I want to start this with a confession, because that’s how all my best posts start.
I have, on multiple occasions, convinced myself that a situation was going great when it was, objectively, on fire. I have walked into rooms believing I was the main character before anyone in that room had agreed to give me that role. I have looked at a mediocre first draft and thought “this is genuinely brilliant” for a solid twelve hours before reality caught up with me.
And here’s the unhinged part: I don’t regret a single one of those delusions.
Somewhere along the way, Gen Z turned “delulu is the solulu” into a joke — a caption under a thirst-trap, a comment under a manifestation post, a punchline for anyone who insists their situationship is definitely, for sure, about to text back. We say it with a wink. We say it knowing it’s a little unwell. But underneath the meme is something psychology has been quietly trying to tell us for decades: a certain amount of self-delusion isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival tool. It might even be the closest thing to a personality upgrade you can install for free.
The Science Bit (Don’t Worry, I’ll Keep It Fun)
Psychologists have a much less catchy name for delulu — they call it positive illusion. Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown, back in the late ’80s, published research suggesting that mentally healthy people are not the ones who see the world with brutal, unfiltered accuracy. They’re the ones who see it with a flattering filter — slightly inflated self-regard, an unreasonably optimistic sense of control over their own lives, and a stubborn belief that the future is going to be better than the data suggests.
The depressing plot twist? The people who see reality most accurately, with the least amount of self-flattering bias, tend to score higher on depression scales. There’s an actual clinical term for this: depressive realism. The sad girls were right all along, they just weren’t delusional enough to be happy about it.
So when you tell yourself you’re going to nail the interview you haven’t prepared for, or that the guy who left you on read is “just busy,” you’re not necessarily being stupid. You’re running a very old, very human software update that keeps your nervous system from collapsing under the full, unfiltered weight of reality. Delusion, in small and strategic doses, is armor.
But Here’s Where I Have to Be the Responsible Cult Leader
I promised you a safe space for romanticizing your life and being a little hehe evil, not a TED talk on toxic positivity, so let me draw the line clearly, because there is one.
Delulu-as-solulu works when it’s directional — when the delusion is doing something for you. Believing you’ll get the job pushes you to actually prepare for the interview instead of spiralling the night before. Believing your art is worth finishing gets the draft done, even if you quietly fix it later. That’s delusion in service of momentum. That’s the good kind. That’s basically manifestation with a marketing degree.
It stops being solulu the second the delusion starts doing something to you instead — when it becomes the reason you don’t apply for the job because you’ve already decided you got it in your head, or the reason you keep replying to a situationship that has shown you, in plain text, exactly who they are. That’s not positive illusion anymore. That’s just regular illusion, and regular illusion doesn’t build anything. It just keeps you comfortable in the same spot while your actual life quietly moves on without you.
The test I use — and yes, I made this up in the shower, no I will not be citing a peer-reviewed source for it — is simple: is this delusion pushing me toward evidence, or away from it? Healthy delulu makes you go get the receipts. Unhealthy delulu makes you avoid ever checking.
Why the Colour-Coded Planner Girl and the True Crime Girl Are the Same Person
This is the part where I get to be annoyingly on-brand for this blog, so bear with me.
The girl who romanticizes her 5 a.m. journaling routine and the girl who can recite the entire timeline of a 1985 vending-machine poisoning case are, psychologically, running the exact same operating system. Both of them are choosing a narrative over raw, unstructured chaos. The planner girl is narrating her own life into something with meaning and forward motion. The true-crime girl is narrating other people’s chaos into something with logic and closure. Both are coping strategies dressed up as personality traits, and both are, frankly, working out fine for the people who use them well.
Self-delusion isn’t the opposite of self-awareness. Weirdly, it requires a decent amount of it. You have to know, on some level, that you’re doing it — and choose to do it anyway because it gets you somewhere better than the alternative. That’s not the same as being out of touch with reality. That’s curating your relationship with reality on purpose, the same way you’d curate a moodboard, or an Instagram grid, or a group chat you’ve quietly decided is “the safe one.”
So, Practically — How Do You Delulu Responsibly?
A few unofficial rules I’ve picked up from personally testing this out way too many times:
- Let delusion write the pep talk, not the plan. Believe you can do the hard thing. Then go look up exactly how to do it, because belief alone doesn’t file the paperwork.
- Set an expiry date on your delusions. Give yourself two weeks of “he’s just busy.” After that, check the evidence, not the vibes.
- Keep one brutally honest friend on retainer. Not to kill the delulu — just to tell you when it’s stopped being armor and started being an excuse.
- Journal the difference between hope and avoidance. They feel identical in the body. They are not identical in the outcome.
Delulu isn’t the villain era we’ve been told it is, and it’s not the harmless meme either. It’s a tool — sharp, a little dangerous, extremely effective in the right hands. Use it like you’d use anything else in the Shreyaverse: intentionally, a little chaotically, and always with a backup plan you were too delulu to admit you needed.
Stay stupidly intelligent.
— Shreya
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