this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
66 points (89.3% liked)
Asklemmy
52068 readers
410 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Might be more of a developmental impairment. For children, magical thinking is normal and expected. They might sincerely think they can cause something to happen by thinking about it or engaging in some kind of paranormal way. Like, if a 4 year old points at you with a finger guns gesture and yells 'bang', they might just be trying to be silly; but they might also be genuinely trying to kill you. You'll know if immediately after, they look down at their finger-gun with a wtf expression cuz they're actually surprised it didn't work.
Again, normal. Unnerving, but normal.
They should grow out of that shit by about age 7 iirc.
Lots of people never grow out of it, they just compartmentalize that kind of thinking as religion... they know they can't kill you with finger guns, but Jesus? His finger guns are real!!.
Those people need a fuck ton of therapy.
Development impairment might be a better description yeah. I haven't given it too much thought as luckily I don't have many people like this around me. It just always struck me as weird that the medical/psychiatrist community doesn't dare to touch it.