In the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale called it “positive thinking”. In the noughties, Oprah promoted it through her talkshow as “manifesting”. Just six or so months ago, TikTok dubbed it “lucky girl syndrome”.
The belief that “if you think it, it will come” has long been popular among the young and hopeful. Now it has another name: delulu – as in delusional.
If you ask TikTok, “delulu is the solulu” to make one’s dreams come true. The idea is to set unrealistic expectations for yourself and earnestly believe you will achieve them. This applies to your career, relationships, mental wellbeing – anything can make you delulu if you want it badly enough. It’s an attractive, if erratic, premise, which might be why the hashtag has been viewed over 4.3bn times on the app.
“To me, being delulu means having so much self-confidence and self-assurance that you completely refuse to believe anything else,” said Courtney Johnson, a 28-year-old content creator from Austin, Texas. “It means showing up to life with radical optimism and joy.”
For Johnson, it felt a little delulu to believe that anyone would want to watch her TikTok videos, where she doles out career advice to her audience of over 130,000 followers.
“Instead of assuming no one would care, I went in with the delulu assumption that my work is important and that everyone is going to love it,” Johnson explained. “I ignored the mean comments and my low-performing posts, and instead focused solely on the positive comments. That fed into a positive, self-fulfilling prophecy. Delusional? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.”
The word has roots in the K-pop community, which first used it to describe a parasocial, obsessive fan. Though it’s been cutesified, the basic concept remains the same. Except now, instead of becoming an obsessed fan of an idol, you become an obsessed fan of yourself.
Bianca Bello, a 27-year-old New York TikToker, first learned the phrase from her 21-year-old intern, Cassie Fu Ren. “Delulu just has a little more fun, a little more flavor, it’s a little more silly” than delusional, Ren explained in a video. “Delusional is rooted in almost like you’re losing your mind. Delulu is, like, I’m just being a silly little goofster.”
“It’s the idea of manifestation but simplified in terms that the everyday, non-witchy-archetype would understand,” Bello added in an interview. “It means to live unexpectedly and with the intent to create a world where you are that character narrating your own story.”
By that definition, anyone who’s confident in themselves would qualify as delulu. TikTokers say the trend is a self-aware, humorous way to fight against insecurities and societal pressure to conform.
Last week, Bello visited Forks, Washington, the Pacific north-west town that has become a tourism hub as the setting of the Twilight franchise.
“I fully thought I was embodying Bella Swan,” Bello said, name-checking the vampire novels’ main character, played by Kristen Stewart in the films. “I genuinely envisioned Jacob Black coming out from behind a car or a tree or something and sweeping me off my feet … It was wholesome and healing.” In that moment, delulu meant romanticizing life, giving in to a fantasy, and indulging goofy, maybe childish, desires.
Delulu’s cousin, the delusion-ship, describes the dating habit of accelerating – or entirely making up – a relationship in one’s head. A crush holds eye contact for just a second longer than normal? They’re in love with you. A hookup texting you back three weeks later? They took so long because they didn’t want to bother you, and that was really considerate of them, actually. Ridiculous lines of thinking like these can be very reassuring.
There is no peer-reviewed research to back up the effectiveness of a delulu moment. It probably isn’t the best long-term life strategy. But experts say it can deliver a much-needed confidence boost. As the San Francisco therapist Alison McKleroy told Today, “Being delulu is almost like a self-efficacy tool. Being able to own your choices, take action and be fulfilled.”
For now – or until TikTok adopts a new psychology buzzword – delulu is the solulu, and it has its evangelists. “[It] makes me feel super strong in my ability to do anything I want,” Bello said. “It opened a portal for more positive and romanticized outlooks.”
