Confession of a Sucker for Psychics
Why do skeptical people like me believe in psychics?
This is the Snarky Sunday edition of Snarky Senior — the newsletter from Erica Manfred, which you can read about here. If you like it and don’t want to miss an issue, you can get it in your inbox by subscribing.
“My astrologer told me to go for it,” said my friend Terry when I asked why she was pursuing a risky career path. Terry is a journalist who doesn’t believe a word most politicians or pundits say, but she slavishly follows the advice of her astrologer.
I am mystified as to why the most skeptical group of people in the world, journalists, would patronize tarot readers, astrologers and psychics. But my unofficial survey says a whole lot of them do. Including me.
During the entire past year I got together every Sunday night with my writer friends on Zoom for a whine and wine about the misery of our isolated pandemic lives and the horrors of the Trump administration. Angela followed a bunch of online psychics. We counted on her to give us their consensus that week about the future of the country, specifically what would happen with Trump and the election.
We were riveted by their predictions of Trump’s demise which, thank God, turned out to be true.
I got hooked in my thirties when a psychic told me as soon as I walked in, “you work for the New York State Youth Division.” I was floored. At the time I worked for the New York State Division for Youth but in the days before the Internet there is no way he could have known this. He was famous for health readings and during the same reading, he told me I was going to get arthritis. I did get arthritis thirty years later but so do most people in their sixties. He failed to predict diabetes, which I was diagnosed with five years after seeing him.
Before I got married, my friend Louis told me about a psychic named Emma, who gave readings at an East Village witchcraft shop. She predicted during his first reading that he would get mugged today. Despite numerous precautions, including bringing a friend along, he did get mugged that day.
I was really impressed and tracked Emma down to an apartment complex in Queens, where despite her Brooklyn accent and housewifely demeanor, she cast spells and did other witchy stuff. I went to her with my currently unemployed boyfriend, Ira, and we asked her to get him a job. She waved her arms around and predicted he would soon be working in a place “with a lot of wires on the floor.”
He was hired shortly thereafter by a midtown video-editing place with, sure enough, a lot of wires on the floor. He had applied there a short time ago but someone else got the job. Then that person had an accident—and they called him.
An accident--that was pretty impressive magic.
At my next reading when I told Emma I was living with Ira, she said in a most un-psychic way, like the Italian mother that she actually was, “what are you doing with HIM? He’s a real loser.”
I married the guy, only to find out that that was her most accurate prediction.
The I Ching had also predicted my marriage. Just after I’d met Ira I threw the I Ching and got a reading that told me that I needed “a dark and passive force,” in my life. God knows why anyone would need a dark and passive force, but I sure got one. I wouldn’t count that reading as helpful.
After my husband dumped me for another woman, I went back on the psychic circuit. I started seeing Stephanie, a tarot reader in the local New Agey bookstore. Stephanie had predicted details of my daughter’s personality with total accuracy when she was three months old so I figured she knew something. She told me with total confidence that my ex would break up with the girlfriend and want to come back to me, but by that time I would have moved on.
Ha! Two years later he married the girlfriend.
The longing for a psychic reading used to come upon me most urgently when I was unlucky in love. Actually that’s how psychics survive, and even rack up six figure incomes—not predicting the stock market, career moves or even sickness and health--but preying on the man troubles that afflict so many women. They all guarantee to tell you if he really loves you, is seeing someone else, will come back to you or whether you should just dump the bum and move on.
When I started going on Internet dates I showed Stephanie pictures of them, including a picture of Rob. “He’s an angry loner,” Stephanie said instantly. “Don’t get involved with him.” Did I listen to her? Noooo. Of course she was right.
After Rob broke up with me, I became obsessed with him and started patronizing all kinds of psychics, including online psychics, doing my own readings on Tarot.com, getting readings from a friend’s psychic daughter, and going for readings with Stephanie and her vacation replacement. They all predicted Rob would come back to me, but by that time I would have moved on.
I found myself checking my email daily for Rob’s admission that he’d made a terrible mistake, that it was me he really loved. But, like my ex husband, he—not me—moved on and got involved with someone else while I was still pining away for him.
This illustrates another problem with psychics. They’re only human. If they get to know you and like you they want you to be happy and are likely to see your future through rose colored glasses.
Psychic advice for a broken heart is like an addictive drug. You feel high immediately after a reading as hope surges that he/she will come back, but as time passes without the lover you’re longing for you start feeling worse and worse, especially as the charges on your Visa card pile up.
I have not given up on psychics, despite their flaws. I now have my own personal psychic, Connie, whom I got to know while co-authoring a book about a haunted house. Connie not only described the interior of the house down to the wallpaper--without ever having been in it--but was intimately acquainted with the nefarious doings of the demon who haunted that house.
We became buddies and whenever I have a question about my future I call her. She told me I was going to move to Florida, which I had no intention of doing at the time, but she was right, I did move to Florida. She also told me not to worry about money because the haunted house book was going to be a bestseller and become a movie. She neglected to tell me when. It did not become a bestseller and is not a movie. But she was half right. The book was finally optioned by a film company even though the movie still hasn’t been made. In the meantime I’ve been worrying a lot about money. (Psychics are notoriously bad at time frames.)
She also told me a lot of stuff that didn’t come true. Conveniently, I’ve forgotten what those predictions were.
Even though I still enjoy a good reading I’m no longer a sucker for psychics, probably because after a lifetime of being a psychic groupie I realized that even the best psychics are only about 50% right. The problem is figuring out which 50%.
What I do know is that we all want reassurance that we’re going to be OK. The future is unknown, and frightening, and, especially in uncertain times we are all desperate to know what it holds.
But let’s face it, no one can really predict the future. We’re all stuck with figuring it out as we go along. But if a visit to a psychic can make contemplating the great unknown a little less terrifying, why not go for it?
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