WHEN THE CARDS BECOME CLICKBAIT

On tarot, romantic obsession, and the curious business of telling people what they want to hear.

There is something rather peculiar happening in the contemporary spiritual marketplace. Somewhere between humanity's ancient fascination with the unknown, centuries of esoteric traditions, the symbolism of tarot, and the seemingly insatiable appetite of social media algorithms, divination appears to have acquired an extraordinarily predictable purpose: informing people that their former romantic partners are thinking about them.

Apparently, someone is always coming back.

Open Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, and you will encounter an endless procession of tarot readings announcing that someone is secretly watching you, regretting their decisions, preparing to communicate, awakening to the extraordinary connection you supposedly share, or finally recognizing that you were, in fact, the love of their life. Sometimes all these revelations occur simultaneously, which makes one wonder how this mysterious individual finds the time to accomplish anything else.

The communication, incidentally, is almost always imminent, although it appears to have been delayed for approximately seventeen consecutive readings.

And should none of these revelations resemble your circumstances, there is always the reassuring instruction to reverse the energies.

How convenient.

Now, before someone mistakes my criticism for an objection to tarot itself, I should clarify something. I read tarot. I believe in divination, in intuition, in energies, and in the possibility that there are dimensions of existence and consciousness that our current ways of understanding the world do not fully encompass. I am neither interested in reducing every spiritual experience to a psychological phenomenon nor particularly concerned with convincing anyone that my understanding of spirituality ought to become theirs.

Quite the contrary.

My concern begins precisely where spiritual exploration gives way to predetermined narratives, where guidance becomes indistinguishable from reassurance, and where an instrument that might help us confront the unknown is increasingly employed to tell people exactly what they were hoping to hear before they even arrived. And having spent considerable time observing how tarot is presented, consumed, and marketed across social media, I have found myself returning to a rather uncomfortable question: when did divination become less about discovering something and more about keeping an audience emotionally invested in the same story?

The question before the cards

Human beings have sought to understand what lies beyond immediate perception for millennia. We have consulted oracles, interpreted dreams, observed celestial movements, sought meaning in natural phenomena, and developed extraordinarily diverse practices through which to communicate with what different societies have understood as sacred, divine, ancestral, or otherwise beyond ordinary human perception.

Divination is neither a modern invention nor an exclusively Western practice, and the forms it has taken throughout history are as varied as the societies that developed them.

Tarot occupies a relatively recent place within that much larger history. Emerging in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, it gradually acquired divinatory associations and, particularly from the eighteenth century onwards, became intertwined with European occultism and esoteric thought. Its symbolism evolved through different traditions, eventually producing the systems and decks familiar to many contemporary practitioners.

Yet regardless of which tradition one follows, what interests me most is the act of interpretation itself.

To read tarot, at least as I understand and practise it, is to enter into an encounter whose outcome has not yet been decided. The cards offer a symbolic language through which information, impressions, relationships, and possibilities may emerge. Intuition participates in that encounter, as does the reader's understanding of the cards, their symbolism, their relationships with one another, and the context in which the reading takes place. For those of us who understand divination spiritually, there is also the question of energy, of what becomes perceptible through the reading, and of how we learn to recognize what is being communicated without immediately imposing our own expectations upon it.

This is not to suggest that the reader becomes an entirely neutral instrument, devoid of personal experience, interpretation, or bias. We are human beings, after all, and it would be rather absurd to pretend otherwise. Our understanding is inevitably shaped by what we have learned, experienced, and come to believe. Indeed, part of developing any serious practice involves recognizing precisely how easily our own assumptions can interfere with what we think we are perceiving.

But there is a distinction between acknowledging the limitations of interpretation and abandoning the attempt to remain open altogether. And this is where I find myself increasingly at odds with much of what passes for tarot content online.

What happens when the reader has already decided what the cards are supposed to say?

There is nothing inherently wrong with asking a question before consulting the cards. People have always turned to divination in moments of uncertainty, and relationships, professional decisions, personal transformations, and difficult transitions are perfectly legitimate subjects of inquiry. I have no particular objection to love readings, either. Love is a fundamental dimension of human experience, and it would be rather strange to exclude it from a practice concerned with understanding the complexities of our lives.

What I question is the tendency to reduce those complexities to an almost uninterrupted succession of romantic predictions, particularly when the conclusion appears to precede the interpretation.

Consider a reading introduced with the promise that your former partner is returning.

Before the first card has been drawn, the audience has already been told what story it is about to hear. The cards are no longer being approached as an open field of possibilities; they are being invited to participate in a narrative whose emotional destination has already been established. The interpretation may vary, the characters may change, and the obstacles may become increasingly elaborate, but the essential premise remains remarkably consistent.

Someone wants you.

Someone misses you.

Someone is coming back.

And I cannot help wondering what happens to everything else the cards might have had to say.

What if the reading concerns an opportunity that has nothing to do with romance? What if the energy being perceived relates to a transformation in the person's relationship with themselves, an unresolved family dynamic, a professional decision, or a change that has not yet acquired any recognizable form? What if the cards suggest that something is ending rather than returning, that the question itself is misplaced, or that the most important development has nothing whatsoever to do with the individual occupying the audience's attention?

Would any of that be allowed to emerge? Or would it somehow become another indication that their ex is experiencing a spiritual awakening?

The romance of waiting

There is an astonishing amount of romantic longing circulating through online spiritual communities, and I do not say this to ridicule the people experiencing it. Romantic relationships can expose some of our deepest vulnerabilities, awaken difficult questions about our worth, challenge our sense of identity, and leave us searching for explanations long after the relationship itself has ended. The desire to understand another person's feelings, particularly when communication has broken down or an ending remains unresolved, is profoundly human. But there is a difference between acknowledging that vulnerability and constructing an entire economy around its persistence.

Spend enough time observing tarot content online and a curious pattern begins to emerge. Someone is always thinking about you, but rarely speaking to you. Someone is undergoing a profound transformation, but apparently not one that has yet produced any observable change. Someone is preparing to return, but the timing remains perpetually uncertain. Someone recognizes the connection, but circumstances, pride, fear, divine timing, karmic lessons, or the ever-convenient intervention of the universe continue to prevent anything from actually happening.

There is always another explanation. And, more importantly, there is always another reading.

This is what I find particularly troubling about the commercialization of romantic uncertainty. An audience may return not because anything in their circumstances has changed, but because the possibility of change continues to be promised. Each new interpretation provides another reason to remain emotionally attached to the same unresolved situation, another detail to examine, another hidden meaning to uncover, and another opportunity to imagine that the person who is absent from their life is nevertheless profoundly present in some invisible dimension.

Perhaps they are. But perhaps they are not. And surely that uncertainty ought to matter.

I am not suggesting that spiritual practitioners should dismiss the emotional experiences of people seeking guidance, nor that every difficult relationship should be reduced to the simplistic instruction to move on. Human relationships are considerably more complicated than that, and the language of personal empowerment can become just as reductive as the language of destiny when it refuses to acknowledge ambiguity. What concerns me is the gradual displacement of the person seeking guidance from the centre of their own life.

We begin asking whether someone misses us instead of examining whether the relationship was healthy. Whether they will return instead of considering whether we genuinely want them back. Whether they feel regret instead of asking what we have learned from the experience. Whether the connection is destined instead of wondering whether it is reciprocal, nourishing, or even compatible with the lives we wish to build. And somewhere along the way, the emotional world of an absent person becomes more important than the actual experience of the person sitting in front of the screen.

I find that particularly ironic in spiritual communities that speak so insistently about self-knowledge, consciousness, energetic sovereignty, and personal transformation. We are encouraged to awaken, to reclaim our power, to become conscious creators of our reality, and yet a remarkable proportion of the guidance being offered continues to revolve around the hypothetical intentions of someone who is not even participating in the conversation.

What kind of spiritual liberation requires us to remain perpetually preoccupied with somebody else's silence?

There is nothing inherently unspiritual about wanting love, reconciliation, or companionship. Nor is emotional attachment evidence of some failure to evolve. But surely a practice concerned with spiritual development should help us become more conscious of our attachments rather than continuously inventing reasons to preserve them.

And perhaps that brings us to a question considerably more interesting than whether someone will return.

Are we seeking guidance, or are we seeking permission to continue waiting?

When the energy doesn't fit, flip it

Then there is the matter of reversing energies.

I have encountered this instruction so frequently that it appears to have become something of an unofficial principle of contemporary collective tarot reading. A reader describes a particular emotional dynamic, set of intentions, or sequence of circumstances and then, often almost as an afterthought, suggests that the audience may reverse the roles if the interpretation does not resonate.

Perhaps the emotions belong to the other person.

Perhaps the person being pursued is actually the pursuer.

Perhaps the individual described by the cards is not who we initially thought.

Perhaps everything is happening in reverse. At which point I begin to wonder what, exactly, would constitute a reading that simply does not apply.

If the interpretation fits, the reading is accurate. If it does not fit, the energies must be reversed, in which case the reading is apparently still accurate. If neither interpretation resembles the circumstances, perhaps the situation has not yet manifested, the person is unaware of what is happening energetically, or the message concerns some future development that cannot presently be recognized.

The possibilities for preserving the interpretation become virtually limitless.

Now, energy is not a trivial concept within my own understanding of spiritual practice, and I do not approach it as though it were merely a fashionable synonym for emotion. I also recognize that intuitive impressions do not always arrive neatly organized, that symbolism can be ambiguous, and that interpretation sometimes requires considerable care. It would be intellectually dishonest for me to criticize uncertainty itself while defending a practice that necessarily involves engaging with what is not immediately known. But ambiguity is not the same thing as unlimited interpretive flexibility. And acknowledging the possibility of error should not be confused with constructing explanations that make error impossible.

One of the difficulties with collective readings is that the reader is addressing an audience whose individual circumstances are largely unknown. A message offered to thousands of people cannot reasonably be expected to describe every person's experience, and it seems perfectly sensible to acknowledge that a particular interpretation may resonate with some individuals and not with others. What I struggle to understand is why that acknowledgment so often becomes an invitation to rearrange the reading until it fits.

If the message is not for you, perhaps it is simply not for you. That possibility ought to be entirely acceptable. Indeed, I would argue that it is essential.

Within my own approach to tarot, I would rather recognize that a message does not belong to a particular person than insist upon making it relevant through increasingly elaborate reinterpretations. This does not mean that I regard every intuitive impression as infallible, nor that I imagine I have somehow overcome the interpretive limitations inherent in divination. It means that I consider the distinction between what emerges and what I would like to emerge worth preserving.

A reading should not require the person receiving it to perform intellectual gymnastics simply to make the interpretation correspond to their life.

And if the cards can be made to say absolutely anything, at some point we ought to ask whether we are still listening to them at all.

The algorithm is not your spirit guide

Of course, the reader and the audience are not the only participants in this peculiar exchange. There is another presence shaping what we encounter, what we return to, and perhaps even what we gradually come to expect from spiritual content: the algorithm.

Social media platforms are not designed to distinguish between spiritual insight and emotional reassurance, much less to determine whether a particular divinatory interpretation is meaningful. Their recommendation systems respond to engagement patterns, viewing behaviour, and a variety of other signals through which content becomes more or less visible. A video that repeatedly attracts attention may enjoy greater opportunities for circulation, regardless of whether the message it contains encourages genuine reflection or merely reinforces an existing preoccupation. And romantic uncertainty offers an extraordinarily fertile environment for this kind of engagement.

Consider the emotional proposition contained in a title such as “Your person is finally coming back.” Within a few words, it identifies an audience, activates an expectation, and offers the possibility of resolving a deeply personal uncertainty. The individual encountering that title does not need to know anything about the reader, the cards, or the circumstances surrounding the interpretation. The promise itself is sufficient to invite attention. And if the reading proves reassuring, there may be every reason to return for another.

I am not suggesting that every tarot reader publishing relationship-oriented content is deliberately manipulating their audience. That would be an unfair generalization, and I have encountered practitioners whose integrity, intuition, and willingness to offer uncomfortable interpretations I genuinely appreciate. Nor do I believe that popularity necessarily invalidates a spiritual practice. It is entirely possible to share meaningful work through commercial platforms without surrendering every principle to their demands. But I do think we ought to recognize the incentives operating within the environment.

When visibility rewards attention, and attention can be obtained through emotionally compelling promises, there is an obvious temptation to frame spiritual guidance around the narratives most likely to attract an audience. Romantic reconciliation, hidden feelings, extraordinary connections, and imminent revelations are particularly convenient because they offer hope without requiring immediate verification.

The prediction can always be renewed. Imagine, instead, a tarot reader announcing:

“Your former partner may never return, and perhaps we should examine why you have organized so much of your emotional life around that possibility.”

Not quite as seductive, is it?

Or imagine a reading that begins without promising anything at all, with the reader simply drawing the cards, observing what emerges, and allowing the interpretation to develop without knowing whether the result will be romantic, uncomfortable, mundane, or entirely unexpected.

What would we call such a reading? Would it attract the same audience?

Would the algorithm reward it? Would people accustomed to receiving constant confirmation of their romantic hopes even recognize it as guidance?

These are not insignificant questions, because the commercialization of spirituality does not necessarily require someone to consciously abandon their principles. Sometimes the process is more subtle. A particular kind of reading performs well, so the reader publishes another. That reading attracts an audience, which begins requesting similar content. The requests become expectations, the expectations begin shaping future publications, and eventually an entire practice can become organized around producing the kind of message that has already demonstrated its commercial appeal.

The audience receives what it has learned to expect, the reader produces what the audience has learned to request, and the platform rewards the interaction.

Everyone appears satisfied. Except, perhaps, for the original purpose of the reading.

There are also psychological mechanisms worth considering. The Barnum effect, for instance, describes our tendency to perceive broadly applicable descriptions as though they were uniquely relevant to our individual circumstances. It offers one possible explanation for why generalized messages may sometimes feel extraordinarily personal, particularly when they concern experiences as widespread as longing, disappointment, uncertainty, and the desire to be loved.

This does not, in itself, resolve the spiritual question of divination. Nor does it establish that every experience of resonance is merely psychological. It does, however, remind us that our capacity to recognize ourselves in a narrative is not necessarily evidence that the narrative was intended specifically for us. And perhaps that distinction deserves rather more consideration than it currently receives. Because the algorithm may be extraordinarily good at identifying what captures our attention, but that does not make it an oracle. And appearing repeatedly on someone's feed is not, by itself, evidence of divine intervention.

The curious business of spiritual dependency

What troubles me most about all this extends beyond tarot, and perhaps this is where my criticism becomes less about a particular practice than about a broader tendency within contemporary spirituality.

We speak endlessly about awakening, expanding consciousness, developing intuition, reclaiming personal power, and learning to trust ourselves. We celebrate the idea of spiritual sovereignty and insist that individuals ought to become more conscious of the beliefs, attachments, and structures governing their lives. And yet, much of what is being marketed as spiritual guidance appears to encourage precisely the opposite.

Instead of learning to recognize our own patterns, we search for someone who can interpret another person's behaviour. Instead of cultivating discernment, we look for external confirmation. Instead of examining our attachments, we seek explanations that allow us to maintain them. And instead of developing a more intimate relationship with our own intuition, we risk becoming increasingly dependent on strangers who announce, several times a week, what the universe supposedly wants us to know.

There is a contradiction here that I find difficult to ignore.

If spiritual practice is meant, at least in part, to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our relationship with existence, why should its success depend upon our continual return to someone else for reassurance?

Why should a person who has supposedly received guidance remain trapped in precisely the same uncertainty that brought them to the reading in the first place? And when does guidance cease to be guidance and begin to resemble dependency?

I do not believe that seeking spiritual assistance is inherently disempowering. We learn through relationships, through teachers, through encounters with traditions, and through experiences that challenge what we thought we understood. There is no particular virtue in pretending that we must navigate every uncertainty alone. Nor do I think that spiritual practitioners should be expected to provide definitive answers to questions that may not have definitive answers. But there is an important distinction between accompanying someone through uncertainty and making that uncertainty the foundation of an ongoing commercial relationship.

A reader can offer an interpretation without demanding that it become the organizing principle of someone's life. A practitioner can acknowledge an intuitive impression without presenting it as an unquestionable truth. And a person receiving guidance can consider what has emerged without surrendering their judgement, agency, or responsibility for their own decisions. Surely that is not an unreasonable expectation. Yet the spiritual marketplace increasingly appears to operate through a curious combination of promises and postponements. Answers are offered, but seldom resolved. Transformations are announced, but rarely examined. Energetic developments are described in extraordinary detail, while the ordinary circumstances of people's lives remain largely untouched. And the more elusive the promised outcome becomes, the more explanations can be generated to account for its absence.

Divine timing. Energetic blockages. Karmic lessons. Unfinished soul contracts. Another spiritual awakening. Another full moon. Another reading.

I am not arguing that these concepts are inherently meaningless within every spiritual tradition. They belong to different interpretive frameworks, and dismissing them all indiscriminately would be just as intellectually careless as accepting every claim made in their name. What I question is their use as explanations that can never be examined, challenged, or reconsidered. Because when every disappointment can be transformed into evidence that the prediction is still unfolding, we have created a remarkably efficient system for avoiding the possibility that the interpretation was simply wrong. And I cannot imagine how that serves anyone's spiritual development.

Reading what emerges

It was partly this growing discomfort with what I was observing that encouraged me to develop my own divinatory practice more deliberately.

Not because I imagine myself in possession of some superior spiritual authority, or because I believe that my understanding of tarot should replace anyone else's. I have very little interest in establishing another collection of rules about what constitutes acceptable spirituality, particularly in a world already crowded with people eager to explain what everyone else is doing incorrectly. But I do believe that the manner in which we approach a practice matters.

When I read tarot, I prefer to begin with openness. There may be a question, a concern, or a particular dimension of someone's life that requires attention, but I do not want that question to become a demand that the cards produce a specific answer. I want to remain attentive to what emerges, including when it differs from what was initially expected, when the symbolism suggests another direction, or when an intuitive impression invites an interpretation that had not occurred to me before the reading began.

For me, this is part of the beauty of divination.

There is something profoundly interesting about approaching an encounter without already knowing where it will lead, about allowing relationships between symbols to develop, about recognizing patterns and impressions without immediately forcing them into a familiar narrative. Sometimes a reading may concern romantic relationships. Sometimes it may reveal questions about personal agency, emotional attachments, professional choices, or circumstances that have not yet been consciously recognized. Sometimes it may bring attention to something the person would rather avoid. And sometimes, quite simply, a reading may not resonate. I am comfortable with that possibility.

In fact, I consider it considerably more honest than insisting that every interpretation must contain a hidden truth simply because the cards were drawn. I also think we need to distinguish between the responsibility of the reader and that of the person receiving a reading. A practitioner has a responsibility to approach their work with care, to remain aware of the influence their words may carry, and to avoid presenting interpretation as an unquestionable authority over someone else's life. But the person seeking guidance also participates in the encounter, bringing their own expectations, experiences, and capacity for discernment.

The relationship cannot be reduced to one person delivering truth and another receiving it.

Nor should it.

I do not believe that tarot exists to relieve us of the responsibility of living our lives. I see it as one possible way of engaging with what we do not fully understand, of approaching questions through a different language, and of allowing ourselves to consider possibilities that might otherwise remain outside our attention. And there is a profound difference between that openness and using the cards to repeatedly confirm a story we have already decided to believe.

This distinction is not always comfortable. It requires acknowledging that our desires can influence what we perceive, that intuition can be confused with expectation, and that even a sincere spiritual practice can become entangled with ego, projection, and the very human tendency to prefer reassuring explanations. Readers are not exempt from any of this.

Indeed, I would suggest that anyone who interprets spiritual experiences for others has particular reason to examine their own assumptions, not because perfect objectivity is possible, but because the temptation to mistake conviction for discernment can become extraordinarily powerful when other people begin treating one's interpretations as authoritative. And perhaps this is one of the more uncomfortable dimensions of spiritual work: the willingness to question not only what other people believe, but also what we ourselves think we know. That, to me, is considerably more interesting than announcing that someone's ex will finally send a message before the weekend.

What are we actually asking the cards?

I often wonder how much of contemporary spiritual consumption is driven by the search for understanding and how much by the search for reassurance. The distinction may appear subtle, but I think it is essential.

Understanding does not necessarily make us comfortable. Sometimes it complicates matters. Sometimes it challenges assumptions we have spent years constructing, draws attention to patterns we would rather not recognize, or confronts us with possibilities that require us to reconsider what we thought we wanted.

Reassurance, on the other hand, can leave everything exactly where it was.

It can make uncertainty temporarily bearable without transforming our relationship with it. It can preserve hope without asking whether that hope remains connected to our circumstances. It can offer the emotional satisfaction of receiving an answer while postponing the considerably more demanding task of deciding what to do with our lives. And I suspect this is one reason why romantic predictions have become so prominent within online divination. They allow the audience to remain focused on an imagined development rather than the present conditions of their own existence.

Someone will return. Someone will apologize. Someone will finally understand.

Something will happen. Eventually.

But what about everything that is happening now?

What about the opportunities we overlook while waiting for a particular outcome? The relationships we neglect because our attention remains attached to an absent person? The possibilities we refuse to consider because we have convinced ourselves that our future must unfold according to a predetermined narrative?

What about the simple, uncomfortable possibility that what we are waiting for may never happen?

I do not ask these questions because I believe we should abandon hope, distrust every intuitive experience, or approach spiritual practice with relentless scepticism. There is room for mystery in my understanding of the world, and I have no desire to eliminate it simply because it cannot always be explained or verified through conventional means.

But mystery should not become an excuse to suspend discernment. And faith in the possibility of something does not require us to organize our entire existence around its arrival.

Perhaps one of the more valuable things divination can offer is not certainty about what will happen, but an opportunity to examine our relationship with what we cannot know.

To consider what we are asking, why we are asking it, and what we might be unwilling to confront if the answer turns out to be different from the one we hoped to receive. That is where I find the practice most compelling.

Not in the promise that every uncertainty can be resolved by another spread, nor in the assurance that the universe is secretly arranging precisely the outcome we desire, but in the possibility that an encounter with the unknown might reveal something about how we are living in the present. And that possibility requires a certain willingness to be surprised. By the cards. By our own interpretations. And, occasionally, by the realization that we have been asking the wrong question altogether.

A final question

I have no particular desire to become the person who tells everyone else how they ought to read tarot. There are many traditions, many approaches to divination, and many ways in which people understand their relationships with energies, symbols, intuition, and the spiritual dimensions of existence. I do not believe that such diversity represents a problem in need of correction.

What I do question is the normalization of practices that seem designed to make every interpretation fit, every prediction remain possible, and every emotional uncertainty become an opportunity for further consumption. Because spiritual guidance, whatever form it takes, should leave room for the possibility that we are mistaken. It should leave room for questions. For ambiguity. For interpretations that do not flatter our expectations.

And for the recognition that sometimes the most meaningful response is not the one we wanted to hear.

I would rather encounter a reading that invites an uncomfortable question than one that offers a comforting prediction every Tuesday. I would rather listen to someone who acknowledges the limitations of their interpretation than someone who insists that every discrepancy can be resolved by reversing the energies. And I would much rather participate in a spiritual practice that encourages people to examine their lives than one that teaches them to remain perpetually fascinated by the hypothetical emotions of someone who is no longer present.

There is nothing wrong with asking the cards whether someone loves you. But perhaps, occasionally, we might also ask why the answer has become so important that we have stopped asking anything else. And perhaps those of us who read tarot ought to be prepared to question our own motivations just as carefully as we question the expectations of the people who seek our guidance.

After all, who is more attached to the answer: the person asking the question, or the person whose audience depends on providing it?