I’m probably the worst person to write a completely anti-TikTok-spirituality piece because, firstly.. I have a tarot page myself and secondly, I’ve absolutely had videos come up on my For You Page that made me go… okay, that was a little bit weird.
There have actually been a couple of occasions where somebody’s video landed at a very particular moment, said something incredibly specific and then, days or weeks later, something happened that made me remember it. One of them didn’t even have hashtags attached to the video, which obviously made my little spiritual brain perk up because I was like… oh?
Another one came from a priest. Yes. A priest. Apparently Spirit enjoys variety… and both times, I allowed myself to entertain the possibility that maybe the timing meant something but I also have to be honest with myself: I consume spiritual content. I create spiritual content. I’ve interacted with tarot readers, astrologers, spiritual creators and all sorts of adjacent content over the years. So is it really that shocking that TikTok occasionally serves me a tarot reading? Not particularly. That’s where I think discernment gets interesting, because two things can potentially be true at once. The algorithm may have technically delivered the video because I already exist somewhere within that ecosystem and the timing may still have felt meaningful to me. I don’t need to choose between this was definitely God and this was definitely code. Sometimes my answer is simply: hmm… noted.
Then I keep scrolling.
Your For You Page knows what you’ve been staring at
This is the part I think we conveniently forget when we’re desperately looking for confirmation. Think about it… If you spend three hours watching videos about your ex coming back, your feed is probably going to begin resembling a digital shrine dedicated to your ex coming back, that doesn’t necessarily mean the universe has assembled forty-seven tarot readers from different countries to personally inform you that Kevin is experiencing a spiritual awakening. It may mean you keep watching videos about Kevin and TikTok noticed. This is especially important when we’re emotionally vulnerable because we naturally start searching for things that soothe the uncertainty. You’ve just gone through a breakup, so you watch breakup content. Then maybe you stumble onto a tarot reading saying someone from your past wants to return. You watch the whole thing. Maybe you replay part of it. Then another one appears. And another. Suddenly your For You Page looks like the Council of Ex Boyfriends has called an emergency meeting. At some point we have to ask ourselves whether we’re receiving constant confirmation or whether we’ve accidentally trained our algorithm around the exact thing we’re struggling to let go of.
Because I’ve been there too.There was a point in my life where I could hyperfixate on signs far more than I do now and eventually I realised that constantly searching for reassurance wasn’t helping my intuition become stronger. If anything, it was making everything noisier. Now, if something comes across my screen and it resonates, I’ll listen. If it doesn’t? Scroll. Beautiful invention, that thumb.
Not every collective reading is personally for you
One of the quickest ways I personally figure out whether I want to keep listening is very simple. If somebody starts with, I’m seeing a masculine in your energy who wants to come back… Lovely for him. I don’t want him.
Scroll.
That doesn’t mean the reader is fake. It doesn’t even necessarily mean the reading itself is rubbish. It simply means I’m not the audience for that particular message and I think people forget this with collective readings. A collective reading is exactly that: collective. It’s being delivered to potentially hundreds, thousands or millions of people with completely different lives, histories, relationships and circumstances. Naturally, some parts may resonate beautifully and some won’t resonate at all. That’s okay. You’re not supposed to hold the reader hostage until every sentence applies to you personally.
I actually think collective readings can be really useful when they’re understood properly. They allow you to experience the reader’s style before booking them. You can hear how they interpret cards, how they communicate, whether their approach feels grounded, whether their personality annoys the hell out of you, whether they’re incredibly serious, funny, gentle, direct… whatever. From the reader’s perspective, they’re also a brilliant way to demonstrate how you work. I do them myself. When I create spiritual content, of course I’m hoping it reaches the people who may connect with what I’m saying. I can set an intention that whoever needs the message finds it, but I’m still posting it onto a technological platform with a recommendation system designed to distribute content. Again… both things can exist in the same room. My intention can be spiritual, the distribution can be technological. I don’t need to pretend my phone is suddenly a crystal ball.
The problem begins when we scroll until somebody agrees with us
This is where things get messy because there are absolutely people who will sit through reader after reader, live after live, video after video until somebody finally delivers the narrative they were hoping for. Reader one says the relationship has probably run its course. Scroll. Reader two says this is a period of separation. Hmm. Reader three says your person is currently undergoing a huge spiritual awakening and will come back transformed after realising that nobody compares to you. THAT’S THE ONE. Save. Like. Follow. Send to best friend. Watch six more videos…and listen, I’m laughing because humans are human, we’ve all wanted reality to hurry up and agree with us before but at some point, we have to draw a line between looking for insight and shopping for an answer.
It’s actually very similar to what I spoke about in my previous post regarding tarot clients who keep asking the same question in different ways. If you need Tom, Dick, Harry, three tarot readers, four astrologers, an angel-number account and a woman whispering over a manifestation audio to tell you the same thing before you can believe it… maybe you’re not looking for confirmation anymore. Maybe you’re just not ready to deal with the problem yet. And honestly? That’s human too but call it what it is.
A sign should reinforce your path, not become the path
This is probably my biggest personal rule around synchronicities now. A sign should reinforce something. It might confirm something you’ve already been thinking about, support a decision you’ve been slowly coming to, reflect something you’ve been processing internally or arrive at a moment where you’re already dismantling an old path and moving towards another but I don’t think a sign should be responsible for building the entire path from scratch. If I’m sitting there doing absolutely nothing with my life waiting for TikTok to tell me whether I should move house, leave somebody, change careers, spend my savings or start communicating with a random man I haven’t spoken to in seven years… I’ve already handed far too much authority over. The signs I find most meaningful usually happen when I’m not aggressively searching for them. Maybe I have a fleeting thought earlier in the day, I forget about it. Hours later I open TikTok, something comes up, I listen because something about it catches my attention and by the end I’m thinking, hmm… okay. I’ll take that. Then I move on. Maybe days later something happens that lines up with what was said and I remember the video and that’s usually the extent of it. There’s a little internal moment of gratitude and then I carry on with my life. I don’t begin stalking the creator’s page looking for Part Two, I don’t need seventeen more readings confirming it. I don’t start rearranging my future around a sixty-second video.
That - for me, is the difference.
Sometimes I do think the timing can be strange
And this is where I’m probably going to annoy both the hardcore skeptics and the people who think their FYP was personally coded by their ancestors. I don’t think every synchronistic experience online can be dismissed simply because an algorithm exists. I’ve deliberately changed my own algorithm before… I’ve gone months where I wasn’t interacting much with tarot content, changed what I was consuming and generally shifted what my feed looked like and then out of nowhere, a spiritual reading would appear. Sometimes it meant nothing, sometimes something about it landed and that’s where I leave room for mystery. Maybe the creator set a genuine intention for their content to reach whoever needed it, maybe the recommendation system simply experimented by showing me something outside my recent habits, maybe the timing was synchronistic, maybe all three happened at once, I genuinely don’t know and I’m comfortable not knowing. That’s one of the things spirituality has taught me over time: I don’t actually need to explain every strange little moment until there’s nothing mysterious left. I can acknowledge it, appreciate it, take whatever value I found in it, then I can go make dinner.
Discernment doesn’t mean becoming spiritually cynical
I also don’t think the answer is to become so skeptical that every spiritual experience has to pass some impossible intellectual examination before we’re allowed to enjoy it, that sounds exhausting. If something makes you pause, reflect, feel encouraged or consider something differently, beautiful. Use it. The problem isn’t enjoying synchronicity, the problem is outsourcing your critical thinking to it. There is a difference between saying, that felt meaningful to me, and saying, this TikTok appeared on my phone so I now know with absolute certainty that this person is my soulmate. Let’s be so for real - one is an interpretation, the other is a conclusion and conclusions have consequences. That’s where I think people can get themselves into trouble, especially when they’re already anxious, grieving, heartbroken or desperate for something to work out.
I’ve actually found good readers online
And I think this matters because I’m not interested in pretending everybody giving spiritual guidance through TikTok is automatically questionable. I actually found a reader through TikTok years ago who I loved. She was incredibly accurate for me at the time and I consulted with her regularly during a particular chapter of my life. Then something interesting happened… I changed so the things I had been constantly asking about stopped being as important. My life moved forward, I outgrew that particular chapter and naturally I stopped feeling the need to consult her. There was no dramatic ending, nothing happened between us, I simply didn’t need the same guidance anymore. To me, that’s actually a healthy relationship with a reader. They helped me during a season, then the season changed. I’ve also worked with incredibly knowledgeable people online who taught me important things but ultimately weren’t supposed to remain part of my life. One particular spiritual connection became incredibly blurred because feeling deeply understood by somebody can very easily start feeling like intimacy, especially when they know parts of you that most people don’t. That taught me something completely separate from astrology or divination: being seen isn’t automatically the same thing as being compatible and again, that was useful. Not every teacher needs to become a lifelong teacher and not every meaningful interaction needs to become permanent.
Sometimes you learn something and keep it pushing.
Spiritual creators also know how marketing works
Now listen… I understand hooks. Completely. If somebody opens a video with: If this message found you, you need to hear this… I’m not automatically clutching my pearls, they’re creating content, people need a reason not to swipe within the first two seconds. Fair enough, I mean - half of social media is figuring out how to make someone stop moving their thumb. What does make me raise an eyebrow is when the marketing becomes spiritually coercive. Like this video or your manifestation won’t happen. Babe, please… Share this with three people or you’re blocking your blessing… My blessing has survived worse. Don’t scroll or you’ll miss the sign you begged for.
Watch me.
And again, I don’t even think every creator saying things like that is necessarily sitting in a dark room rubbing their hands together plotting psychological warfare. A lot of them are simply using engagement tactics because engagement helps content travel. The bigger question is what happens when the audience doesn’t have enough discernment to recognise the tactic. A fairly grounded person will laugh, scroll and go about their day but somebody in an extremely vulnerable state might believe they’ve genuinely endangered an outcome because they didn’t save a video and that’s where creators need to think about the responsibility attached to the language they’re using. Spiritual language hits differently because it can invoke fate, karma, God, ancestors, manifestation, punishment, destiny and fear. That’s powerful, so… Use it accordingly.
Your algorithm can amplify whatever you refuse to leave alone
This is probably the part worth paying the most attention to. If I keep searching one topic, watching content about that topic, interacting with people discussing that topic and spending my free time thinking about that topic, naturally my online environment starts reflecting it back to me, then I can accidentally use the reflection as evidence that I should keep focusing on it. That’s the loop. I’m obsessed with whether my ex is coming back, so I consume ex-related content. My feed gives me more ex-related content. I interpret the increase in ex-related content as a sign that my ex is coming back. So I consume even more…. Round and round we go and the actual real-life problem? Still sitting there, untouched because sometimes scrolling feels much safer than resolving.
If I keep watching readings telling me something is about to happen, I can remain inside anticipation. Anticipation delays grief, acceptance it can even delay action. Why move forward if something wonderful is apparently arriving next Thursday? Then Thursday comes… Nothing happens. So we find another reading. Now it’s next month. At some point the phone has become a waiting room and that’s when I think it’s time to put it down.
If you need forty-six signs, the sign probably isn’t the issue anymore
I love signs. I love synchronicities. I’m a sucker for those weird moments where something happens and you genuinely have to sit there for a second like… okay Universe, very funny. I’m not interested in becoming so cynical that everything meaningful has to be reduced to coincidence but I’m also not interested in handing my spiritual sovereignty to an app.
My For You Page can inspire me, entertain me, it can introduce me to brilliant readers, teachers, ideas and perspectives! Something appearing there may even arrive at a moment that feels deeply synchronistic to me, but what it cannot do is replace discernment and perhaps that’s the simplest way I can explain my relationship with online signs now: if the message resonates, I take what is useful and continue living. I don’t chase it, I don’t need it repeated endlessly, I don’t build a religion around the creator and I definitely don’t assume TikTok has been granted exclusive access to my Akashic Records because I watched three tarot readings before bed.A sign should reinforce the path you’re already beginning to recognise, it shouldn’t become a substitute for walking it.
If you’re struggling to tell intuition from noise
If you’ve been consuming reading after reading, seeing “signs” everywhere and somehow becoming more confused rather than less, it might be worth stepping away from the feed for a moment and looking at what you were actually trying to answer in the first place. That’s something we can also explore together in a private reading. I’m not interested in telling you that every coincidence is spiritually significant or dismissing everything meaningful as your imagination. I’d much rather look at the context properly: what keeps repeating, what your intuition has already been saying underneath the noise, whether anxiety has taken over the conversation, what you may be avoiding and where your own agency sits inside the situation because spiritual guidance should bring you closer to yourself, not make you terrified to scroll past a TikTok. Your algorithm might know what keeps your attention. Your spirit guide, however you personally understand that relationship, should probably be asking something much more useful:
What are you going to do with what you already know?
With love,
Venus — aka Venusian Alchemist ✨
