Culture

A New York Times article explored how our world has changed in the aftermath of the pandemic.

At first, the solidarity was breathtaking. Out of concern for ourselves and one another, we suspended nearly all interpersonal activity for months, wiping our lives almost entirely clean of the very people we were trying to protect. But, perversely, that solidarity destroyed our social fabric… For several months the daily lives of many Americans were reduced to the boundaries of their nuclear unit and their phones and televisions and computers. Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real… Politics started to look more like a zone of virtual reality, too, and many Americans came to see their fellow humans as mindless drones.

It was deeply unsettling to realize that our modern, wealthy world was no fortress against contagion, mass death and pandemic hysteria of various kinds. The end of the end of history has been declared countless times since 2001, but no event punctuated the point as clearly as Covid-19.

The emergency began at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, but it ended in an unmistakable polycrisis: beyond Covid, its supply shocks and inflation surge, there was a debt crisis and an ongoing climate emergency, wars in Europe and soon the Middle East and renewed great-power conflict with China…

It looks like we finally got those Roaring Twenties we were promised. In 2020, the phrase was used to suggest an age of parties and sex and social recklessness was on the way, as 330 million cooped-up Americans let off some steam. [But] in 2025 … the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.

Don’t die. That’s the simple mission statement of Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur, who is on a mission to extend his life as long as possible. He is not alone in this quest. In fact, the preoccupation with longevity is everywhere. Entrepreneurs are using AI to crack the longevity code. Cities are vying to be the new “longevity hubs.”

Most of the longevity movement is not really about immortality but rather about extending life and limiting the damaging effects of aging. Of course, we all want longevity. The danger of Johnson’s obsessive approach is spending so much time trying to extend your life that you never quite get around to living it.

Indeed, keeping death close—even while pushing it as far into the future as we can—has many lessons to teach us about life…. Death can help us focus our attention on living our best life, because there’s nothing that can teach us more about how to live life than death. Death is the most universal experience, yet we will do anything and everything we can to curtain it off, to avoid dealing with the only plot twist that we know for sure will be in our story’s last act.

Here lies the crux of the error of those that see human beings solely as material beings, they have confused an immortal soul with an immortal body. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

When we don’t allow death into our lives, we lose the clarity, perspective, and wisdom that only death can bring. That’s why psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called death the key to the door of life: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.”

Now here's an interesting take on the need for gratitude (aside from the hundreds of biblical injunctions of course). The magazine Inc. ran an article titled "Listening to Complainers Is Bad for Your Brain." Apparently neuroscientists have learned to measure brain activity when faced with various stimuli, including a long gripe session. And the news isn't good.

The article summarizes the research:

"Being exposed to too much complaining can actually make you dumb. Research shows that exposure to 30 minutes or more of negativity—including viewing such material on TV—actually peels away neurons in the brain's hippocampus. That's the part of your brain you need for problem solving. Basically, it turns your brain to mush."

Possible Preaching Angle:
So, basically, too much complaining (either listening to it or dishing it out) turns your brain to mush. The article provides three practical steps to avoid that negative, brain-numbing experience of complaining, but that advice can't top the Bible's simple command: "Give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thess. 5:18).

People are speaking about 3,000 fewer words each day compared to less than two decades ago. Between 2005 and 2018, researchers found the average number of daily spoken words dropped from 16,000 to around 13,000 — a decline that appears linked to our increasing reliance on digital communication tools like texting and social media. Co-lead author Valeria Pfeifer noted, “We did a full analysis looking at what year the data were collected and found that, indeed, 300 spoken words on average per year go missing.”

Another researcher added, “There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men. We wanted to see whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested.”

The numbers show that women do speak slightly more on average — about 13,349 words per day compared to men’s 11,950. This modest difference of 1,073 words is small compared to the vast individual variation in daily speech, which ranges from fewer than 100 to over 120,000 words per day.

Senior author Matthias Mehl said, “I’m fascinated by the idea that we know how much we need to sleep, we know how much we need to exercise, and people are wearing Fitbits all the time. But we have no idea how much we’re supposed to socialize. The evidence is very strong that socializing is linked to health, at least to the same extent as physical activity and sleep are. It’s just another health behavior.”

Somewhere between the hustle culture sermons about “grinding for the Kingdom” and your boss passive-aggressively emailing you at 10 p.m. with a “quick question,” the idea of actual, soul-filling rest has been lost.

Rest isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. A spiritual, emotional, and even physical game-changer that modern life is actively working against. We treat it like a reward for productivity, something we “earn” by checking enough boxes. But that’s not how it works. If you only allow yourself to rest when you’ve run out of energy, you’re not actually resting. You’re recovering from burnout.

For a generation that’s really into “self-care,” we sure are bad at resting. We schedule vacations that are more exhausting than our regular lives and take “Sabbath” as an excuse to binge entire seasons of prestige TV in one sitting.

The Bible starts with God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh—not because he was tired but because he was setting the rhythm. Rest wasn’t an afterthought. It was built into creation itself.

Jesus followed that rhythm too. He regularly stepped away from crowds, left people hanging (yes, really) and took time alone to pray. If the literal Savior of the world wasn’t available 24/7, why do we think we need to be?

Here’s the thing: rest isn’t just good for your soul. It’s good for your brain. Studies show that chronic stress literally rewires your brain, making it harder to focus, regulate emotions, and be productive in the long run.

The world thrives on keeping you busy. Consumerism, capitalism, and even some versions of church culture—there’s always something else to achieve. But choosing rest? That’s countercultural.

So, take a real Sabbath. Put your phone in another room. Go outside. Breathe. Let yourself rest. Because you don’t need to “earn” it. In fact, you were created for it.

Tarryn Pitt loves scouring thrift shops for treasures, from vintage canning jars to velveteen armchairs. “I’ve been thrifting my whole life — it’s one of my favorite things to do, at least once or twice a week,” she said. “Pretty much all of my home decor came from a thrift store.”

She was browsing in secondhand stores where she lives in Prineville, Oregon, when she got an idea about her upcoming wedding. The average cost of a wedding in the United States is about $33,000 — an amount she said she found extravagant and also created a lot of environmental waste.

“I wanted something that was unique and fit my personality,” said Pitt, 25. “A thrift store wedding dinner seemed like the perfect answer.”

She and her fiancé, Holt Porfily, are inviting 307 guests to their outdoor mountain wedding in Sisters, Oregon. All of the wedding tableware and decorations at the outdoor meal will be thrifted.

“It’s honestly not just about saving money for us, though,” Pitt said. “What we’re doing is super sustainable, and I love giving old things new life.”

So far, she said, she has spent less than $2,000 on her wedding dinnerware and decorations, about half of what she priced out to rent similar items.

In late December, she posted a TikTok video of some of the plates she had found during one of her thrift shop excursions. Pitt said she was shocked when the video received more than 3.6 million views and 2,200 comments.

Pitt said the response has been so positive that she now plans to keep only a few plates after the wedding, and she hopes to rent the rest to other interested brides and grooms. She said she will keep the price low for obvious reasons.

Movies are getting deadlier – at least in terms of their dialogue. A new study analyzing over 166,000 English-language films has revealed a disturbing trend: characters are talking about murder and killing more frequently than ever before.

Researchers examined movies spanning five decades, from 1970 to 2020, to track how often characters used words related to murder and killing. What they found was a clear upward trajectory that mirrors previous findings about increasing visual violence in films.

By applying sophisticated natural language processing techniques, the team calculated the percentage of “murderous verbs” – variations of words like “kill” and “murder” – compared to the total number of verbs used in movie dialogue.

Lead author Babak Fotouhi explains, “Our findings suggest that references to killing and murder in movie dialogue not only occur far more frequently than in real life but are also increasing over time.”

This rising tide of violent speech wasn’t confined to obvious genres like action or thriller films. Even movies not centered on crime showed a measurable uptick in murder-related dialogue over the 50-year period studied. This suggests that casual discussion of lethal violence has become more normalized across all types of movies. This potentially contributes to what researchers call “mean world syndrome” – where heavy media consumption leads people to view the world as more dangerous and threatening than it actually is.

What makes this new study particularly noteworthy is its massive scale – examining dialogue from more than 166,000 films provides a much more comprehensive picture than earlier studies that looked at smaller samples.

One researcher warned, “The evidence suggests that it is highly unlikely we’ve reached a tipping point.” Research has demonstrated that exposure to media violence can influence aggressive behavior and mental health. This can manifest in various ways, from imitation to a desensitization toward violence.

An accountant who fills out spreadsheets at the beach, a dog groomer who always has time for one more client, a basketball player who shoots free throws to the point of exhaustion.

Every profession has its share of hard chargers and overachievers. But for some workers — perhaps more than ever in our always-on, always-connected world — the drive to send one more email, clip one more poodle, sink one more shot becomes all-consuming.

Workaholism is a common feature of the modern workplace. A recent review found that roughly 15 percent of workers qualify as workaholics. That adds up to millions of overextended employees around the world who don’t know when — or how, or why — to quit.

Workaholism could be on the upswing thanks to Zoom, Slack and every other technological advance that makes it easier for people to work anywhere, anytime. Behavioral scientist Toon Taris says. “It is something I’m worried about. The conditions for workaholism to develop have never been as good as today.”

Psychologist Malissa Clark agrees that the stage seems to be set for more people to find their inner workaholics. She said, “The mass shift to working from home and remote work may have changed some of our communication patterns and expectations.” Working from home, which became especially widespread during the pandemic, likely created a new group of always-on workers who lost all sight of the boundaries between work and home life. It’s troubling, she says. “Even just your average worker might now start to be more of a workaholic.”

Jack Hassell, a human resource specialist in New Zealand, interviewed an academic who got a wake-up call during the massive Christchurch earthquake of 2011. When the earthquake started, they were reluctant to quit work and leave their desk, Hassell says. Finally forced to exit the shaking building, the academic had an epiphany. “They realized, ‘Oh my God, I was so consumed with work I was willing to almost die.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of the curse (Gen. 3:19) introduced toil and effort into our lives. Yet, God never meant for us to become slaves to our work. In fact, He insists that we take a day of rest for every six days we labor (Exod. 20:8-11; Luke 23:56).

If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, then screens continue to fuel and even accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience.

The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.

Urban safety experts have long worried about the impact of distracted driving. However, a new study by researchers suggests we should be equally concerned about distracted walking.

Researchers have uncovered alarming differences in behavior between pedestrians engrossed in their mobile devices and those who remain alert to their surroundings. The study, conducted at two busy intersections in downtown Vancouver, used advanced video analysis techniques to examine the behavior of pedestrians and drivers during near-miss incidents.

Published in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, the findings paint a concerning picture of how our smartphone addiction is affecting our safety on city streets. Distracted pedestrians, those using their phones for texting, reading, or listening to music, tend to walk slower and maintain closer proximity to vehicles compared to their non-distracted counterparts. They also rarely yield to oncoming traffic and are less likely to change their walking direction, even when dangerously close to vehicles. This behavior suggests a significant decrease in awareness of their surroundings and reduced navigational efficiency. This creates a perfect storm for potential accidents.

The next time you find yourself reaching for your phone while walking, remember: the digital world can wait. Your safety, and the safety of those around you, depends on staying present in the physical world.

Despite decades of medical and cosmetic innovations, we haven't quite yet reached Never-Never Land, where no one ever grows older. But we're not that far away from a related place, Never-Lost Land, where no one and nothing gets lost.

According to an article in The New Yorker by Tim Lu, we've entered an age of Never-Lost Land, where no one and nothing gets lost. Thanks to G.P.S, Bluetooth, and the Internet, it is becoming harder both to become lost and to lose things.

This generation could be the last to have a real sense of what it means to get lost or to lose treasured objects. "Get lost" will become an archaic expression. Most of us will react to that possibility with relief. Yet it seems worth wondering whether something will be lost in Never-Lost Land, in a world without such a common and universally defining experience.

Sure, it's a relief, Lu argues, but have we lost something in the process of never losing anything. Lu continues: "While no one wants to lose their dog, or treasured object, maybe there's something to be gained by losing things, in the right dosage, at least … It helps toughen us, and it helps us understand the way the world actually is, which is to say, really quite indifferent to our well-being." He also thinks that by losing things it helps us stay less attached to the material world.

But will we ever reach Never-Lost Land? Wu doesn't think so. Instead, he thinks we will live in Nearly-Never-Lost Land, "where loss will be less common, but, when it does happen, even more traumatizing." He ends by saying, "It is something of the paradox of technological progress that, in our efforts to become invulnerable, we usually gain new, unexpected vulnerabilities, leaving us in vaguely the same condition after all."

Chapman University recently completed its 10th annual Chapman Survey of American Fears (2024). Each wave of the survey focuses on what Americans fear, the potential causes of those fears, and the consequences of fear. In addition, the comprehensive survey includes extensive background information about respondents, allowing for examinations of how fears vary by different groups.

Here are the top ten fears for 2024 (check the Chapman Survey for American Fears for new yearly top fears):

1. Corrupt Government Officials 65.2%

2. People I Love Becoming Seriously Ill 58.4%

3. Cyberterrorism 58.3%

4. People I Love Dying 57.8%

5. Russia Using Nuclear Weapons 55.8%

6. Not Having Enough Money for the Future 55.7%

7. US Becoming Involved in Another World War 55.0%

8. North Korea Using Nuclear Weapons 55.0%

9. Terrorist Attack 52.7%

10. Biological Warfare 52.5%

Regarding the number 1 fear, Corrupt Government Officials, the survey added this comment:

Our analysis of the data also shows that Americans perceive corruption at all levels of government – local, state, and Federal. Whereas some might suggest that perceptions of corruption are driven by mistrust of national politicians and the executive branch of government, our findings show that, although Americans perceive somewhat less corruption at the local level, all levels of government are generally perceived as compromised. And despite the intense partisanship that surrounds public discussion of corruption, we found that Americans are fearful of corruption across lines of party and ideological identification.

They're colorful, valuable, and make the most delightful noise shaking around in their box … and to the trained criminal eye, they glitter nearly as valuably as uncut diamonds. What are they? Humble Lego sets.

Recently, thieves have begun targeting Lego sets as (relatively) high value and nearly untraceable goods. Why? The brick toys are in massive demand, can be instantly resold, command high prices for hard to find or mint condition sets, and are extremely difficult to track as stolen goods. Over the years, Lego sets have become more elaborate — for example, Lego recently released a kit of the Millennium Falcon, comprising 7,541 pieces and, notably, retailing for $849.95. An unopened Lego Star Wars Cloud City set from 2023 will set you back $7,000.

A Lego crime ring was recently busted in southern California where police said they found 2,800 boxes of Lego, with individual values ranging from $20 to “well over” $1,000. They included Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Marvel sets. In similar recent cases thieves smashed their way into stores and made off with around $100,000 worth of Lego kits.

“Ten years ago, I just couldn’t have imagined it — I did not think our little hobby was the kind of thing that would attract that kind of crime,” said Graham E. Hancock, editor of Blocks, an enthusiast magazine.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Value - It's a fascinating case study in value—sometimes the easily overlooked things right under our noses are more interesting or valuable than we think; 2) Greed; Temptation – The sinful desire for wealth can lead to sin, destruction, and judgment; 3) Meaning; Purpose - The Bible often speaks of the emptiness of material possessions and the search for true meaning and purpose in life. People’s obsession with Lego sets might reflect a deeper longing for something more.

The knitting needle moves quickly, back and forth, making a pattern. It’s an Instagram video in the fascinating repair genre. Similar clips show rougher work—a stonemason restoring a 900-year-old cathedral, a handyman reviving a neglected home room by room. But in this video, the task is to fix a moth-eaten sweater. In mere moments, the wool looks good as new. The hole has disappeared, the weaving so exactly matched by an unseen mender that some would take to be digital trickery, had they not shown every stitch.

These repair videos aren’t quite honest, of course. They’re practiced and edited, glossing over the less-than- perfect bits, and skipping entirely the discipline and tedium required to master a craft. On a platform that reflects so well our culture’s tendency to seek the easier option, repair videos choose the inverse.

Though we see it most obviously in social media, the consumerist tendency against repair is rooted deeply in our culture and institutions. We often see that inclination in ourselves. Children’s socks get holes, but we do not darn them. We throw them away, alongside so many other products made to be disposable or planned for quick consumption and then obsolescence.

However, repair is not always the right choice. Sometimes things really are broken beyond repair, subjected to the laws of physics, human error, and the desolation of sin. A marriage can’t be repaired when one spouse won’t repent of abuse. We can’t haul up the Titanic and send it on a second voyage.

The tendency toward repair deeply resonates with the story of salvation. In Isaiah 58, repair is a sign of the restoration of God’s blessing, of the people’s reunion with God after repentance from their sin. This theme continues into the New Testament, where Peter preaches that the time is coming “for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago” (Acts 3:21).

It feels like kids’ slang is evolving so quickly that adults now need to learn a new language just to keep up. The latest viral phrase? “Six seven.” But what does it actually mean, and should parents be concerned?

The “six seven” trend started with the song "Doot Doot (6 7)" by rapper Skrilla, where “6-7” refers to 67th Street in Chicago. The meme went viral on TikTok, especially in edits featuring NBA player LaMelo Ball, who is 6' 7" tall. These videos often splice together clips of Ball with the Skrilla song, and soon, tweens everywhere were making their own “six seven” content and repeating the phrase endlessly.

But the meaning behind “six seven” is intentionally vague. Some kids use it to mean “so-so,” often with a hand gesture, while others see it as a reference to height or basketball. Ultimately, the phrase is mostly nonsense-which is part of its appeal. As one TikTok commenter put it, “I think the point is that it makes no sense,” while another added, “but it’s provocative.”

Teachers have already voiced frustration about the trend disrupting classrooms, with some banning the phrase outright due to constant interruptions. On Reddit and TikTok, both educators and students have shared stories of “six seven” derailing lessons and becoming a classroom in-joke.

Should parents worry? Probably not, but context matters. Kids have always latched onto silly, context-free phrases for fun. Remember “YEET?” Still, it’s worth knowing that “six seven” comes from a rap song with explicit lyrics, which is inappropriate. If your child is using the phrase, ask where they heard it and what they think it means. It’s a good opportunity to talk about media literacy and responsible language online.

For most kids, though, “six seven” is just another catchy, meaningless meme-one that’s more amusing because adults don’t get it.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The “six seven” meme is an example of how quickly children’s culture can shift and how bewildering it can feel for parents. Scripture encourages parents to stay engaged, teach discernment, lead with humility, and model Christlike love. Rather than fearing or fighting every trend, use them as opportunities to build trust, teach wisdom, and shepherd your child’s heart toward God.

Jonathan Haidt, author of a bestseller, "The Anxious Generation," challenged church leaders to address an important issue. He writes:

As long as children have a phone-based childhood there is very little hope for their spiritual education. An essential precondition is to delay the phone-based life until the age of 18, I would say. Don't let them fall off into cyberspace, because once they do, it's going to be so spiritually degrading for the rest of their lives. There's not much you can do in church if they are spending 10 hours a day outside of church on their phones.

Believers also need to know that researchers have found evidence that religious communities and families play a crucial role in raising healthy children. Haidt continued, “The kids who made it through are especially those who are locked into binding communities and religious communities.” Meanwhile, it is the "secular kids and the kids in progressive families" who tend to be "the ones who got washed out to sea."

Haidt stressed that lives built on smartphones, tablets, and computers will change their minds and hearts:

Half of American teen-agers say that they are online 'almost all the time.' That means that they are never fully present – never, ever. They are always partly living in terms of what is happening with their posts, what's happening online….

There is a degradation effect that is overwhelming, but most people haven't noticed…. I am hoping that religious communities will both notice it and be able to counteract it. But you can't counteract it if the kid still has the phone in a pocket. The phone is that powerful.

In an issue of CT magazine, author Jen Wilkin writes:

Individualism says that I should do what’s best for me regardless of what’s best for others. Instant gratification assures me that waiting is an enemy to eliminate. At every turn, I am told that I can and should have what I want when I want it.

Earlier this year, my husband and I spent two weeks with an apparent narcissist named Charlotte. From the moment we stepped into her space, it was all about her. She demanded our full attention day and night. Forget rational arguments or the needs of others; it was The Charlotte Show 24/7. She thought only of herself and demanded loudly and often that her needs be met. Our schedules bowed to her every whim. She uttered not a word of gratitude during the entire 14 days.

And we didn’t mind one bit. Because all 7 pounds and 15 ounces of her was doing exactly what she should. Our newest grandchild’s age-appropriate focus is to declare, Me, right now! Any time she is tired, hungry, or needs a clean diaper. Babies self-advocate as a survival instinct. They understand only the immediate need.

But what is appropriate in an infant is appalling in an adult. In its obsession with “me, right now,” our culture doesn’t just worship youthfulness; it worships childishness, legitimizing it into adulthood. An adult who demands what he wants when he wants it is a costly presence in any community, prioritizing his own needs above those of others and of the group. He has not learned to “put away childish things,” as the Bible says (1 Cor. 13:11, KJV); he has managed to grow physically from a baby to an adult without shedding the childish mantra of “me, right now.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

As parents, our first challenge is to meet the needs of babies crying out, “Me, right now.” But our greater task over the years is to train our children to mature and outgrow their entitlement, to resist the narcissistic norms of our age. It is our job as Christian parents to move our children from the immaturity of individualism and instant gratification to the maturity of sacrificial service and delayed gratification.

Pollution. When you hear that word what do you think of? Perhaps dangerous gases are being emitted into our atmosphere. Garbage floating around the ocean. Sick animals due to toxic food. But there's another pollutant lurking in our society. An invisible one that we encounter every single day. Information. It's in our phones, televisions, text chains, and email threads. It's packed into devices we wear on our wrists and in the checkout lines at the grocery store.

In our modern society, escaping the barrage of information is impossible. But are we equipped to handle it? In a 2024 letter published in Nature Human Behavior, scientists argued that we should treat this information overload like environmental pollution. It may not affect our drinking water, but it affects our brains at every turn.

The brain is the most complex organ in the body. But the brain can only process a certain amount of information. When we exceed that peak level, it can almost feel like our brain is filled to the brink and totally frozen, incapable of performing its most basic duties that help us get through our days.

When we reach that point of paralysis, we can't process and act on the information we consume. If this is feeling familiar, you're not alone. According to the Real Time Statistics Project, as of January 2023, there were nearly 2 billion websites on the internet. 175 million tweets were sent every day, and 30 billion pieces of content were shared monthly on Facebook. How was it possible to not get distracted by all that information?

Of course, technology is useful. We can look up healthy recipes or determine if a headache is just a headache or something more problematic. But because of modern technology, we're all slaves to the amount of information we can consume. The American Psychological Association defines information overload as the state when the intensity of information exceeds an individual's processing capacity, leading to anxiety, poor decision-making, and other undesirable consequences.

Astrology is a meme, and it’s spreading in that blooming way that memes do. On social media, astrologers and astrology-meme machines amass tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. People joke about Mercury retrograde, and categorize “the signs as ...” literally anything: cat breeds, Oscar Wilde quotes, and Stranger Things characters. In online publications daily, weekly, and monthly horoscopes and zodiac-themed listicles flourish.

This isn’t the first moment astrology has had and it won’t be the last. The practice has been around in various forms for thousands of years. In the decades between the New Age boom and now, while astrology certainly didn’t go away—you could still regularly find horoscopes in the back pages of magazines. Chani Nicholas, an astrologer based in Los Angeles said:

(For a time) it went back to being a little bit more in the background. Then something happened in the last five years that’s given it an edginess, a relevance for this time and place, that it hasn’t had for a good 35 years. Millennials have taken it and run with it.

The stigma has receded as the practice has grabbed a foothold in online culture, especially for young people. One researcher said, “Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much geared toward a Millennial and young Gen X quotient.”

Callie Beusman, a senior editor at Broadly, says traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown really exponentially.” SimilarWeb reported in December 2024 that the top 10 astrology sites received a total of 38 million visits in one month.

Editor’s Note: You can check the most up-to-date astrology stats on SimilarWeb here

In the year 1909, seven-year-old Walt Disney was playing by himself in the backyard of his family's farmhouse. He decided to sneak up on a big brown owl, but when he grabbed it the owl panicked, Disney threw it to the ground and stomped it to the death. According to his biographers, that owl haunted him for years, and produced a morbid fear of death.

Disney’s first big hit as a young animator came when he was 26 years old, in a cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse. But he immediately followed up that success with a short feature titled “The Skeleton Dance,” which opens with a terrified owl perched in a tree followed by skeletons rising from their graves. Disney’s distributor complained, saying, “We don’t want this gruesome crap… More mice… More mice!”

This was a small sample of what was to come. One scholar said, “If Disney was a mouthpiece for an American way of life, the force of his voice depended on a curious obsession with death.” Virtually every one of his famous films focused on the subject, from Snow White to Pinocchio.

His personal life was focused on decline and demise as well. Disney’s daughter Diane said that Disney hired a fortuneteller when he was in his early 30s to predict when he would die. The fortuneteller predicted the age of 35. Disney distracted himself by workaholism and success. If he stayed busy, maybe he could distract both himself and the Reaper. He survived 35, but never forgot the prediction. Shortly before his 55th birthday, he knew that maybe he had misheard, and the fortuneteller had said 55, not 35.