Charlotte York was right, I fear

re: the final stage of the woo-woo pipeline

A few weeks ago I came across a diagram on the internet that rearranged my brain chemistry.

It was one of those four-quadrant charts that looks like it was assembled in Microsoft Paint but somehow contains a devastating amount of psychological truth.

This one was about Sex and the City.

Which is exactly the kind of cultural artifact I’m professionally incapable of ignoring.

• On one axis: knows what she wants / doesn’t know what she wants.

• On the other: realistic / delusional.

And the four women fell neatly into their quadrants:

[ quick, before you read more — which quadrant are you in?! ]

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I stared at the chart longer than I care to admit. At first it was just funny. Charlotte — the eternal romantic — being labeled “delulu” by the internet felt about right.

But alas, the longer I looked at it, the more my brain kept snagging on something…

Charlotte York is actually the only character on the show who spends six seasons being brutally and consistently honest about the life she wants.

Marriage.
Devotion.
A partner who chooses her publicly and without hesitation.
An artistic home filled with flowers and children and optimism.

She says these desires out loud from the very beginning — without embarrassment, without hedging, without pretending she’s cooler than that.

And somehow we’ve all decided that makes her naïve.

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For most of my adult life, I assumed Carrie Bradshaw was the main-character blueprint.

Carrie is curious. Romantic. A little chaotic. She approaches love the way a writer approaches a question: she studies it, interrogates it, turns it over until the edges blur.

Carrie doesn’t rush toward answers. She explores.

Which is deeply appealing when you’re in your twenties and the entire world still feels like an open-ended experiment.

Unfortunately, Carrie’s operating system also creates the perfect breeding ground for men like Mr. Big. And if you’ve watched the show, you know the rhythm by heart.

Carrie leans in.
Big pulls away.

Carrie becomes unavailable.
Big swings back.

Carrie engages again.
Big retreats.

The relationship becomes less of a romance and more of a very elegant — yet compulsive — emotional pendulum that swings back and forth for years.

Which makes for fantastic television.

But it becomes considerably less entertaining when you realize you may have accidentally been living inside the same storyline for the last four years.

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The man in question is, in many ways, a perfect mold of the archetype — a NY-based gentleman running a very real (very large) empire, just old enough to feel worldly but not old enough to be embarrassing about it.

The kind of man who moves through rooms with quiet authority and always seems to be boarding a plane to somewhere important.

Charismatic. Successful. Slightly elusive.
In other words: narratively perfect.

Unfortunately, narrative perfection does not always translate to emotional stability…

Every time I emotionally disengaged, he would intensely reappear. Every time I leaned in again, he would slowly drift away.

For a long time I treated this like an intellectual puzzle. Surely if I applied enough emotional analytics to the situation I could crack the code.

[spoiler alert]
In fact, dear reader, I could not.

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The conditions for this realization had actually been forming for months.

Because at the end of July 2025, the scaffolding of my life quietly (albeit dramatically) collapsed.

Structures I had built my identity around dissolved. Relationships shifted. Career paths bent in directions I hadn’t anticipated. And for the first time in years, life slowed down enough that I could actually hear my own thoughts.

Which forced a question I had avoided for a very long time:

What do I actually want?

Not what sounds impressive.
Not what keeps certain relationships intact.
Not what other people expect.

Just… what I want.

The clarity work started there.

But it wasn’t until last week — staring at that SATC diagram again — that the diagnosis finally landed.

Carrie sits squarely in the quadrant labeled delusional + doesn’t know what she wants. And in that exact moment a thought hit me that was both humiliating and clarifying in equal measure:

💭 oh my god — i’m fucking carrie.

Which is a devastating realization if you’re a woman who prides herself on pattern recognition.

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The thing about Carrie’s quadrant is that it creates the perfect ecosystem for ambiguity. When you’re not entirely clear about what you want, the universe has a funny way of filling that space with situations that remain permanently undefined.

Which is why the Charlotte quadrant suddenly looked… interesting.

Charlotte is also delusional.
But she knows exactly what she wants.

And the more I thought about that combination, the more it started to look less like delusion.

Clarity plus belief. A surprisingly potent combination.

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It’s worth noting before we move forward:
I am not, by nature, a woo-woo person.

I love science.
I love evidence.
I love patterns that can be tested and repeated.

Ambiguity, as a general rule, makes my fucking skin itch.

Which means the recent infiltration of woo-woo philosophy into my life has been… deeply off-brand.

The irony is that I’ve actually been orbiting the woo ecosystem for years.

Not as a believer. As an anthropologist, of course.

Since 2023, I’ve attended an annual conference in Tallinn, Estonia — a gathering centered around global AI and emerging technology.

The crowd it attracts is… impressive. Former prime ministers. Founders of massive companies. Venture capitalists. Movie stars. People experimenting on the bleeding edge of biohacking and longevity science. Also quite critically, the top minds in the fields of consciousness and manifestation.

It’s the kind of environment where someone might present cutting-edge AI research on stage while three rows back a longevity researcher is explaining mitochondrial optimization and the woman next to him is casually discussing energetic alignment over oat milk¹ cappuccinos.

I went for the AI. But the woo was always… adjacent.

And over time, there were some things I couldn’t ignore.

First: These people were unusually clear.

Clear about what they wanted.
Clear about who they were becoming.
Clear about the futures they were building.

And second: year-after-year when I saw these same people again, their lives had progressed with remarkable accuracy in the direction they had previously described.

For someone who loves data, the experimental results were certainly difficult to ignore.

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I’ve since determined the woo-woo community, as it turns out, has terrible PR.²

Not because the underlying idea is crazy — but because the language around it tends to make people shut down before they even examine the mechanics.

“Manifest your dream life” sounds fantastical.

But if you strip away the vocabulary and look at the underlying dynamics, the idea becomes a lot less mystical.

Clarity reorganizes reality.
Not magically.
But behaviorally.

When you know what you want, you filter your choices differently.

You exit certain situations faster.
You entertain fewer ambiguous dynamics.
You recognize misalignment sooner.

Which brings us back to Charlotte York. Because Charlotte might, in fact, be the patron saint of this philosophy.

She knows exactly what she wants. And she believes — with almost alarming confidence — that it will eventually happen. Even when she doesn’t know how.

The internet calls that delusion.
The woo call it manifestation.

I’m starting to suspect it’s simply excellent strategy.

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Around the same time this realization was bouncing around in my brain, the universe decided to get a little cheeky.

My friend Caroline texted me.

“Random question,” she wrote.
“I have this silk dress Char wore on Sex and the City. Do you want to try it on and see if it fits?”

I laughed out loud.

Unbeknownst to Caroline, Charlotte had been occupying a suspicious amount of my mental bandwidth for weeks.

And suddenly a literal Charlotte York dress had entered the chat.

Not just any dress, either.

It’s the dress she wears in Season 6, Episode 7 where she tells the girls that she and Harry made up — and that they’re engaged.

Tell me this is not… suspiciously on theme.

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When I stood in front of the mirror wearing that very dress, something clicked — honestly, the kind of intellectual satisfaction you feel when a new data point suddenly makes a theory make. more. sense.

Charlotte York dresses like someone who believes in the life she wants.

Her wardrobe is romantic, polished, feminine in a way that feels almost radical now.

She isn’t dressing ironically.
She isn’t experimenting with identities the way Carrie often does.

Charlotte dresses with the calm confidence of someone who already knows who she is becoming.

And standing there in that silk dress, holding a tiny vintage handbag like I was about to attend a Park Avenue luncheon, something in my brain snapped into focus.

For months I’ve been circling a thesis in my writing about style — that clothing isn’t just aesthetic expression. It plays a role in shaping identity.

But somehow the idea had never crystallized this cleanly at scale. And Charlotte York is a near-perfect cultural example.

Her clothes aren’t decoration.
They’re rehearsal.

Every silk dress, every tailored coat, every polished headband reinforces the same internal message: This is the life I am building.

And suddenly the theory sharpened.

Every outfit is a small vote for the person you believe yourself to be — or more accurately, the person you’re training yourself to become.

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Carrie Bradshaw interrogates love.
Charlotte York chooses it.

And the older I get, the more I reassert, Charlotte wasn’t naïve — she was strategic.

Because the moment you become truly clear about the life you want, something interesting happens.

Ambiguous men get boring.
Half-aligned opportunities lose their shine.
Entire storylines quietly stop auditioning for your time.

Which leaves you with a surprisingly simple strategy:

1. Decide what you want.

2. Believe it’s possible.

3. And build a wardrobe that assumes the future is already on its way.

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1. don’t worry, they’re glyphosate-free

2. dare i say, they have worse PR than cats