What's that? Sorry, couldn't hear you: I was accessing my home star cluster's dimensional frequency.
Oh, it's real: A group of people who — according to TikTok, Instagram, and countless New Age blogs — refer to themselves as "Starseeds," and believe that they are aliens from different stars and planets, reincarnated inside human bodies.
Their valiant task is to help usher in a bountiful golden age for humanity. Naturally.
"Starseed is the modern name for what was known in antiquity as angels," one YouTuber, who goes by "The Alchemist," explains in a recent video. "They are residents of higher dimensions that specifically incarnated into a human physical experience with the intention to help raise the collective consciousness of humanity."
Got it.
The concept — which has been around since at least the 1970s — appears to have exploded in recent years, likely a result of the rise of the modern, New New Age wellness industry. Seriously, just type in #starseed on TikTok and you'll get over one billion results.
But as a team of psychologists — Manchester Metropolitan University, and Andrew Denovan, a lecturer at the University of Huddersfield — explain in an essay for The Conversation about the phenomenon, there's a helpful theory that might explain why so many people believe this stuff.
They claim it's because of the Forer Effect, a common psychological phenomenon based on psychologist Bertram Forer's 1949 paper called the "Fallacy of Personal Validation," which posits that it's incredibly easy to get people to identify deeply with vague personality descriptions that can apply to just about anyone — especially when those common traits are framed to validate the individual desire to be seen as unique. ("I'm not like other girls — I'm an alien girl.")
Think astrology, but in this case, it's aliens.
And indeed, like with astrology, there are a number of different types of Starseeds, which come from different star "clusters" — or galaxies, or planets, or what have you — and apparently have different personality traits.
Look, yes, people are different. But even before you reach that point, the reasons that people are drawn to the idea of being a Starseed in the first place — which according to The Conversation, includes feeling a lack of belonging, literally just having empathy, and experiencing mental health issues — really just seem like the side effects of being human.
That said, a disclaimer: as noted in the experts' essay, there are probably some outfits who believe themselves to be aliens in a much more real way, particularly those who might be affected by schizophrenia or similar disorders.
The Starseeds, on the other hand, are likely just suffering from a bit of self-rarifying. But hey, we all cope with the burdens of humanity in our own ways.
Besides, what do we know? We're just silly ol' Earthlings, after all.
READ MORE: Starseeds: psychologists on why some people think they're aliens living on Earth [The Conversation]
More on the Forer Effect: People Thought an AI Was Brilliantly Analyzing Their Personalities, but It Was Actually Giving out Feedback Randomly
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