The World Went Flat. So We Went Looking for Gods.
Astrology, tarot cards, fortune tellers, and the long way back to wonder
PART ONE
I watched The Odyssey last week, and I kept thinking about a world where gods argue over dinner, omens hide in the flight of birds, and any storm might be a message. It made me realize how far we’ve drifted from a world that could still surprise us like that, and it’s what finally pushed me to write what I’ve been obsessing over for a long time.
The flattening
Technology did not set out to remove the sacred from daily life. It was supposed to make life easier, and mostly it has. But this ease has collapsed time and distance, and removed much of the wonder we once experienced. A letter took two weeks and carried the ache of waiting for it. A walk alone used to be uninterrupted time with our own thoughts, and we could hear the birds, look at the trees, feel a flicker of awe at the natural world, but now we half-listen to a podcast about optimizing our lives, or photograph the flowers to produce content.
As we started seeing too much of our world through a screen, we stopped looking out, and up. Our world went flat, and somewhere between one phone update and the next, we stopped looking for awe. We don’t need to anyway: our algorithm serves us whatever we want to see, flat and 2D, and we just keep scrolling.
I want to spend this newsletter (Part One), and a few more that follow it, exploring why and how so many people — Gen Z especially — are trying to claim some of life’s sacredness back.
Hope and Awe, in a different format
Gen Z has been raised inside the flattening, is looking hard for hope and awe.
The Pew Research Center reported this year that roughly 3 in 10 American adults now consult astrology, tarot cards, or fortune tellers, with usage concentrated most heavily among Gen Z and millennials.
The tarot and oracle card market alone has grown from an estimated $830 million in 2020 to roughly $1.5 billion in 2026, and about two-thirds of new practitioners are between 18 and 34. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, formal religious affiliation among Gen Z continues to slide: only 45% now identify as Christian, down from 55% a decade earlier, according to Pew's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, and 41% claim no religious affiliation at all.
Surveys of Gen Z consistently find people who describe themselves as spiritual far more often than religious. The hunger for meaning, for awe, for something larger than ourselves hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just no longer looking for a home inside traditional institutions.
It’s also, I think, why so much of this search gets filed under “wellness” rather than “religion.” We already have a fluent, judgment-free vocabulary for taking care of ourselves such as therapy, meditation apps, sleep tracking, breathwork, and slotting tarot or astrology into that same category isn’t a stretch so much as a natural expansion of it.
And I believe that reaching for something larger than ourselves that can foster belonging, connection and community can be just as much an act of self-care as a good night’s sleep. Maybe a more important one.
The questions AI is forcing us to ask
We are, all of us, being asked to answer a question humans have mostly been able to avoid: what, exactly, are we here for? When a machine can write the essay, generate the image, answer the question, plan the trip, we realize that maybe those tasks were never really the point. Remove them, and what’s left is the harder question: why are we here? What do we owe each other? And what, if anything, does make a life well spent?
I don’t think it’s an accident that this is happening at the exact moment technology has also stripped the wonder out of daily life. We are all asking, essentially, the oldest question there is: not “what should I do today” but “what am I here to do at all.” That’s a spiritual question, and it always has been.
The Tarot
I got an early preview of this searching-for-connection instinct in my own life a few years ago, when I started reading tarot. I remember one reading in particular: sitting across from a stranger, a deck of cards shuffling slowly between us, forty minutes passing before either of us reached for a phone. What I understood afterward is that the cards were almost beside the point. A stranger and I had given each other forty uninterrupted minutes of real attention, and the deck between us gave us both permission to talk about things too big for small talk, without either of us having to hold that weight alone. Reaching for something explicitly non-human — a set of symbols with no stake in my life — is what made the hour feel more human than most conversations I have in a week.
I’m not a theologian, a scholar of religion, or anyone with the authority to tell you what’s true. But I’m someone who noticed the flattening in my own life, went looking for a way back to noticing the awe in everything around me — birds, flowers, the ordinary miracle of another person’s attention — and found myself, unexpectedly, at a table with a tarot deck, discovering that what I was actually hungry for connection to the world, to other people, to myself and my own intuition. I wanted to recapture a sense of magic, hope, and mystery — the idea that some things can’t be explained by the brain. They have to be felt and understood in the body, not just the mind.
Over the next few pieces, I want to explore why practices like tarot, energy work, spirituality and some modalities that used to live at the margins are now sitting comfortably in the mainstream, sometimes alongside very religious traditions. I want to talk about the charlatans, because they’re real and worth naming plainly. And I want to talk about the people I believe are genuinely gifted, and why, in a world this flattened, reaching toward them might be one of the more rational things a person can do.
I’d love to hear from you: do you read tarot? Do you follow astrology? Have you tried energy work like Reiki? Tell me what kind of healing art, mysticism, or spiritual practice you’re drawn to.
Next week: a field guide to the many modalities people are reaching for right now — astrology to akashic records — and what they all turn out to have in common.
Sending love and good energy ❤️
Patricia