🌀 Build the Runway, Expect the Goods

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It's a Sunday in early January. You've got a stack of magazines, scissors, and a blank corkboard. You cut out a kitchen with good light, a beach at sunset, a number that looks like a salary, and you pin them where you'll see them every morning.

Maybe you skip the board and just write the wish down. The job, the apartment, the person, three times before breakfast and nine times before bed.

People have called this prayer. People have called it planning. It's older than both of those, and in 2024, a major dictionary named it the word of the year. So what's the actual mechanism when someone pictures the life they want and waits for it to show up?

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On the island of Tanna, in what's now Vanuatu, people did something during the 1930s and 1940s that still gets misread as foolish. They built airstrips with no planes, control towers with no radios, and bamboo antennas wired to nothing.

The reason was material. During World War II, American forces arrived in the South Pacific with an avalanche of cargo: food, medicine, jeeps, radios, all of it dropping from the sky as if summoned. Then the war ended, the troops left, and the cargo stopped.

So islanders reproduced the things that had seemed to call the goods down. They mimicked the marching drills, laid out the runways, and raised the towers, hoping the planes would come back. Outsiders labeled these movements cargo cults, a phrase scholars now handle with care, because it was often used to make a reasonable response look ridiculous.

The logic underneath deserves respect. When the cause of your fortune is invisible and far away, you copy the visible signs that came with it, and you wait. The John Frum movement on Tanna still marks its holiday every February, decades after the last wartime plane.

Read it plainly and the move is familiar. Build the image of the thing you want, and trust that the image pulls the thing toward you.

Manifesting tells a clean story: your thoughts shape your reality, so picture the right things and the universe delivers. It feels good because it hands you the controls. If your own mind is the engine of your life, nothing is out of reach.

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich spent a whole book pulling on that thread. In Bright-Sided (2009), she traced how American culture turned relentless positivity into a kind of duty, from megachurches to corporate seminars to cancer wards.

Her warning was about the other side of those controls. If a good attitude brings success, then failure becomes a personal verdict. The laid-off worker, the patient who doesn't recover, the person who can't make rent: each gets handed a quiet accusation that they failed to believe hard enough.

That's the trapdoor under manifesting. It offers power over your fortunes and, in the same breath, blame for your misfortunes. The things that actually move a life, like wages, housing, health coverage, and the luck of where you were born, slide out of frame, because the only variable left is the contents of your head.

Picture the life you want, the practice says. Whatever you end up with becomes the picture you must have deserved.

Manifesting sits in the mainstream now. In November 2024, Cambridge Dictionary named "manifest" its word of the year after the term was looked up almost 130,000 times, helped along by celebrities like the singer Dua Lipa crediting it for their wins.

The online numbers are huge. Videos tagged with "manifestation" had surpassed 60 billion views on TikTok by mid-2024, and Google searches for "manifesting" jumped about 600% in 2020, the year the pandemic pulled the floor out from under everyone.

The practice arrives with products attached. The 2006 book The Secret sold more than 30 million copies and held a spot on the New York Times bestseller list for 190 weeks, and its formula now resells as apps, courses, and "manifest your money" tutorials.

The mechanics have hardened into ritual. The popular 3-6-9 method asks you to write your wish three times in the morning, six in the afternoon, and nine at night. The Cambridge psychologist Sander van der Linden calls the whole thing magical thinking, the old belief that a private act of the mind can reach out and rearrange the world.

Quote: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Joan Didion, The White Album (1979). She meant it as a warning about the tales we invent to keep panic at bay when the world stops making sense.

Study: Picturing success can quietly sabotage it. Following job seekers over two years, NYU's Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer found that those who fantasized most about landing a great job sent out fewer applications and earned less than the realists (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002).

Artifact: The vision board. A corkboard of cut-out images of a wanted life, hung where it gets seen every day. It runs the same logic as the bamboo runway on Tanna, scaled to a bedroom wall: lay out the signs of arrival and wait for the thing itself to land.

What does a culture gain by teaching people that fortune is authored by attitude, and what does it quietly let off the hook? And when wanting is sold as a skill, who profits from the gap between the wish and the result?

Every culture builds a ritual for the part of life it can't control. The people of Tanna built runways for planes that had flown away. We make boards, write numbers, and ask the universe for a raise.

The instinct is honest and very old. When the machinery behind our fortunes is hidden, we copy the signs of good outcomes and hope the outcome follows. There's real comfort in that, and the focus it brings sometimes does help.

What's new is the bill and the blame. The old rituals were shared, performed by a village for a harvest that the whole village needed. Manifesting hands the practice to one person, sells them the supplies, and tells them that any failure was an inside job.

Picturing the life you want costs nothing, until the day it costs everything. The runway is easy to build. The hard part is admitting the planes were never ours to call.

If this made you question manifesting, forward it to someone still deciding what they want.

Find yourself in the next one,

Eren.