The fatalism of the ‘lucky girl syndrome’ trend

Manfluencers to manifestations

Having trawled through honestly an uncomfortable number of these videos at this point, with No Doubt making me increasingly doubt my will to live, one thing that really struck me was how similar the format and style is to a lot of the manfluencer content which plagues social media feeds.

Like much of that content, the backing is often vague and anecdotal rather than citable. In fact, I struggled to find even one reliable source.

The voices and colour palette are often softer, an iced latte might replace the protein shake in hand, but the message is essentially the same: do exactly what I did, and you can have the life that I lead.

The main difference between these two types of content, then?

Men are ‘coached’ on how to be ‘men’ by actively going after their goals, hitting the gym, bio-hacking, and tricking women into sleeping with them. Whereas women, by contrast, are told to just ‘believe that you’re lucky’ and you will be.

What?

The ‘lucky girl syndrome’ may seem light and fun and breezy. It may feel like a way of receiving and reciprocating positivity through the belief that what you put out into the world is what you get back from it. Why wouldn’t a 12 step night time routine or a consistent journaling habit produce positive results?

To an extent this does make sense. It’s far easier to enjoy life when you’re starting off with a positive approach, and practising mindfulness isn’t necessarily going to make your situation any worse, per say.

But what about the less privileged people who don’t have the option of simply “manifesting” good things happening, or even of implementing the more scientifically backed WOOP method? What about those for whom these steps to success are materially inaccessible?

I’m thinking of the people in Palestine whose homes and families have been torn apart by genocide and years of oppressive occupation. Or of those in war torn countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, India, Pakistan and others.

I’m thinking of people caught in the vicious cycle of homelessness, unable to get a job without a bank account, unable to get a bank account without an address, unable to get an address without a job. Or of people exploited in sweatshops, or caught in the midst of dangerous tradings and guerrilla warfare in places like Colombia and Venezuela.

What about the people whose existence is being denied in various places across the world just for not conforming to archaic and rigid perceptions of gender identity?

Are all of these people just ‘unlucky’? Or are they victims of a far, far wider network of insidious, exploitative and oppressive systems of control?

It’s all well and good incorporating the acknowledgement of obstacles into your positive thinking and planning, but if those obstacles are otherwise insurmountable things like a lack of clean drinking water or ubiquitous air pollution, the practical application of a positive outlook is, understandably, going to feel a lot more difficult to achieve.

 

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Individualistic, infantilised incompetence

‘Girl math’ presents women as compulsive and impulsive consumers, reminiscent of the hysteria associated with middle class women and department stories in the late 19th century. ‘Girl dinner’ shows women relinquishing both their appetite and their domestic ability.

‘Lucky girl syndrome’, then, deprives women of intellectualism. The documentation of this manifestation-infantilisation allows the predominantly white, middle-class women embracing this trend to flaunt their privilege without considering the wider global disparities in wealth and economic distribution which makes their so-called ‘luck’ possible.

By placing implicit trust in the “universe” rather than taking accountability and exercising our hard fought for autonomy, “lucky girl syndrome” seeks to accept a fatalistic view of the world, one which insinuates that what you get is what you deserve, and that it’ll all work out in the end.

The more insidious alternative, however, is that the very acknowledgement of other people’s inequality as misfortune is what sustains these co-called lucky girls’ clientele. It is the sale of the attractiveness of this kind of life, of counting your followers and consuming recklessly whilst remaining deliberately ignorant to the environmental and social consequences of your own irresponsible behaviour, that many “lucky girls” are endorsing.

So we see, almost exactly like the gimmick of sponsored GRWM morning routines, day-in-my-life videos, or whatever other carefully curated highlight reel we see of content creators’ lives, the documentation of ‘lucky girl syndrome’ becomes nothing more than an advertisement intended to draw more money out of people who probably already had less than them to start with.

In doing so, ‘lucky girl syndrome’ confuses manifestation with privilege, and continues to pander to the hierarchical system which places everyone in competition with each other for the top spot.

Spoiler, if you’re straight, cis, white, and western, relatively middle-class and have no financial commitments such as a family who rely on you, you might just be the luckiest girl of all.