“If you believe you are lucky, you will, in fact, become lucky!”
Lucky Girl Syndrome has taken TikTok by storm, chances are if you have been scrolling on your for you page at some stage in the past few days then you will have come across one of the thousands of videos by users either detailing their success stories or sharing their method for carrying out their affirmations.
User @skzzolno went viral at the end of 2022 with 836.9k views on a TikTok where she and a friend shared their experience of “Lucky Girl Syndrome” while at college together. This triggered a movement of people sharing their similar experiences. Since then #luckygirlsyndrome has racked up over 400 millions views, alongside #luckygirlsydromstories heading towards 400k views.
So what is it? The theory is pretty simple. If you repeat positive affirmations and truly believe in yourself, good things will come to you. It is based on the assumption that good things will happen to you because you are lucky enough for them to happen. People have taken to Tiktok to share how they implement this with affirmations and mantras taking first place as the most common technique, with vision boarding and journaling following along as a close second.
Will I be joining the community of people who have had success? Personally, I don’t see the difference between the “Lucky Girl Syndrome” trend and being an optimist.
For me, the premise feels like another regurgitation of either the Law of Assumption by Neville Goddard, which is based on having a state of mind and the feeling that your desires, wishes, and aspirations will be fulfilled; and the Law of attraction first recorded by William Walker Atkinson meaning that whatever you focus your energy on will come back to you.
There have been many versions of this trend over time in various idioms or adages.
“Man plans, god laughs” from the old Yiddish adage “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht”.
“What’s meant for you, won’t pass you by” which every Irish mammy has said at some point.
“Whatever will be, will be” which was even written into a song by Doris day – “Que Sera, Sera”.
… and the list goes on. I feel as thought this trend has an element of toxic positivity that could be dangerous. The focus on “being lucky” and this method of manifesting being successful, stems from looking for confirmation bias – If I manifest something and it happens, then it works, but what happens when it doesn’t. Are you not manifesting well enough or simply unlucky? For now I think I will stick with my simple optimism but if you want to give it a try, here are some of the most popular affirmations I found.
“I’m on a winning streak”
“The universe has my back.”
“Everything always works out for me.”