Can You LARP Your Way to Success? The Research Says Your Daydreams Might Be Stealing Your Energy

Okay, I need to talk about something that has been rattling around my head all week. We are living in peak LARP culture. Live-action role-play started as people dressing up as elves in a field, but online it now means something else: performing a version of yourself you have not become yet. The 5am-routine reel. The vision board. The 'I am already a millionaire' manifesting audio. The aesthetic of success, worn like a costume.

And here is the uncomfortable thought I cannot shake. What if the more vividly we fantasise about the future, the worse we actually do at reaching it? Because when you have already lived the win in your head, what do you do next? You relax. You are done. Except you are not.

Turns out, this is not just a vibe. There is serious research behind it.

The blood pressure experiment

Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, who works at New York University and the University of Hamburg, has spent decades studying what she calls positive fantasies: those lovely, effortless daydreams where everything works out. In 2011, she and Heather Barry Kappes published four experiments in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology under a title that says it all: Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy.

Participants who were nudged into positive fantasies showed less energy than people who questioned the dream, imagined it going badly, or thought about something neutral. And the researchers did not just ask people how they felt. They measured systolic blood pressure, a physical marker of energisation. It dropped. In one study, women who fantasised about looking and feeling great in high heels showed lower energy afterwards. In another, participants who were genuinely thirsty were asked to fantasise about an ice-cold glass of water. The more pressing the need, the bigger the drain.

Read that again. Your body reacts to the daydream a bit like it reacts to the real thing. It stands down. The fantasy delivers the reward early, and the energy you needed to go and get it quietly leaks out.

Less energy, less effort, less success

This is not one cute lab result either. Across Oettingen's wider body of work, more positive fantasies have predicted worse real-world outcomes: less success in getting together with a crush, lower grades in an upcoming exam, a rougher transition into work after university, slower progress for people recovering from hip surgery, less weight lost by people trying to lose it. The pattern repeats. Dream sweeter, do less.

But, and this is the bit the hustle reels never mention, her research also separates fantasies from expectations. Believing, based on your actual track record, that you are likely to succeed is a different thing from floating in a dream where success is effortless. Expectations tend to help. Pure fantasies, the kind that skip every obstacle, tend to hurt.

So is LARPing bad? My take

Here is where I land, and I have gone back and forth on this. The internet has turned dreaming into a performance, and performance into a feed. We post the outcome before doing the work, collect the likes, and feel a tiny hit of 'already made it'. That is exactly the relaxation Oettingen measured, except now it comes with an audience. The algorithm even rewards it, serving us endless aspirational content, which is why I think tools like Spotify's new home feed controls matter more than they look.

But I do not think the answer is to stop dreaming. Oettingen does not say that either. Her fix is called mental contrasting, packaged as WOOP:

• Wish: name what you want

• Outcome: picture the best result, properly, enjoy it

• Obstacle: then name the thing inside you most likely to get in the way

• Plan: decide what you will do when that obstacle shows up

The dream stays. It just stops being the finish line and becomes the starting gun. You let yourself feel the win, then you crash it straight into reality on purpose.

So can you LARP your way to success? Honestly, I think you can LARP your way to feeling successful, which is exactly the problem. The costume is cheap. The work is the costly signal, and costly signals are the only ones anybody really believes, something we argued about in our piece on Kane Parsons and costly signalling. Dream big, yes. Just do not let your blood pressure throw the party before you have earned it.

Vishal Waghela is the co-founder of AltBollywood and writes about the messy space where psychology, internet culture and AI meet. Argue with him on Instagram.