I sat down to write some playful predictions for 2026—wry Sagittarian forecasts on trends in areas of interest to me, and hopefully to you. I was thinking about the inevitable surge in sigil-on-bay-leaf tutorials and candle magic ethics discourse escalating from dollar-store candles versus elite vegan backyard beeswax to whether jar candles can ever be spiritually sincere.
But it got dark fast, mainly because almost every digital writing and editing tool has an opinion. Email drafts, Microsoft Word, Grammarly, and others suggest a smoother, safer, more professional version of the sentence that I wrote. I’m trusting my instinct and skills, not the machine’s nudges toward bland sameness.
In 2026, discernment becomes harder, not easier. The systems that shape what people see, buy, and believe are tilting toward noise, extraction, and manufactured authority, with AI woven through them not as a neutral tool, but as an accelerant. These aren’t prophecies so much as observations about what is already happening, where the momentum is taking us, and how we might respond.
Predictions for 2026: the terrain
There was a time when digital platforms felt better, even fun: when Facebook reliably showed actual friends, when searching the web didn’t feel like wading through ads and spam, and when Twitter was still Twitter. That internet did not disappear by accident. Tech critic Cory Doctorow calls what happened enshittification: the process by which platforms become steadily worse as they squeeze users and business customers for profit.
Enshittification has a pattern. Platforms start by being good to users to build an audience, then pivot to prioritising advertisers and business customers, and finally extract value from everyone until the service becomes actively hostile to the people who made it valuable in the first place. This is not a mistake or a personal moral failing of individual CEOs; it is the business model.
The result is not just a degraded online experience; it is a degraded environment for knowing what is true. Search gets worse. Discovery becomes pay-to-play. Feeds become a contest between what’s most profitable and what’s most provocative. Authority drifts away from substance and toward distribution: who is amplified, who can post constantly, who can buy reach, who can game the algorithm.
At the same time, synthetic content is flooding the internet: AI-generated text, images, and video engineered for engagement and monetisation rather than truth, usefulness, or care. Verification becomes harder, trust becomes more expensive, and reliable information becomes more difficult to find. For spiritual communities, this matters because our work depends on things these systems actively erode: trust, discernment, relational depth, and the ability to distinguish substance from performance. We are trying to build grounded practice in an environment engineered to reward the opposite.
Prediction 1: Volume buries discernment
I came of age in Paganism during the 1990s. The web was young. There were brick-and-mortar bookstores and metaphysical shops where you could actually meet practitioners, ask questions, and build relationships. Information was harder to find, which meant people often engaged more deeply with what they did find.
Now a young seeker opens Instagram and sees endless aesthetic witchcraft: perfect altars, polished rituals, confident proclamations. They can search any question and get ten thousand contradictory answers. Teachers with no verifiable lineage or accountability sell initiations. Abundance looks like access, and access looks like wisdom.
But spiritual practice requires sustained attention, embodied learning, and the willingness to be changed. It requires making mistakes in the presence of people who can help you learn from them. It needs relationships with traditions, teachers, communities, and with the powers invoked. You can’t get that from a social media feed.
In 2026, Pagan and Witch online spaces saturate further with volume-driven content: frequent, emotionally charged, endlessly repeatable. AI makes it trivial—the same correspondence lists rewritten endlessly, bot-generated moon phases, spells as engagement bait, archetype posts that sound profound but say nothing.
AI-generated “authority” accounts will multiply. They will have coherent aesthetics, consistent posting schedules, and smooth, confident language, with comment replies that sound warm and personal. Imagine an account that posts daily tarot readings, offers initiatory language about shadow work and devotion, responds tenderly to every comment, and is entirely generated. Some will be obvious. Many will not.
This could spark a counter-movement. If AI tends toward polish, authentic practitioners may lean harder into the messy, the unfinished, the personal and fumbling. “Let me show you my actual altar, which is a disaster” becomes a trust signal. Slowness becomes credibility, hesitation, and uncertainty become markers of humanity.
But messiness can also be performed. Authenticity can become just another aesthetic to game, and the arms race is exhausting. Energy spent learning to detect synthetic content is energy not spent on actual practice. As people get better at spotting tells, AI will get better at mimicking authenticity, while the sheer volume continues to rise.
Occult learning has always had closed circles, covens, groves, and lodges, where access is relational, and accountability is earned. Digital imitations such as self-paced schools, “coven” Discords, and tiered subscriptions, will continue to proliferate; they run on enshittified logic: scale, churn, monetisation. A better response is to build what platforms can’t: embodied micro-communities meeting regularly with mutual accountability. Prioritise one-on-one mentorships, local rituals, and free, shared resources for provenance checks (“Where did you learn? Who vouches?” as a harm-reduction approach). Choose fewer teachers carefully; sustain relationships over sampling. Depth doesn’t scale.
The most potent work still happens in rooms of people who’ve committed years, but those rooms require time, proximity, resources, and existing social capital. The most vulnerable seekers—young, older, isolated, with fewer economic resources, or without community connections—remain most exposed to exploitation, misinformation, and spiritual harm. In 2026, that gap widens unless we build bridges to them too.
Prediction 2: AI anxiety displaces climate grief as the ambient dread
In recent years, climate anxiety has been getting increasing attention in spiritual care contexts. The American Psychological Association defined eco-anxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom,” and it’s a widespread mental health challenge for young people in Australia and in the United States. Grief for the more-than-human world is a real and necessary part of the spiritual landscape.
In 2026, AI anxiety will rise to the foreground. Climate change is enormous and terrifying, but often intermittently visible. AI anxiety is ambient. It sits in your workplace, your phone, your child’s school, your health system, your news feed, your creative life, your relationship with money, and your sense of what’s real. If climate grief is about the world we’re losing, AI anxiety is about the self becoming unstable.
AI anxiety is existential. What is real when images, voices, and videos can be plausibly manufactured? What can be trusted—not just institutions and media, but friends, communities, even one’s own judgement? What is mine when words and creative output can be scraped, recombined, and monetised without consent? What is a person when machines can mimic empathy, companionship, and spiritual language?
This shows up as reality fatigue. People feel stretched thin by the effort of discerning what is true and begin to experience that effort as a moral burden. There is a sense of failing at being responsible because responsibility now includes tasks that once felt optional: constant fact-checking, platform literacy, scam detection, deepfake awareness, and ongoing renegotiation of what technology is doing to them.
A 2025 US survey published in Practice Innovations found that nearly half (48.7%) of participants with ongoing mental health conditions used large language models like ChatGPT for psychological support in the past year. These numbers are likely to grow in 2026, and people will increasingly turn to AI for spiritual support as well: tarot readings, astrological interpretations, shadow-work prompts, guidance that sounds like wisdom.
Spiritually literate communities already have language for intuition, symbolism, discernment, and relationship with unseen forces. That is a resource, but it can also be exploited. AI will mimic the tone of wisdom, the cadence of initiation, the language of devotion and shadow work. It will offer spiritual certainty on demand—reassuring, coherent, and carefully tailored to individual biases and fears.
The risk is not only that people will be fooled; it is that the hunger for certainty will override the slow work of testing, grounding, and learning to live with not-knowing. Spiritual practice requires tolerance for ambiguity and the ability to stay with questions that do not resolve quickly. AI offers the opposite: immediate answers, constant validation, and certainty without the labour of discernment.
Spiritual care in 2026 will need to protect the conditions that make meaning possible when fear is chronic. That means practices that restore attention rather than fracture it: devotional rhythm, embodied ritual, community study, and time offline. It means creating spaces where “I don’t know yet” is allowed to be honest instead of shameful, and treating trust as a spiritual issue, not just a political or technical one.
The people most vulnerable to AI’s mimicry of spiritual authority will often be the same people most isolated from in-person community and experienced practitioners. Closed containers can provide protection, but they also create barriers. That tension between safety and accessibility will intensify.
Prediction 3: The US climate will worsen for Pagans and Witches
The political and social climate for US Pagans and Witches is already deteriorating in visible ways, and 2026 will bring more of that pressure to the surface. In 2025, Christian nationalist authors and commentators escalated rhetoric that explicitly frames modern Pagans as enemies of faith and nation, drawing on older “spiritual warfare” language and folding Paganism into broader moral panics. At the same time, culture-war initiatives have targeted anything perceived as “occult,” “New Age,” or insufficiently Christian in public institutions.
Incidents in recent years have included harassment, disruption, and sometimes violence directed at Pagans and Pagan events in multiple states. These are not isolated anomalies; they form a pattern and a testing ground for policies. In 2026, that pattern is likely to escalate at the institutional level, from schools and libraries to local government.
Expect increased challenges to Pagan chaplaincy in prisons and the military, framed as “religious neutrality” or budget rationalisation. Expect more workplace discrimination cases, especially where employers feel emboldened by hostile political rhetoric. Expect local governments to place barriers in front of public Pagan events through permit denials, “public safety” objections, or zoning restrictions on metaphysical shops.
Mass retreat into invisibility is unlikely. For many long-time practitioners, that ship sailed years ago; names are on books, articles, and public rituals. Younger practitioners are digital natives, and the internet is still where they learn and connect. What will emerge instead is more sophisticated navigation of visibility: careful decisions about what is shared under legal names, where public ritual is offered, and how families and livelihoods are protected.
This compounds the problems described in Predictions 1 and 2. Political pressure encourages more caution about public visibility, driving people further into online spaces where volume, misinformation, and AI exploitation are at their worst. The closed containers that provide some protection from both targeted harassment and algorithmic manipulation become even more necessary, and potentially more surveilled or targeted.
The response will require infrastructure. That includes legal defence funds, mutual-aid networks, safety protocols for public events, and better documentation of incidents. It also means actively supporting organisations that do visibility and advocacy work for Pagans and related communities—through money, labour, and signal-boosting, not just quiet approval. Community care will matter: checking in on those who are more vulnerable, sharing resources, and being ready to stand beside each other when things get more difficult.
Final thoughts
These predictions aren’t separate trends; they’re interconnected pressures that amplify each other. Volume makes discernment harder. AI anxiety makes people hunger for certainty and community. Political persecution makes both safety and authentic practice harder to sustain in public. The thread that runs through them is that trust is deliberately being degraded because distrust is profitable and confusion is lucrative.
When it is hard to tell what is real, people become easier to sell to, easier to frighten, and easier to move. The work in 2026 is not to keep up with every new tool or scam, but to protect what makes a spiritual life possible: attention that is not constantly fractured, relationships that can hold complexity over time, and communities that reward care over performance.
Systems built on volume and speed cannot easily replicate depth. AI can generate endless content, but it cannot do the slow work of becoming, cannot live a life or keep vows, cannot be accountable to a community that knows your name and notices when you do not show up. That does not make anyone immune to what is coming, but it does point to where the leverage sits.
The leverage is in committing to build and sustain the small containers where integrity and depth are still possible, while staying aware of who is left outside them. It is in choosing teachers more carefully, hosting and showing up for in-person gatherings, supporting organisations that do advocacy, and protecting time offline for embodied practice and trusted community. In a year that rewards speed, that kind of stubborn slowness is both protection and magic.