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This Frat Boy Spent 6 Months as a Burmese Monk to Impress a Girl
He learned a thing or two in the process.
I have a little confession to make. When I was maybe 14 years old, my older cousin told me to watch a movie called The Secret. It was all it was for me — a movie. Only later, to both my regret and surprise, I learned that it’s an entire cult of people who genuinely let themselves believe that relentlessly visualizing your desires like it’s your job is somehow enough to make them a reality.
For those unfamiliar with the premise, The Secret is an expertly crafted collage of magical success stories where people — the successes — diligently explain how they took proactive visualization steps to get the house they always wanted to live in, the car they always wanted to be seen in, or the family they always wanted to be loved by. The core mechanic at play is the “law of attraction,” or the magical magnetism that attracts the new iPhone to your effortful visualization of it. An enticing proposition based on rigorous research.
People like my 14 year old self are the perfect audience for The Secret: not enough critical thinking to question the assumptions; not enough knowledge to spot the contradictions; not enough experience to know that stuff doesn’t just magically manifest if you make your whims intense enough.
