Is the New Age kinda back?

Martha Gill (who I am unfamiliar with) writing at The Guardian talks a bit about Jordan Peterson's new book, and notes more broadly that his approach sort of fits in with a general renewed popularity of New Age-ish ideas amongst the younger set:

With mainstream religion in the west in long-term decline, something else is emerging. Not quite religion, not quite self-help – but a tantalising mix of the two. Where self-improvement sections of bookshops once contained straightforward advice on dating, dieting or getting rich quick, now they ask you to buy into a whole canon of spiritual beliefs. Call it mystical self-help.

You see it, for example, in the astonishing popularity of astrology among young people. For my generation, for whom reading your horoscope is an embarrassing secret, this can be jarring. At a recent party, I was surprised to stumble into an earnest astrology conversation between people in their late 20s, bonding over the fact that two of them were Capricorns, and analysing their moon signs in great detail.

Really, of course, it was a jumping off point to open up about their lives, relate to each other, and explore how they tended to deal with problems. No wonder generation Z seems to find it therapeutic. The global market for astrology was valued at $12.8bn in 2021 and was projected to nearly double in the following decade.

Then there is tarot, which is also on the rise, driven mostly by TikTok. More young people are turning to spiritual readings “as an alternative to therapy”. Meditation techniques used to be advocated as a method for calming down; now they are sold, via semi-Buddhist beliefs, as a route to complete personal transformation. See, for example, the huge success of The Power of Now, a book that asks the reader to believe in a system of universal energy flow. Wellness has meanwhile fused with a set of anti-science beliefs, including the idea – dangerously championed by Elle Macpherson – that you can think yourself better, via your “inner sense” of what will cure you.

This sits alongside a cabal of celebrities on the right – Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, Peterson – who are tapping into the self-improvement market among young men and advocating religion as a route to the answer. The market is growing: the largest segment of buyers of self-help books is now men aged 25 to 34. They are sold a rebranded and cherry-picked system of faith, drawn from various religions and packaged to fit their needs.

The bit about astrology is interesting.  I thought it was long dead and buried; or at least, now a very fringe interest with much less popular following than in what seems to have been its heyday from the 1960's to the 1980's.  But then again, I was surprised recently to see the most generic type of astrological weekly forecast pap being put up near the end of one of the commercial TV news services on (I think) a Sunday.

And, of course, as I don't use TikTok, I have no idea what things are gaining popularity there with the youth.

Anyway, Gill ends with a bit of overreach, I think:

Mystic self-help may largely be harmless but we should ask what its popularity says about us and where we are going. After all, we owe nearly all modern progress to the fight against religion, allowing rational deductions to hold sway over tribally mediated beliefs. Are we now seeing the dawn of a post-information age?

Still, it's a topic that always interests me - how people find meaning and how much religion or other metaphysical beliefs really have to do with it.