Exploring the Rise of Spiritual Content on TikTok

This chapter examines the rise of spirituality content on TikTok, touching on manifestations, astrology, and tarot readings. It explores the influence of encountering such content, delving into the concept of lucky girl syndrome and its connection to the law of attraction, along with warning about the risks of getting caught up in trending spiritual practices over practical actions.

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In this week's episode, I explore the spiritual-adjacent corners of TikTok like manifestation-tok, tarot-tok, psychic-tok, and astrology-tok, and how this content can lead users down a harmful pipeline. I look at how young people, Gen Z in particular, are turning to new-age spirituality to make sense of the world and how the TikTok algorithm contributes to increasingly extreme beliefs in this area. I also share case studies of users who have devolved into "spiritual psychosis" (an unofficial term) after becoming obsessed with this side of TikTok.

Timestamps:

4:05 Why I wanted to talk about this topic

5:13 Overview of the spiritual side of TikTok

10:30 Explaining “spiritual psychosis”

13:36 Creator case studies

17:44 The role of TikTok’s algorithm

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Sources:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/astrology-is-at-the-center-of-danielle-johnson-murder-case-but-any-spiritual-practice-can-incite-violence