New Agers Make My Brain Hurt

I am surrounded on all sides these days by new agers.

You can't have a conversation with a new ager, any more than you can have a conversation with a 9/11 truther or an Obama birther. Lately, largely thanks to that halfwit book The Secret, new agers believe reality is whatever they perceive it to be. Their perception can't be wrong, they believe, because it is their perception that literally creates reality.

(If you're thinking that you're going to correct me by telling me that halfwit book The Secret doesn't actually say that, save your typing. Their perception is that it says that, and therefore, that's what it says.)

Are there any new agers who have not cured cancer with crystals, colored lights, homeopathy or the mystical 527 528 hz 'sound of love'? Why does cancer even exist anymore? Apparently it's easier to fix than a hangnail. A rhetorical question, of course. Cancer exists because of a conspiracy by Big Pharma and the Defense Department and/or the CIA to keep it going. This conspiracy exists because new agers believe it exists.

For the past two or three months, I have been beseiged by a friend who, after years of personal new age beliefs, has decided to become evangelical about it, and equally determined to convert me. I assume she has willed me to believe it, and since I still don't, she must think her will power has somehow been tainted — perhaps by misaligned chakras or unfocused kundalini energy. And if she thinks it has become tainted, well, that makes it so.

Some of my new age friends assume that because I lean toward Buddhism, I must also be a new age believer. Lord, no. I don't know how a person even functions when he or she believes all their thought processes are closed feedback loops altering the reality around them second by second.