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How did 2024 manifest for you?

As the year draws to a close several dictionaries have published their word of the year, in some cases driving much discussion among psychologists. For Dictionary.com ‘demure’ tops the list, for Oxford it’s ‘brain rot’, for Collins it’s ‘brat’, and for Merriam-Webster the winner is ‘polarization’, showing the importance of online content in the significance attached to word use.

The most interesting choice of word of the year comes from Cambridge Dictionary who chose ‘manifest’ (also on the shortlists of other dictionaries). Choices are based on the number of searches but also the use of the words in popular culture, which is where manifest has an interesting history in its use, for example, during the Summer Olympics by many prominent athletes.

Manifest means to use methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you to imagine achieving a goal, which many believe will make it more likely to happen. If we go back to 1380, manifest was a word borrowed from Latin and French with a meaning of “easily noticed or obvious”, shifted to a verb that meant “to show something clearly” and its meaning has come a long way since then beginning with its current rise to popularity during the pandemic when imagination was all that many of us had to work with.

However, for many psychologists manifesting is problematic. Sander van der Linden, whose research is focused on the psychology of misinformation, says:

“manifesting [is] the idea that you can will your desires into reality simply by thinking about them. In psychology, it’s a form of what we call ‘magical thinking’. Indeed, it’s a form of pseudoscientific thinking where people mistakenly assume that they can move reality with their mind.”

He goes on to say that there is zero scientific evidence that manifesting works and explains the difference between manifesting and positive thinking (which is often a part of manifesting and a basic human instinct – optimism bias). He points out that you can’t simply “wish that these outcomes eventuate, without doing anything constructive to make them happen”. In reality, most of the celebrities and athletes who talk about ‘manifesting’ achieve their goals through hard work rather than imagination.

On a lighter note, Pantone have declared that ‘mocha mousse’ is the colour of 2025. They describe mocha mousse as, “a mellow brown hue whose inherent richness and sensorial and comforting warmth extends further into our desire for comfort, and the indulgence of simple pleasures that we can gift and share with others”. It’s been a long-time since I enjoyed chocolate mousse. Happy Christmas!

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