Andy Masley here is quoting a tweet about the book The Secret:

A lot of people who think everyone went insane because of social media really don’t remember how fundamentally insane people were before social media

A lot of otherwise normal teenagers and adults around me -Would buy bracelets with little crystals inside because the crystals provided energy -Thought 9/11 was an inside job -Didn’t believe in evolution -Would talk about The Secret as if it were a respectable normal thing to believe in

I agree 💯

It reminds of this time when my personal life was volatile and this smart friend of mine recommended that I read this book. It may have been my lazines but I didn’t end up reading it. But now that I think about it its wild how popular this idiotic book was. I’ve heard so many anecdotes about this dumb book from friends. In hindsight, it feels like the book was as popular as the bible at the time.

Look at the bullshit in it:

The second thing to know is that the condition of being overweight was created through your thought to it. To put it in the most basic terms, if someone is overweight, it came from thinking “fat thoughts,” whether that person was aware of it or not. A person cannot think “thin thoughts” and be fat. It completely defies the law of attraction.

But to Andy’s point, people always believed in dumb shit but it was private, but now everybody has the technology to broadcast their stupidity to the entire world at their fingertips. Now add LLMs into this mix. Brace for the wild times.