No One is Vibing Their Way Out
Health, love, stability, loss—suddenly they’re all reflections of your internal state. It’s prosperity gospel in Lululemon: same transaction, different outfit.
I used to traffic in new age circles until I realized it could not withstand death.
Of all the modern theologies that piss me off, The Secret sits at the top. Not because it’s simplistic, but because it quietly installs a moral economy of outcomes while pretending to be liberating. It takes a small, human truth—that attention shapes experience—and inflates it into a totalizing claim that attention controls reality. It’s cosmic victim blaming.
Once you make that move, everything becomes a referendum on the self. Health, love, stability, loss—each one reinterpreted as evidence of your internal state. It’s prosperity gospel in Lululemon: same transaction, different outfit.
Of the many things I’ve heard since being diagnosed with RA, after a horrific battle with COVID that resulted in double pneumonia and a body that’s never been the same, is that maybe if I get a treatment that works, feel less pain, I’ll give off better energy and things will get better.
Yes, please, allow me to vibe my way out of this.
I understand the impulse to do this. It’s not so much about me as it is a desire to order reality into a worldview that feels controllable, digestible, and manageable. Confrontation with the truth is much harder: You can’t always control what’s going on in your body—your only vehicle to reality. You can eat well (I did), take appropriate precautions (I did), and still get really sick, live with it, or if you’re really unlucky, die.
That is where shit gets real, and no amount of good energy matters.
Attention isn’t leverage. It doesn’t bend reality to your will. It’s looking at what is—and not turning away. It’s love, as a verb.
One of my dear friends just lost her husband. He was my age, not even 50. The day he died, he was having a medical procedure to repair a stent for lung cancer treatment and coded under anesthesia. She called me sobbing from the hospital. All I could say was, “What? It was just a procedure.” I couldn’t reconcile it. My brain skidded to a halt. The world slowed down. The chirping of a bird outside the kitchen window reduced to a 0.25x speed.
“He died?”
Then I saw him, twenty years before, outside behind a friend’s house at a party. I gave him one of my cigarettes. He said, “Don’t tell my wife.” I never did.
This was Monday. The next couple of days were a blur, but then at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday night she called me, sobbing. The funeral home had urged her to donate his body to science. She thought it was the ethical thing to do. But lying in bed, she googled what happened to those bodies. Heads and limbs are severed, sent different places. Organs separated, parsed, distributed. She couldn’t stand the thought of that—of only getting partial cremated remains. She tried to call the funeral home, but it was late, and the woman she texted said it might be too late to stop the transfer of his body.
She needed me to pick her up at six a.m., take her there, try to stop it. So, I did.
We drove in silence. What do you say when you’re on the way to stop a body transfer out of a funeral home as the sun peeks up over the horizon?
The funeral home is situated on the corner of 51st Ave and McDowell, across from a Food City and in the same parking lot as Domino’s.
The front doors were locked, lights off, but I drove behind. The back door was open.
“I’m going in,” I said.
My friend made to get out of the car.
“Stay there, just stay in the car. Don’t get out. Just stay.”
I walked into a morgue at dawn. I yelled for help. Two men came out, looked at me with disbelief and shock, ushered me back outside. I explained, pointing at the car. She got out, came to me.
“That’s his widow,” I said. “Wait, are you a widow or a widower? I don’t know. He’s her husband. You can’t take his body.”
They promised nothing would happen. We waited for the funeral home to open, windows down in the car, the noise of urban Phoenix traffic idling at stoplights, the hum of I-10 behind us. I watched four little birds hop through a water puddle. I don’t know where the water came from. I worried they’d get sick from it, but they flew off after a while.
We made arrangements for a viewing the following week, and I took her home. I watched her walk inside, steps slow, head bent. I pulled away, uncertain.
Was there something else I should be doing?
I sat too long at the stop sign to pull onto Union Hills. Someone honked at me. The morning was fully awake now. Places to go, life to live, no time to idle in thought at stop signs.
There is no system for this. No alignment, no vibration, no abundance mindset that reaches into a morgue at dawn and makes any of it different.
You just go when you’re called. You stand with the living. You honor the dead. You try not to look away.
Everything else is privileged theory that cannot withstand death.
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked shall I return there;
the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.”
In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.
— Job 1:21–22 (NRSVUE)
