Man, everyone and their dog is talking about Oracle cards and Tarot these days. You see these decks everywhere, from the checkout line at the bookstore to that weird pop-up spiritual shop down the street. Why the hell are they so popular? Everyone thinks it’s about seeing the future, about some spooky fortune-telling power, but honestly, that’s just the shiny packaging. I used to be the guy who rolled his eyes so hard he almost sprained something looking at a deck of cards.
The Great Wall of BS and How I Ran Headfirst Into It
I worked the same mind-numbing gig for almost seven solid years. Coding, meetings, more coding, less sleep. It was just an automatic loop. My life was planned out like a cheap budget spreadsheet, and I hated every single damn number in it. It wasn’t a crisis of money; it was a crisis of nothing happening. My partner kept trying to get me to talk about quitting, about moving, about even painting the damn walls, but I was frozen stiff. I couldn’t pull the trigger on anything. My head was just static. I was an empty glass, and every time someone tried to pour in an idea, it just sloshed out the sides and made a mess.
This is where the story gets rough. I was so wound up I ended up spending a night in the ER with what I thought was a heart attack, but the doctor just shrugged and said, “Sir, you’re just really stressed out.” He told me to find a hobby, a way to switch off. A hobby! Like I had time for that garbage.
A few weeks after that little health scare, a buddy of mine, the one who does all the weird yoga retreats, kept bugging me. He didn’t push Tarot, which looked too complicated and kinda scary with all those skulls and towers. He came at me with this ridiculously colorful deck of Oracle cards, all abstract art and flowery words.
He just slammed them down on my desk.
“Take them,” he said. “Don’t read the future, just use them to look at your present mess.”
I shoved the box onto a shelf and didn’t touch it for maybe two months. It collected dust right next to my old copy of A Brief History of Time. That’s how much stock I put in it.
The Messy Practice: Forcing a New Routine
Then came the night when the anxiety got so bad I literally couldn’t even stand up to make myself a sandwich. My brain was cycling through the same five horrible scenarios, and I just needed an interrupt. Anything to stop the machine. I grabbed the Oracle deck. I didn’t want to. I had to.
Here’s the process I started, and it was painful, trust me:
- I didn’t bother with cleansing rituals or any of that stuff. I just shuffled the damn things like a poker dealer.
- I forced out one single question: “What is the single biggest block right now?” Not “Should I quit my job?” but “What is blocking me today?”
- I pulled one card. Just one.
The first card I got was called “The Desert.” Its little guidebook entry was all fluffy stuff about solitude and waiting for rain. I almost threw the deck in the trash. It was useless. It didn’t give me the answer: “Quit your job and start a coffee shop in Montana.” It just gave me a picture of sand and a word. What a total waste of time.
But the next night, I did it again. Why? Because the cycle of anxiety was worse than the five minutes of card-shuffling awkwardness. The next card was “Interruption.”
This is where the shift happened. I put the card on the table. I sat and stared at the artwork. I didn’t read the book. I just kept thinking: Interruption. Interruption of what? I realized that the card itself, the very act of pulling it, was the interruption. It stopped the self-destructive loop I was in. It forced my focus onto one single abstract idea for longer than a TikTok video.
The Real Deal: Why They Catch On
I started doing this every morning before work. I’d grab a card, look at it while the coffee brewed, and I’d write down one short sentence about what I thought it meant for that day. Then, and only then, would I read the little book. Sometimes the book was spot-on. Most of the time, the book was total nonsense compared to what I’d already written down.
The cards never told me to quit my job. They never told me I’d win the lottery. What they did was something way more practical and way less magic: they created a dedicated space for self-talk.
- They made me use verbs about my own life. I had to actively interpret something, not just passively consume a screen.
- They broke the overwhelming problem (“My whole life is a disaster”) into tiny, one-day chunks of meaning (“Today is about ‘The Harvest,’ what am I even trying to collect?”).
- They put a name to the uncomfortable feeling. If I felt stuck, the card would pop out as “The Gate,” and suddenly, the feeling wasn’t just dread; it was a specific obstacle I could mentally try to unlock.
That is the real spiritual benefit, and that is why they are popular. People are desperate for a tool that forces them to stop, look inward, and have an actual conversation with their own gut feelings, instead of just waiting for Netflix to tell them what to watch next. It’s not fortune-telling; it’s just a cheap, tangible way to force radical self-reflection. It’s an easy-to-use, visual journal prompt. That’s all it is. And honestly, it worked better than the year I spent in therapy telling the doctor the same five things over and over again.
I ended up quitting the job anyway, but it wasn’t because a card told me to. It was because six months of using those damn flowery cards finally cleared the static enough that my own answer could actually land in my head. They didn’t predict the future; they just built the room for the future to walk into.
