"Reality shifting" communities made me appreciate disenchantment.

It seems like a bunch of fan-fiction.

Nov 13, 2025

The Background

In preparation for a conference, I’ve been looking into the “reality shifting” phenomenon.

At the height of COVID, when everyone was at home facing the woes of not enough socializing in-person.

Suddenly, people who’d normally spent only a noble 4-5 hours on their phone per day were spending 4.5-5.5 hours on it per day. And that wasn’t all.

At work, where they’d normally spent the better part of 8 hours hiding Facebook tabs when people passed by their cubicle, they now found themselves at home, not having to hide tabs at all.

Oh, a dark time it was! I considered myself lucky to be a simple factory worker—I’ll take “sparks from a grinder flying into various sensory organs” over “using Zoom a bit more” any day of the week.

Monty Python Get On With It GIFs | Tenor

Anyways, while adults were pretending that their productivity being unaffected by being at home with their kids with a TV in the background and no oversight wasn’t a major red flag implying that they used to screw around all day at the office… the youth were actually being affected a great deal socially.

Normally, sure, these youths weren’t going to go outside and do interesting things—but they liked the option, as any of us would. Now, they were like prisoners.

And what do prisoners do? They think about how to escape.

Well, that’s what “reality shifting” was pitched as. Not just a form of escapism, but the great escape itself!

It was, evidently, mostly a TikTok thing. Brazenly scoffing at politician’s fear of Communistic oversight, they flew to TikTok like flies to poop.

As they buzzed around, they found that between dance videos and people pretending to like Dostoevsky, there were all manner of people claiming to be able to “shift” out of this humdrum reality and return to tell the tale.

“By George,” they thought, “that’s the ticket!” And hundreds of thousands of people endeavored to buy that ticket.

For my research, I first wanted to figure out what in the heck was going on with this phenomenon generally, straight from the horses mouth. So, I reached out to some former students of mine who happen to be part of the generation in question. They informed me that it was dead.

Evidently, a lot of people came out as liars and admitted to making their experiences up, and the whole thing was “just a cringy phase that we’re all ashamed we had.”

This was most unwelcome news. So, with a downcast heart, I returned to Google, just to see what its lifecycle actually was.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the community is still very much alive. I clapped my hands together with a little, “huzzah!”

My thoughts were that I’d investigate this as an altered-consciousness phenomenon which would be measurable using some of the same linguistic identifiers associated with religious and spiritual experience in other qualitative accounts.

What I encountered was significantly more disheartening than if the whole thing had been dead.

To put it bluntly: I’m not convinced at all that there are any religious or spiritual experiences occurring here. I don’t think there’s much in the way of altered states of consciousness at all, in fact.

If there’s anything, it would seem to be minimal, akin to a basic, very low-intensity meditative states.

“But Michael,” you say, “what’s wrong with a bunch of internet nerds forming a meditation group?”

What does pot of greed do again? : r/yugioh

Oh you’ll find out.

What Reality Shifting Is Supposed to Be

So what is reality shifting? To put it simply, it’s the idea that through focused practice and “scripting”1 where and what you want your desired reality to be, your consciousness can transfer from your original reality to that desired reality.

At first blush, we say, “Ah, this is just a form of meditative manifestation.” Something that people might use to get money and babes—they just call it a consciousness transfer, but if pressed, they probably believe that they’re drawing good fortune toward themselves.

Nope.

The communities come with a whole lot of ontological baggage.

First off, the multiverse is real.
Second off, the multiverse goes by Rick and Morty rules where sometimes pizza can talk; not, like, physics rules where that would be considered a stupid and erroneous pop-application of an already controversial theory.
Third off, they believe that consciousness is not bound to the body and is, with practice, able to leave the body.

And for whatever reason, these have been linked together such that there is a belief that people can, through sheer tyranny of will, impose their minds on an alternate body in another reality.2

Now, this sounds like fun stuff—I was genuinely excited and genuinely not setting out to be snarky. I mean, I’m not particularly keen on committing to months of researching something that makes me want to throw up.

Investigating an emergent mind-bending online phenomenon sounded pretty compelling, and I was eager to see what (if any) historical religious parallels were present.

There’s certainly mind-body dualism at play, where ascension through some genuine gnosis about the desired reality occurs.

They, rather unsurprisingly, state that they’re against religious proselytizing, and in practice, have a general distaste for religious dogma (let’s be honest: Christian dogma). As with many such spiritual-but-not-religious sorts, there’s a sort of implicit friendliness toward New Age concepts.

For example, bringing up the Bible as an authoritative source would be a no-no, but bringing up the Akashic Records similarly raises no alarms.

The “success” stories.

For my goal, I’m looking specifically at success stories. That is, people who claim to have successfully shifted. Currently, I’m hoping that the more I spend the next several months periodically reading/coding more of these accounts, I’ll find something (anything) that’s either in alignment with existing religious/spiritual experience taxonomies, or represents some new thing.3

But so far, they don’t read like that at all.

They resemble something much closer to, if we’re being honest, fan fiction.

People will often describe other worlds that they’ve gone to or even worlds they left in order to get to ours without an eye toward the phenomenology of the experience of shift. Pretty abnormal, but not absolutely unheard of.

But, this is coupled with a lack of any of the “haziness” we tend to find in ecstatic accounts—whether they result from meditation, psychedelics, or some unsolicited religious or spiritual revelation.4

So, we’re being asked to accept that using basic meditative and visualization technique, they’ve stumbled on some new consciousness-altering methods which have outcomes unlike any other consciousness-altering methods, and result in (sometimes temporary) clean breaks from reality. Basically, a bunch of 13-year-olds on TikTok claim to have beaten out DMT for immersion and holotropic breathwork for accessibility, all while the end results are significantly more ordered and significantly less dynamic than DMT—and everything else.

One person described their previous reality as a sort of post-war apocalyptic place where nukes had gone off; it was also, somehow, a sort progressive utopia without class or gender. That was their original home, and for whatever reason, they decided to come to this reality simply to see if the grass was green or something. Thus, even though on their original world, shifting is, evidently, systematized and well-understood, they could conceive of no greater possible reality than this one… because of grass. Then they got here and found their way to Reddit within a few weeks to talk about it.

Why it’s irritating.

So why does this bug me so bad? Yes, it’s cringy. Sure. But cringy things exist all over.

The irritating bit is that I think this marks the upper limit or threshold of at least two things. The first is religious pluralism. The second is psychology culture. That is, the social grip that the field of psychology has on our culture.

The fact that something can achieve those limit-testing heights without, at any point, stumbling over its own silliness and stopping its ascent is concerning to me.

Religious Pluralism

I’ve written in the past about Charles Taylor’s description of the secular age as being a result of the “Nova effect”—an explosion of plurality of beliefs. This is how he understood the secular: not that there’s nobody who’s religious, but where each religion is understood to exist as one among many options for belief.

What seems to be at play in these shifting communities is a sort of radical acceptance of this Nova effect in the minds of the youths, such that plurality itself becomes meta-religion.

In these communities, you see in-group, out-group ideation—which isn’t in itself anything special, but is still indicative of this being a group. A group which insulates itself from the outside in order to protect their radical metaphysics, which may very in certain areas, but adhere to core dogma, with community acceptance mediated by adherence to a set of guidelines.

You’re not allowed to go on a subreddit and, for example, express and argue skeptical beliefs about someone else’s account.

I saw one person argue that a story sounded stupid and implausible, and the response was broadly in opposition, but with one commenter stating: “Look, if it’s fake, it doesn’t affect anything. If it’s real, it’s a cool story.”

There’s this idea that the appropriate response to ideas seen as false is not to be concerned, but to tolerate them for the sake of enjoyment.

Aesthetically Mediated Belief

This is, as far as I can tell, the unholy alliance of several cultural streams: the Nova effect, yes. I’d also toss in (as I often do) Raoul Eshelman’s artistically mediated belief.5 Think here about when you engage with a story and suspend disbelief: you temporarily put yourself into a less skeptical mode; people in the metamodern community6 have extrapolated this to “aesthetically mediated belief,” which extends this beyond art forms into broader social contexts.

This is one of these groups where, for the sake of enjoyment, people will set barriers around the group saying: don’t bring your disbelief in here, we’re trying to have a good time.

Then, in this unholy alliance, you have much of the force of religious thought, with all the insulation that comes with it. Unfortunately, they lack any structures that would allow for disputation or jarring of belief from within.7

So the guy who pushed back against the oddball account saying, “There are logical inconsistencies with your narrative”—people replied, “Illogical inconsistencies apply within our universe but not within theirs because multiverse theory dictates that any possibility exists whatsoever.”8

We must not forcefully apply our world’s rules to other worlds which may have different rules. In fact, the one rule we know is a rule is that there is no rule because anything can happen and everything has happened and is happening and the multiverse is like a magical wonderland where my sad life is just a bad dealing of the cards of fate, but I can seize fate by the shorthairs and do whatever the heck I want.9

Parasocial Relationships

People who had inclinations to place themselves within fictional worlds used to have a home: it was in the weird fan-fiction communities of Tumblr. Now, running unchecked after opting into the unholy alliance of shifter-thought, they’re like fan-fiction on steroids.

They’ve got parasocial relationships with fictional characters!!

This seems to be a bump on the same freeway as the following:

living in a virtual space for much of one’s life,
virtual space exacerbating parasocial tendencies, and
fictional narratives and niche communities exacerbating obsessive fan cultures.

In the past, nerds could meet and geek out, but eventually they’d have to split up to go eat grilled cheese and poop and stuff. Now, people can fall into a rabbit hole and stay there for as many waking hours as they want (and COVID made this even more possible).

And so we’re seeing parasocial relationships, high-immersion fiction communities, and all the previously discussed factors align.

In addition (and this is where I kind of drew the line and said, “My goodness, what the heck is going on here?”) there seem to be other problematic mental issues. One person claiming that they became so jealous they vomited because they saw that somebody else had “shipped”10 with their very niche, fictional, significant other.

I had to sit there for about 10 minutes and unpack it. “What are they talking about? Movies?”

And that’s when it hit me: oh my goodness, no, they think they can shift into fictional worlds!

Now, one of the most common recommendations for shifting successfully is to act as if it’s true. So, in their mind they were already in a relationship with a fictional character in some universe where that’s possible, and somebody else (in this mundane universe) is with that character… in, well, another universe. And the fact that it’s another universe is not enough to quell the jealousy.

Psychology Culture

This made me realize that these communities may well anticipate the end of psychology culture’s grip on us.

The person in the preceding story indicated that their therapist had recommended even more sessions to deal with their jealousy. So, on some level, they acknowledge the authority of the therapist, but in their secret lives they resist it, looking to others and saying, “Look, I’ve already been to therapy. I don’t want to hear about why I need to just deal with it.”

What these folks are doing in the ever-atomizing world of this Nova effect, and in the unrestrained possibilities associated with multiverse theory’s pop-culture representation, is finding infinitely fine niches within which they can put themselves.

Here, people can simply exist alongside others who, only a few years ago, we would’ve simply deemed extraordinarily mentally ill.

But, here we find a problem: if I want to open up the DSM-5 and say, “This person has a problematic psychotic disorder,” one of the entry criteria is that it disrupts their life, generally including their social functioning. But when we don’t have a clear idea of what social norms are, we can’t say, “Hey, look, this person being an outcast, hiding in an internet hole with their weird friends talking about putting themselves into the Attack on Titan universe,11 that’s an insane delusion.”

If they don’t see it as a problem, they can expand and reify their delusions in a niche community without becoming a risk to themselves or others, so, we have no reason to crack open the DSM-5.

So, this person’s therapist can only shrug and say, “Hey, most people don’t believe what you believe…” and then talk to their parents. But the culturally accepted answer is, “That’s just great! You’re mega unique and that’s great because you’re great.”

I think that after, as Jung believed, the psychiatrist replaced the clergyman, we assumed people would continue to bend the knee to authority structures associated with rational-types (science-types), and these would ground them.

But now, the “what’s it matter?” defense stands as a wall between the hyper-niche, hyper-eccentric communities and those who hope to have any sort of common cultural understanding with them.

Conclusion

Augustine said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

And I agree—that should be the ultimate end.

But the intermediary stepping stone is that my heart is restless until it rests in a world where this kind of whacky nonsense goes away.

I don’t even know that there’s anything interesting to be found here.

I definitely don’t believe there is any interesting altered-consciousness phenomenon occurring. And I’m not even convinced this is a compelling social phenomenon. But there are hundreds of thousands of people still doing it, and it’s weird and upsetting.

The clashing together of bad physics, bad metaphysics, mental health issues, and fan-fiction has spawned reality shifting, and like the hybrid Offspring from Alien: Romulus, it should never have been.

The Offspring looking at Rain holding a gun in Alien: Romulus (2024) — This is what reality shifting communities look like. Their understanding of physics is the Engineer DNA, their understanding of metaphysics is the Xenomorph DNA, and their mental health and fan-fiction tendencies are the Human DNA. Wa the Offspring ever going to destroy everyone the *Alien* universe? No. But are all the citizens of that universe better off with it gone? Absolutely.

So, the question that arose in my mind is:

If we don’t have the social structures to dispute and/or ground this sort of thinking before it grips hundreds of thousands of people, are we ready for something like reenchantment?

That is, ought we to encourage more magical thinking without, first, some regress into an exaltation of capital “R” Reason, or some social structure that’s both less sweet/supportive and less atomized.