He viewed your Instagram story twice. Obviously, he’s in love with you. You applied for a job requiring five years of experience with precisely none. Naturally, you’re getting hired. Your startup has no customers, no funding, and no business plan, but you’re already rehearsing for your Forbes interview. Congratulations, you’re delulu.
In 2023, TikTok popularized the mantra “delulu is the solulu,” short for delusion is the solution, turning irrational optimism into a life philosophy. By November, #delulu had amassed over 4.3 billion views, according to The Guardian. In part a manifestation, in part a coping mechanism, this trend and collective joke offered a refreshing alternative to the conventional wisdom on the importance of being realistic. In a culture where social media amplifies comparison and realism often means tempering our ambitions to match our circumstances, confidence can feel like something we must earn. “Delulu” suggested we could start with it instead. Whether it was manifesting a relationship, a dream job, or an entirely undeserved level of celebrity, the appeal was obvious.
Apparently, the internet has come to its senses. TikTok’s 2026 trend forecast declared #delulu out and #lockedin in. Manifestation has given way to discipline. The implication is that we’ve finally exchanged childish optimism for a more mature understanding of how the world works. But perhaps the internet is confusing a change in attitude with an improvement in judgment.
The problem with this supposed evolution is that it treats optimism and realism as competing approaches to success. Yet psychology suggests something more complicated. Our expectations don’t merely reflect reality. They can influence how we engage with it. A belief can imperfectly predict the future while still motivating behaviour that improves our chances of achieving it. In that sense, being a little delusional might actually be rational.
Long before TikTok began encouraging us to manifest six figure salaries, psychologist Albert Bandura was studying how beliefs about our capabilities shape our behaviour. His theory of self efficacy suggests that people who believe they can accomplish a task are more likely to attempt it, invest effort, and persist through difficulties. The relationship between confidence and achievement is therefore not entirely one directional. Success can build confidence, but confidence can also help produce success.
Consider two students contemplating the same competitive internship. Both have imperfect resumes and face equally uncertain odds. One assumes rejection is inevitable and never applies. The other believes they have a chance, prepares seriously, and submits an application. The second student’s optimism hasn’t guaranteed an offer, but it has changed the range of outcomes available to them. Their confidence becomes consequential not because the universe rewards positive thinking, but because it changes what they do.
Our beliefs about ourselves are also less objective than we might assume. Psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown argued in 1988 that positive illusions, including somewhat flattering perceptions of our abilities and futures, can contribute to psychological well being. Although their conclusions remain debated, the research challenges the idea that perfectly accurate self perceptions are always the most psychologically beneficial.
The appeal of “delulu” becomes especially interesting when we consider self esteem. Unlike self efficacy, which concerns our confidence in performing particular tasks, self esteem reflects how we evaluate our own worth. Yet the two can become entangled in a culture that treats achievement as evidence of personal value. When everyone else’s LinkedIn profile reads like a corporate annual report, it’s easy to confuse what we’ve accomplished with what we’re capable of, and both with what we’re worth. “Delulu” offered a playful rejection of that logic. It encouraged people to imagine themselves as capable and deserving before having the credentials to prove it.
The freedom to imagine a more successful version of ourselves can be valuable, particularly when it encourages us to pursue opportunities we might otherwise dismiss. However, confidence becomes less useful when we mistake our imagined future for an accurate description of the present.
The important distinction is not how strongly we believe in ourselves, but what that belief allows us to do. Productive confidence encourages experimentation, persistence, and learning. Destructive confidence makes criticism feel irrelevant and failure impossible to acknowledge. The former expands our possibilities, while the latter narrows our understanding of them.
This is what TikTok’s transition from delulu to locked in fails to capture. Discipline and accountability are valuable precisely because they allow us to act on our ambitions and evaluate the results. They don’t invalidate the optimism that motivated those ambitions in the first place. Treating the two as successive stages of enlightenment overlooks the relationship between belief and behaviour that psychology has spent decades examining.
Delulu was never a particularly reliable method of predicting success. Its more interesting contribution was to challenge the assumption that our current circumstances provide a complete picture of our potential. We can recognize the odds, acknowledge our limitations, and still believe we’re capable of more than we’ve demonstrated. The rationality of a little delusion lies not in being certain we’ll succeed, but in refusing to mistake uncertainty for impossibility.
