Reflection

Ambition or Entitlement

A man sits in my consulting room and tells me he has been out of work for eight months. I ask him what he has been doing about it. He says he is manifesting his perfect job.

I have heard some version of this sentence a great deal in the last few years. It used to be called visualising. Before that it was called positive thinking. The word changes every decade or so, and the thing underneath it does not change much at all.

What I wanted to say, and did not say, was this. Think about who actually knocks on your door. People selling something. People you owe money to. Occasionally a neighbour about a parcel. No employer has ever walked up a garden path, rung the bell and said: good morning, I have a position for you, do come in. It does not happen. It has never happened. The job is not going to arrive, because jobs do not travel.

I am not against visualising

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this argument is a man of my age telling younger people they are lazy, and that is not what I think.

Visualising works. It is not a superstition. Anyone who has trained in a martial art knows that stepping onto the tatami having already seen yourself move well is better than stepping on having seen yourself lose. Athletes rehearse in their minds because mental rehearsal does something real to performance. Surgeons do it. Musicians do it. Holding a clear image of what you are about to attempt is a genuine part of attempting it.

But notice the word. Rehearsal. You rehearse something you are then going to do. If you visualise the throw and never go to training, you still lose. The visualising was never the technique. It was the preparation for the technique, and on its own it is an empty gesture with no body behind it.

Faith without works, as the old line has it, is dead. Manifesting without action is dead faith with better branding.

Ambition or entitlement

This is the distinction I keep returning to, and it is simpler than anything else in this piece.

If you are working hard and you also hold a clear picture of where you want to end up, that is ambition. The image and the effort are pointing the same way. The picture tells the work where to go, and the work makes the picture cost something.

If you are doing nothing and holding the picture instead, that is entitlement. You are expecting a return on an investment you have not made.

I do not mean entitlement as an insult, and I would not use the word with a patient in a first session. I mean it structurally, in the way an accountant would: something is owed to you that you have not paid for. And the reason that matters clinically is not that it is morally wrong. It is that it does not work, and the person is usually the last to find out.

Where it comes from

The idea has a lineage. It arrives through the New Age, and before that through New Thought in nineteenth century America, and it rests on a single premise: that mind has power over matter. Think it clearly enough, hold it purely enough, and the world rearranges itself to match.

What interests me is not whether that is true. What interests me is what it protects against.

A world in which mind governs matter is a world with no accident in it. Nothing is random. Nothing merely happens. Every event is connected to every other, and most importantly, every event is connected to you and to the quality of your thinking. That is an enormous comfort, and it is sold as spirituality, but look at what it does. It abolishes chaos. It removes contingency. It makes a frightening and largely indifferent world into something responsive and personal.

I understand why people want that. I would want it too. But a defence against chaos is still a defence, and it has a cost.

The quiet narcissism of it

Here is the part I find most striking, and it took me a while to see it.

Consider what manifesting replaces.

It replaces prayer. Whatever you make of religion, a man on his knees in a church is in a particular position: there is something larger than him, he is not in charge of it, and he is asking. That is humility, in the plain sense of the word.

It also replaces asking a friend. Phoning someone and saying I do not know how to do this, can you help me, can you look at my CV, do you know anyone, is a small humiliation and a real relationship. You have to admit a limit. You have to let another person matter.

Manifesting removes both. No one above you, no one beside you. Just a mind, alone, exerting force on the world by its own quality. It looks like spirituality and it functions as self sufficiency. I am not using narcissism as an insult. I mean it structurally: the other has been taken out of the picture, and what is left is a self that does not need anyone.

That is also, incidentally, why it is so hard to argue with. Any failure can be absorbed. You did not manifest clearly enough. Your energy was off. You were secretly holding a limiting belief. The system cannot be wrong, so the person must be, which is a strange outcome for something that promises empowerment.

Real life has not started yet

In my clinical work I see a pattern that is not confined to manifesting at all, and this is simply its current costume.

The man is waiting. When the job arrives, when the body arrives, when the right relationship arrives, then life will begin. What he is doing now is not really his life, it is the corridor before his life. And because the thing he is waiting for lives in the imagination, it is perfect, and because it is perfect it recedes as he approaches it, the way the horizon does.

Jung has a name for this figure, the puer aeternus, the eternal youth who keeps his options open and never lands. The trouble is not that he lacks vision. He has nothing but vision. The trouble is that he has arranged his life so that nothing is ever tested, and so nothing is ever disappointed, and so nothing ever actually happens.

Sitting still and picturing the outcome, in that light, is not spiritual practice. It is procrastination with a candle lit next to it.

Yes, but I manifested it

Then someone succeeds, and they tell you they manifested it.

I once spoke with a man who told me how lucky he had been. He had got talking to someone in a pub, it turned out to be a director of a major bank, and he was hired. Pure chance, he said.

So I asked a few more questions, as one does. He had read mathematics at Oxford. He had years behind him. He could hold a conversation with a bank director about the thing the bank director cared about, and hold it well enough that the man remembered him the next morning.

The encounter was luck. Everything that made the luck convertible was not. If the same conversation had happened to someone without that preparation, it would have been a pleasant evening in a pub and nothing more.

That is the formulation I keep coming back to. Hard work takes you to the places where luck can find you, and leaves you able to use it when it does. The manifesting is the cherry on the cake. People point at the cherry and tell you it baked the cake.

And notice that the man in the pub was not entitled. He was ambitious. He had done the work, he had an idea of where he wanted to end up, and he was in the room. All three were needed.

What I would say in the room

I am not asking anyone to give up the practice. If holding a clear picture of the work you want keeps you from despair in month eight of unemployment, keep it. Hope has to live somewhere, and I would rather it lived there than nowhere.

But I would want to ask one question, gently, and it is the question I did not quite ask that morning. What is the visualising a rehearsal for? Because if there is an answer, if there is a letter to write or a call to make or a person to ask, then the image is doing exactly what images are supposed to do, which is to pull action towards itself.

And if there is no answer, then it is worth wondering what the manifesting is keeping you safe from. Usually it is not the absence of a job. Usually it is the risk of asking and being told no.