Destiny Swapping
Mark Honeychurch - 14th September 2026
It seems like every time I write an article about a new TikTok trend, five others spring up in their place. This week, we’re going to look at Destiny Swapping, the idea that people are not only endowed with pre-ordained destinies for their lives, but also that these destinies are not indelibly attached to us.
Of course, the whole concept of destiny is silly. It often comes hand in hand with religious belief, the idea that your God has a plan for your future, but can also be tied up with more nebulous new age spiritual beliefs. On a scientific level there are legitimate questions about how deterministic the world around us is, what part quantum effects play on our lives, and whether we actually have free will. But this is not the kind of “destiny” that destiny swapping is all about - believers are firmly in the camp of believing that each of us has a divine or spiritual plan laid out for our future.
The basic idea of Destiny Swapping, as you may have already guessed, is that it’s possible to swap your destiny with that of someone else. The reasons for doing this are simple - if you know of someone who you think has a more positive, affluent or fortunate destiny than you feel you have, swapping with them, or stealing their destiny, will improve your life. Of course, to do this you have to be comfortable with the idea of making someone else’s life worse. But I suspect that, if anyone’s actually trying to do swap destinies with someone they know, they probably lack the maturity to even realise that this is a flaw in the plan.
I used the word “if” when talking about people trying to do this, as I’m unsure how much of a thing destiny swapping is from the perspective of people trying to steal someone else’s destiny. There are descriptions online of how to do it, but they mostly seem to be written down as a guide for people to use to find out if someone’s been trying to steal their destiny. The descriptions of how to destiny steal are fairly simplistic, and range from simply mirroring or mimicking someone’s life, through to manipulating dreams and using hexes, curses or spells.
Historically there are stories of people stealing some aspect of someone’s life, like the biblical story of Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing from their father, and some early European and Chinese attempts to explain the mechanics of luck. And there are more contemporaneous ideas from a couple of decades ago where people talk about being “luck vampires” - often with caveats about stealing people’s luck ethically. The book “The Psychic Vampire Codex”, from 2004, talks about stealing people’s psychic energy, but also has a strict code around using willing volunteers to take energy from - people who supposedly have too much energy. Of course, psychic energy is not a real thing, it’s just made up spiritual mumbo-jumbo - but at least I guess the people who considered themselves psychic vampires were trying to practice their silliness ethically.
When it comes to the recent phenomenon of Destiny Swapping, I’ve had a hard time finding any credible recent reports of people describing themselves stealing someone else’s destiny. It just doesn’t seem like anyone’s trying to steal someone else’s destiny - or at the very least nobody’s willing to admit to it. What I have found, though, is a lot of people claiming that someone has stolen their destiny, or attempted to steal it.
Here’s a (badly written) post that was made to the r/spirituality subreddit, titled “Is destiny swapping real?”, from four months ago:
I strongly believe my friend is trying to desting swap with me. Everytime she complains about something, the same thing she is complaining about miraculously starts happening to me and she kind of solves that problem in her own life. This has been happening since years and about multiple different things like love life problems, financial problems, family problems and now career related stuff as well. Please help me, I am desperate. How do i solve it??
And here are just a few descriptions of people who claim to have had their destiny stolen from them on a thread on the r/lawofattraction subreddit, also titled “is destiny swapping real?”:
I’ve had my energy harvested so I know for a fact people can use your energy to propel themselves forward in life.
I had a curse removal done and EVERYTHING I thought I lost was restored in my life.
My energy came back, opportunities started flowing in again and my life started moving forward the way it used to.
The person I suspected of harvesting my energy suddenly wanted to be friends again after YEARS of not having any communication with me.
I have a selfie I took of myself during the time it was happening to me and I looked like a straight up mannequin.
There was no light in my eyes, no energy, NOTHING until I had that bullshit removed.
I experienced something similar some years ago by a man I met. It was g necessarily destiny swapping but he swapped my energy with another person who i knew. It was CRAZY. I actually didn’t notice until the next week in class when we had to recap on our week. It was so weird! Fast forward to today, I have someone who seems to be attempting or succeeding at a destiny swap with me. If you care to hear about it ill continue but i def believe in this stuff!
Literally going thru this with my aunt…she is extremely jealous of me and attempts to cast spells with her words onto me and force me into a box. She loves to copy me and speak over me because I trigger her shadow. Needless to say im cutting her out. I see her beauty but she doesn’t. She is overcome by darkness.
I had been through a covert narcisstic friendship of a decade and we became friends when I finished with my studies and she advertised that she is documenting a social project which I loved to contribute too and thus fell into her trap. I did all the work by myself as I was so energetic and passionate and she would showcase it as her work covertly.
After I got my job, I was not much in touch. Once I quit my job to pursue my dreams of Art , she came back into my life. I helped her through a very depressive stage and it was as if I forgot my life. She revealed herself as a psychic out of the blue and I had unexplainable symptoms of panic and fear with weird energetic sensations one day after being at her home. That was the day my life changed completely to hell and still im suffering through the impact of it after seven years.
And right after that, she ignored and gaslighted me painting me crazy to everyone so that I would be silent. And this is the craziest part, within few days she became the secretary of a huge organisation where we all used to volunteer earlier and she would act as if she is volunteering while we do the work. And from there she grew immensely and now is a popular person in the society with many awards and opportunities which she has zero real skills for. I had many people tell me that I should have been in those positions and I deserved it.
And this is where YouTube says “hold my beer” - some of the comments on this video are just unhinged:
Still trying to recoup my destiny. A demonic movie producer contacted me about my memoir in 2005. She made progress stealing my star and in 2011 she sold my story for billions of dollars. My family and I were so sick we could all barely get out of bed while she bought 4 mansions and new cars and used my memoir as a hate crime against my family and I. Then her and her three witch accomplices fled from Texas to the UK and Australia. I am still trying to recoup everything that was stolen.
Same as me I had a destiny swap happne 2 me in spiritual courts and in Jesus name I will have my destiny back to me my finances my peace everything my dreams
I have monitoring spirits. 👽 I can sense them. My spiritual ✨️ eye is open. They won’t leave. Right now at work, I’m listening 🎶 to kids voices but they are not kids. They are dark spirits. They Lie and say they are your angels 😇 but they are the ones giving your ideas 💡 and credit to other people. Behind the dark spirits are familiar spirits. Alot of them are white people. They even went as far as distributing the destiny or glory to another black person or culture to protect themselves. I know when they are here but most of the time I try to keep silent. Alot of people don’t know that they are followed by these entities
Always dream of eating in dreams, poo on my foot, being chased by unknown people, dogs biting my hands….
I really needs deliverance by the precious blood of Jesus Christ.🙏
I think that this asymmetry, where virtually nobody’s out there saying that they’re stealing someone’s destiny, while conversely a lot of people appear to be accusing others of trying to steal their destiny, is key to explaining why the idea of Destiny Swapping is gaining traction. When you look at the lists online of warning signs that someone is stealing your destiny, a pattern becomes clear:
- Others steal the glory for your hard work
- You’re working hard, but not progressing
- Things feel promising, but don’t quite work out
- You lose important things when you need them
- People hypocritically criticise you for things they also do
- You start behaving differently
- Your life suddenly becomes harder
- Your friends disconnect, and you start feeling lonely
- People at school or work start ignoring or rejecting you
- You get physically sick, where before you were healthy
The reason for people making these Destiny Swapping claims seems to be as an excuse or scapegoat for the problems they’re having in their lives. If someone’s partner leaves them, they fail their exams, or their friendship circle disowns them, it’s psychologically much easier to blame it on something external than to have to employ some introspection and consider that maybe it’s their own actions that have caused their misfortune. And what could be easier than simply blaming someone in your life - a friend or family member who’s mean to you or envious of you - rather than accepting your own part in your misfortune.
But there’s an arrogance here - the idea that you were destined for something bigger, your life was going to be a success, you were pre-ordained for greatness. And then there’s the second problem, where you’re avoiding any kind of culpability for your actions by blaming your life situation on someone stealing your destiny. Now, I’m not going to say that everyone’s lot in life is purely a result of their own actions - each of our lives is a complex interplay of our own choices and the choices of those around us, along with a liberal dose of the privileged/disadvantaged circumstances of our upbringing, some genetics, and a sprinkle of randomness. But to abrogate all personal responsibility and just blame someone else when something goes wrong in your life seems like a pretty big cop-out to me.
As is often the case, many Christians have figured out the right answer for the wrong reason. I found several posts online on Christian blogs arguing that Destiny Swapping is not real, but using the faulty logic that the reason they know it’s not real is that God is the person who gives everybody their destiny, and nobody is powerful enough to change God’s plan for our lives.
I can’t quite put my finger on why, but this feels a lot like the Mandela Effect to me - the idea that, when someone learns that something is different to how they remember it, rather than accept that their memory is faulty they instead believe that they’ve jumped to a parallel universe where things are slightly different. Maybe it’s because both are a combination of arrogance, assuming you’re always right, mixed with use of whatever the opposite of Occam’s Razor is - picking the most complex explanation, with the most outlandish unproven assumptions. Whatever the connection, one thing is clear - Destiny Swapping is just as daft as the Mandela Effect, and I hope it ends up in the graveyard of bad ideas just as quickly.