64% of Gen Z Use Psychics or Spells to Find Love

Sixty-four percent of Gen Z daters have tried manifestation, a psychic, astrology, tarot, or a paid love spell to find a relationship. That’s the finding in a CNBC report published October 6, built on a DatingNews-commissioned survey of just over a thousand American adults. Two days before that, Fortune ran its own piece on the wider version of the same trend: Gen Z increasingly paying actual witches and tarot readers, not just scrolling a horoscope app for free. Read together, both stories are describing the same thing from two directions: a generation that doesn’t feel like it has any say over its love life, reaching for something, anything, that makes the uncertainty feel smaller.

I’ve written before about why nobody your age is dating anymore and about the specific skill nobody taught you for asking someone out. Both were about the same root problem: a confidence gap, not a desire gap. This is that problem wearing a different costume. When the approach feels impossible and the outcome feels random, some number of you stop trying to fix the fear and start looking for a way around it. Tarot is one version of that detour. So is a $2 love spell off Etsy.

The short version

What’s true	What it means for you
64% of Gen Z and 51% of millennials have tried at least one mystical dating tactic (manifestation, psychics, astrology, tarot, or love spells) versus 25% of Gen X and 12% of boomers, per CNBC (DatingNews survey, ~1,013 U.S. adults, August 2026)	This isn’t a fringe habit anymore. For your generation, it’s closer to the median experience.
19% of Gen Z have paid for a spell or love ritual on platforms like Etsy or TikTok, versus 16% of millennials, 6% of Gen X, and 2% of boomers	Nearly 1 in 5 of you have put actual money behind this. That’s a transaction, not a joke.
Half of Gen Z practice manifestation or vision-boarding for their love life; 3 in 10 use astrology or tarot specifically for dating decisions	The method changes. The impulse underneath it doesn’t: some structured way to feel like you’re doing something instead of nothing.
Fortune separately reports Gen Z increasingly paying witches and tarot readers for guidance, part of a U.S. psychic-services industry that pulled in $2.3 billion in 2025	This isn’t limited to love. Dating is just the loudest room in a much bigger house.

Why is Gen Z turning to psychics and spells to find love?

A relationship coach quoted in the CNBC piece, Amy Chan, author of Unsingle, put the real driver in one sentence: “When people don’t feel like they’re in control — and right now, dating is a dumpster fire — [people] become more vulnerable to magical thinking.” Strip away the specific tactics and the pattern underneath them breaks into four pieces:

Dating genuinely feels uncontrollable right now. Apps that don’t reply, matches that ghost, a market where two-thirds of your peers aren’t even actively dating. When the normal levers don’t seem to work, people reach for levers that at least feel like they’re doing something.
The cost of trying is lower than the cost of another rejection. A $2 Etsy spell costs you nothing emotionally. Walking up to someone and getting turned down costs you a bad night. One of those options is obviously going to get more volume, even if it doesn’t actually move the needle.
It’s social and shareable in a way that practicing an approach isn’t. Tarot content performs on TikTok. “I finally talked to the person I liked and it was awkward” doesn’t. The internet rewards the version of this that photographs well.
The apps gave you infinite options and almost no real information. A profile tells you a height and a job title. It doesn’t tell you if this is the one. So some of you go looking for a different kind of answer, one that claims more certainty than a bio ever could.

None of that makes you gullible. It makes you a generation trying to solve a real problem (not enough control, not enough confidence in the approach) with whatever tool is closest at hand. The dating skills nobody taught you didn’t disappear because you’re superstitious. They disappeared because the rooms where you’d normally practice them thinned out, and a tarot reading is at least something to do in the meantime.

Does manifestation work for relationships?

Not the way it’s marketed, but not for nothing either. Manifestation doesn’t reach out and produce a partner. What it can do is change your behavior: focusing hard on an outcome sometimes makes you notice opportunities you’d otherwise scroll past, and more likely to actually take the next step. If a vision board gets you to sign up for the class or send the text you’d been avoiding, it worked. Not because you moved the universe. Because you moved yourself.

That’s the honest version of the whole trend, and it cuts both ways. A tarot reading that leaves you feeling calmer and more willing to put yourself out there did its job, even if the cards didn’t predict anything. A tarot reading you use as a reason to keep waiting for a sign instead of making a move did the opposite. The ritual isn’t the problem. What you do with the forty-eight hours after the ritual is the whole question.

What this is actually costing some of you

The money side of this is worth saying plainly, because it’s not trivial. CNBC’s reporting notes a single tarot session can run as high as $162, while a love spell on Etsy can go for as little as $2. That’s a range from pocket change to a real line item, depending on how deep someone goes. I’ve written before about why money comes up on the first date now: dating already costs more than it used to. Layering a recurring tarot subscription or a $100-plus reading on top of that isn’t neutral. It’s a second budget line for the same underlying problem: not feeling in control of whether this works out.

Here’s the part I want you to actually hear, not as a scold but as a dad who’s watched plenty of people spend money trying to buy certainty that was never for sale: no reading, spell, or chart has ever once made someone brave enough to say hello first. Only you can do that. The $162 buys you a nice hour and maybe some calm. It doesn’t buy you the conversation.

What actually closes the gap

If the real driver here is feeling out of control, the fix isn’t a better psychic. It’s building the one skill that gives you actual control back: the approach itself.

Treat the uncertainty as the thing to get used to, not the thing to eliminate. Gen Z’s confidence gap isn’t a character flaw. It’s a reps problem. No chart fixes a reps problem. Practice does.
Spend the ritual money on the room instead of the reading. A $20 class or a recurring meetup gets you in front of real people. A $162 tarot session gets you an hour of feeling calmer about not being in front of real people.
Use the calm, not the prediction. If a reading genuinely settles your nerves, fine. Use that calm to do the scary thing within the next day, not as permission to keep waiting for a sign.
Set a rep count, not a cosmic timeline. “The cards say it’ll happen when it’s supposed to” is a comfortable sentence and a terrible plan. “I’ll start three conversations this week” is an uncomfortable sentence and an actual plan.

Run those four for a month and you’ll have done more for your love life than a year of horoscopes. Not because the horoscope was lying to you about the universe. Because it was never going to be the thing that walked up and said hello.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

You pull a tarot card on your phone before bed, the way you do most nights. It says something about new beginnings. You feel a little lighter about the whole thing, maybe even a little hopeful. Then you close the app, put the phone down, and go to sleep having done nothing different than yesterday. The card didn’t fail you. You just stopped one step short of using what it gave you.

Try the other version. Same card, same forty-eight hours. You take the lighter feeling and spend it on something that costs you nothing but nerve: you text the person you’ve been meaning to text, or you go to the thing you’ve been putting off, or you say one true sentence to someone instead of rehearsing it in your head for the fortieth time. The card is the same either way. What changes is whether you treat the calm it gave you as the finish line or as the starting gun.

That’s the actual difference between manifestation that works and manifestation that doesn’t. It was never about whether the universe was listening. It was about whether you were.

The takeaway

Wanting some sense of control over your love life isn’t superstition, it’s human. The people getting somewhere aren’t the ones who found the right spell. They’re the ones who used the confidence boost from whatever ritual they liked and then went and said something to a real person before the feeling wore off.