfortunately (fortunately?), I can’t tell you what those things are. Only you know what they are. If you don’t know what those are, you could try focusing on figuring out what they are. If nothing else, focusing on figuring out what they are will bring “figuring out what they are” into your life through this same mechanism.
Because that’s how the world works.
The key is to focus on those things. You love them, so it should be relatively easy for you, even if it's relatively hard for others who don't love those things. Not easy of course, just easier. Patrick Wyman puts it nicely in a post on Bluesky (emphasis mine):
My strongest opinion on exercise is that you should find an active thing that you enjoy doing rather than searching for an optimal workout, because you're infinitely more likely to keep doing an activity you enjoy than one you don't
The only thing that really matters in the long run is consistency, so finding something you like doing a few times a week is way better than doing a workout you hate, quitting for a month, trying another thing you hate, stopping again, and repeating the process ad nauseam
Consistency, repetition, focus, passion, curiosity, love. This stuff isn't new. It's obvious. I've been hearing it from everywhere my whole life. But it took me this long to understand how it works.
Visa put it so beautifully, “focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of.”
