Fortune cookies can satisfy some people's desire to know the future, but others require more specific responses. The urge to predict the future is nothing new; fortunetelling practices, such as palm reading and card shuffling, have been practiced for millennia. Through astrology applications and social media fortune tellers, it is currently gaining popularity among young people.
Some ethnic groups combine devotional sessions with fortunetelling at the start of the year to stave off bad luck. Asian populations congregate in temples during the Lunar New Year to pray for themselves and their loved ones.
Shuffling the magic card that predicts one's fate for the future year is an essential rite. Most of the time, the mother and grandmother speak on behalf of the family when they ask about the family's future within the year and express their aspirations to Buddha and heaven. Visitors to the Bao Quang temple shuffle a wooden basket filled with bamboo sticks that are each numbered between 1 and 25 while kneeling in front of the Buddha.
Those who pray anticipate an answer from Buddha on the stick that emerges from the offering basket. One of the numbered pieces of paper, which includes customized poems (with a broad translation) foretelling what would occur that year, matches the stick's number. Some people experience worry as a result of the readings, while others have contented smiles.
Over the past few years, Asian young adults have become more interested in other types of fortune-telling. A tarot reading is one. During an "experimental period" where queen figures were introduced to court card sets that previously only comprised the king and male characters, the tarot was created in Italy in the 1430s. These card sets primarily featured Italian cultural icons, including coins (Denari in Italy), swords (Spade), and cups (Coppe).
Tarot card reading, according to Ousch, is a prod to tackle a task she has put off and is still thinking about. For instance, after receiving a tarot reading from a friend, she decided to stop continually dating and start improving herself. Ousch responds positively to card readings conducted by people who are familiar with her, in contrast to Nguyen, who thinks this could introduce bias into the reading.
Fortunetelling has been successfully turned into a business by some. Her feed includes screenshots of client testimonials along with posts about tarot and tea leaf readings. She uses her account to ask clients questions and make appointments. Before getting the confidence to market her readings in 2018, Vi began studying tarot in 2015.
Similar to Vi, a lot of contemporary card readers achieve notoriety on social media. Tanaya Apshankar, a junior specializing in creative writing, recently began posting weekly reading videos on Instagram Reels and YouTube. The only thing viewers need to do is choose a card from the screen and click on the time that corresponds to how each card is explained.
Ella Dao, a final-year student at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Vietnam, disagrees with the idea of using social media for tarot card readings. She believes that readers' exposure to listeners' social media presence and accounts may provide them insight into their personalities and issues, which could skew the results.
Dao is more drawn to the study of astrology and how the planets and stars impact daily life and human behavior. She is especially curious about how astrology is used differently in various cultures, including Vietnamese, Chinese, and Indian psychology.
Applications of astrology have been increasingly popular among young people, both men and women. Co-Star and The Pattern, two popular apps, each have 5.3 million and 3.5 million subscribers, respectively. Significant investments have also been made in them, with Co-Star raising $5 million in 2019. These applications provide their users with daily tailored messages that let them know how they're feeling generally on a given day or week. Daily messages' conversational tone appeals to young folks and helps them feel a part of a community in a way that traditional offline fortunetelling does not.
Although there isn't much scientific evidence to support fortunetelling, many readers and listeners have used these techniques for introspection.