Why Fortune-Telling Is Popular: Class Mobility, Opportunity Anxiety, and a Sense of Fate

1. The Popularity of Fortune-Telling Is Not Only About Superstition

The popularity of fortune-telling is often not a purely superstitious matter. Rather, it is a reaction to uncertain destiny in a social order where class positions have become more fluid.

In a society where a person can hardly change his or her own situation, fate is harsh, but expectations are relatively fixed. You are largely born into a position that largely determines where you will live. Peasants, artisans, merchants, scholars, and nobles each have their own trajectories. Such a society is certainly unfair, yet it allows most people to know where they are “supposed” to be.

Once the original class structure begins to loosen, things become more complex.

Suddenly people are told: you too might rise up; you too might succeed; you too might grow wealthy. Yet where opportunities are, what the rules are, who can truly rise, and who is simply being pushed into endless competition are not transparent.

So, fortune-telling begins to gain a larger market.

Because it does not answer “whether this world is fair,” but another question that is more direct and more painful: Do I have fate? Do I have luck? Am I the one who will be struck by opportunity?

2. When Class Structures Shift, a Sense of Fate Becomes Stronger

The popularity of fortune-telling is often a sign of class breakdown or worsening anxiety about class mobility.

In societies with relatively rigid hierarchy, a person’s life is broadly determined by birth, family, occupation, and marital circles. Most people find it difficult to leave their class trajectory, and they may not strongly imagine doing so.

For example, in traditional patriarchal societies, many women’s realistic expectations were often not to overturn patriarchy entirely, but to secure a better marriage within existing structures. In feudal hierarchies, ordinary people typically did not imagine suddenly becoming rulers; rather, they sought a slightly better outcome within their allotted station.

This is not to say that such a society is better; it is to say that it suppresses ambition and reduces uncertainty.

After the class order fragments, the situation reverses.

Everyone seems able to rise, and everyone also seems able to fail. Under the right conditions, someone from the bottom may rise suddenly; under the wrong conditions, a person may struggle for a lifetime and still remain where they started.

At that point, people no longer merely “believe in destiny” as fixed fate, but begin to revere the “god of fate.”

Destiny is no longer a static position. It becomes a dynamic opportunity: when one meets a patron, when one happens to catch the wind of the age, when institutions happen to select one, and when the age suddenly discards one.

The more a society presents mobility as possibly open yet not clearly open, rules as seemingly clear yet unclear, and opportunities as present yet barely there, the easier fortune-telling is to become popular.

3. What People Call “Fate” Is Often the Total Explanation for Uncertainty

In real life, success and failure are rarely decided by one factor.

Family background, educational opportunity, historical cycles, industry position, relationships, personality choices, policy shifts, chance events, and personal effort all shape outcomes. The problem is that ordinary people can hardly disentangle these factors one by one, much less determine which one was decisive.

So “fate” becomes a convenient overarching explanation.

Why did someone pass an exam while another did not? Why did one person become wealthy and another lose everything? Why does one person seem to meet benefactors while another always misses opportunities? Why does someone outwardly ordinary rise quickly, while someone clearly capable repeatedly misses out?

When concrete explanations are unclear, fate explanations fill the gap.

This is also where fortune-telling is most attractive. It compresses messy reality into a narrative that can be understood: the world is not completely chaotic, and you are not completely powerless; it is just that your chart, fortune cycle, and timing have not arrived yet.

It explains failure, and it preserves hope.

So many people are not completely believing in fortune-telling. They are unwilling to give up this framework. If it is taken away, what remains is a rawer reality: effort does not guarantee returns, rules are not always transparent, and opportunity is not always yours.

4. Fortune-Telling and Sorcery: Not Science, but a Technology of Control

Divination, astrology, choosing auspicious dates, feng shui, name changes—all of these are, at their core, a kind of “control-value technique.”

They are not science. Science assumes broad, testable regularities and requires verification, revision, and refutation. Fortune-telling and sorcery do not work that way. They operate more like a procedure: you cast a chart, draw hexagrams, choose dates, adjust orientation—as if you can exert some influence on an uncertain world.

The problem is that this sort of procedure often has no stable evidence framework and is hard to be fully falsified.

If one prediction is wrong, the issue may be blamed on the practitioner; if one method fails, one can switch schools; if an outcome does not materialize, it can be explained as timing not yet arrived, conditions insufficient, or incorrect application. Its internal logic is highly flexible, and therefore difficult to be decisively disproven from within.

But this is exactly why it survives over time.

Most people’s conditions are already uncertain. What people find hardest to bear in uncertainty is not failure itself, but having no handle on anything at all. Even if a procedure is not reliably sound, as long as it makes someone feel “I can still do something,” it has psychological value.

That is why fortune-telling remains hard to disappear, even under repeated criticism.

It is not only a predictive tool; it is also an anxiety-management tool.

5. Why Astrology Also Has Mass Appeal

Astrology, personality tests, and personality typologies have similarly persisted for a long time.

People’s personalities do differ, and those differences do influence behavior to some extent. A person who sees himself as heroic may value promises, face, and role identity more strongly; a cautious, conservative person may favor risk avoidance in major decisions. Inferring behavior from personality is not wholly nonsensical in itself.

What is suspect is labeling.

Classifying people into twelve zodiac signs, or into Venus, Mars, Mercury systems, or other symbolic systems is fundamentally about attaching labels to personality differences. The labels are not necessarily reliable, and the causal link between birth month and personality is difficult to establish rigorously.

Yet it remains fun and culturally sticky.

Because it turns complex human nature into something discussable, shareable, and personally relatable. People may not rely on it for major decisions, but they often use it to explain themselves and others.

Public research also shows this modern form. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey shows that about three in ten adults in the United States engage with astrology, tarot, or fortune-telling at least once per year, and a substantial portion treats it mainly as entertainment, while the share of people who say they heavily rely on it for major decisions is low.

This suggests that modern people are not necessarily “less superstitious the more modern they are.” More precisely, modern people still need a fate narrative, but they often package it as entertainment, psychological reflection, social discourse, or personal exploration.

6. From Ancient Astrology to Modern Fortune-Telling: A Constant Search for Order

Historically, humans have long tried to understand social order through celestial signs, calendars, and omens.

Public sources generally trace early astrology to ancient Mesopotamia. Babylonian astronomical records, omen interpretation, and later Hellenistic astrological traditions together form a major source of what became Western astrology.

This shows one thing: human interest in fate is not peculiar to one region or period. Whenever people face uncertainty about war, disease, regime change, wealth fluctuation, and personal prospects, they try to find explanatory frameworks beyond personal experience.

During the Renaissance, European interest in classical learning, natural philosophy, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and astrology revived for a time. At the same time, critics of astrology also emerged—for example, Pico della Mirandola wrote against divinatory astrology.

This shows that astrology did not exist simply because “the ancients were foolish.”

Historically it has always been entangled with astronomy, natural philosophy, religious authority, and political power. Modern society classifies it as pseudoscience as part of contemporary epistemic boundaries; but in many ancient and early modern societies, users did treat it with genuine seriousness.

Something may be unreliable and still be treated with great seriousness in history.

There are two things to distinguish here when understanding divination culture.

7. Why Religion Often Opposes Divination

Abrahamic monotheist traditions often oppose divination, sorcery, and idolatry, not merely because of “scientific” objections.

The deeper conflict is this: divination assumes that through some procedure a person can peer into, manipulate, or preemptively grasp fate, while monotheism emphasizes ultimate submission to divine will and that human beings should not try to control God’s intent through occult technique.

Deuteronomy contains passages opposing divination, omen-seeking, sorcery, and related practices. Behind such prohibitions lies not only moral guidance but also long-term competition between monotheist traditions and surrounding polytheistic, local-spirit, and omen-based traditions.

That said, religious life in practice has never been cleanly separated.

Many self-described religious believers still retain smaller superstitions—amulets, fortune slips, divinatory rituals, avoidance practices, date selection, and the like. Rational modernity behaves similarly: even a person with modern education may, when facing illness, unemployment, death, marriage, major exams, or investment failure, revert to more primitive psychological states—wanting an omen, wanting an answer, wanting someone to tell them what comes next.

This is not as simple as logic being unable to defeat superstition.

It is that under pressure, humans find it very hard to abandon the desire for certainty.

8. Why Fortune-Telling Is Especially Important in East Asian Societies

East Asian societies have historically emphasized examinations, achievement, family, marriage, official careers, and wealth mobility. Whether a person prospers depends not only on ability but also on historical context, institutions, networks, quotas, and opportunity.

The imperial examination system is especially representative.

A literati’s quality of writing mattered, of course, but whether one passed and advanced also depended on quotas, examiners, the political climate, performance, and luck. For ordinary people, this mechanism easily generates a strong sense of fate: I am not completely without chance, but the chance is not entirely in my control.

Merchants seeking profit, families arranging marriages, households relocating or opening businesses, and officials pursuing promotion share similar psychology.

East Asian societies outwardly emphasize effort, while at the same time long acknowledging chance. On one hand they tell people to study, strive, and pursue; on the other they also show that many outcomes are not explainable by effort alone.

So fortune-telling becomes a supplementary interpretation of lived experience.

It tells people: your failure is not necessarily just a matter of ability; your waiting is not necessarily meaningless. You do not lack opportunities; your luck has not arrived yet.

That statement can be comforting—or anesthetizing.

But the more opportunities are opaque, competition fierce, and mobility channels narrow in a society, the more market this kind of consolation has.

9. Why It Can Be “Accurate” in Some Cases, Yet Not Truly Useful

Many people are genuinely puzzled by this: some fortune-tellers seem to be right about certain things, but what does that mean? Why do fortune-tellers themselves often not succeed? Why doesn’t a society that embraces fortune-telling necessarily become a better society?

The key is that prediction and change are two different things.

Being able to read someone’s personality, circumstances, anxiety, and likely trajectory does not mean one can change their structural position. Saying someone is under stress, has unstable finances, and unstable relationships does not mean one can fix industry downturns, family burdens, educational thresholds, institutional bias, and class entrenchment.

Much of what appears “accurate” often comes from experiential judgment, psychological observation, statistical common sense, and deliberately ambiguous language.

A practitioner who has been reading people for a long time has seen many similar life situations. They can infer a great deal from your age, tone, occupation, clothing, and way of asking. Those inferences are not necessarily mystical, but they can still seem effective.

But effectiveness does not equal changing destiny.

Knowing that you might fail does not mean you can avoid failure. Knowing you are anxious does not mean you can remove anxiety. Knowing you are in a disadvantaged position does not mean you suddenly possess the resources you need.

This is the paradox of fortune-telling: it may provide explanation, yet rarely provides genuinely structural solutions.

10. What is Truly Worth Observing Is Why People Need It

Criticizing fortune-telling is easy.

Saying it is not scientific, not falsifiable, and easily abused is all true. But if we stop there, we miss the more important question: why do so many people still need it?

The more a society can provide people with stable expectations, clear rules, and understandable pathways for upward mobility, the less people need to hand over their entire lives to fate explanations. Conversely, when reality is full of opaque opportunities, unstable class mobility, and hard-to-explain differences in success and failure, fortune-telling naturally finds a wider market.

What fortune-telling truly profits from is opportunity anxiety.

It feeds on people’s desire to rise, their refusal to accept failure, their fear of opaque rules, and their helplessness before contingency.

So the popularity of fortune-telling is not just a cultural-tradition issue, nor only a personal-psychological one. It reflects a deeper social condition: people long both to change fate and to have no clear certainty about where the path to change actually lies.

That is the real reason fortune-telling is so popular.

For practical tools on fortune and destiny viewpoints, you can refer to this site’s Bazi charting tool and I Ching divination tool.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does the analytical framework of this article come from?

The article is written primarily from sociological, class-analysis, and personal-observation perspectives, drawing on Bourdieu (cultural capital), Marxist traditions, and contemporary Chinese social studies, rather than on a single theory.

Does this article encourage or criticize any specific social behavior?

The stance is mostly descriptive and analytical rather than straightforward moral judgment. The author tries to present the complexity of structural issues, and readers can make independent judgments based on their own experience.

How representative are the cases in the article?

The cases and observations are suggestive but do not represent statistically universal patterns. It is recommended to read them alongside broader data and research to avoid overgeneralization.

How can I learn more about related topics?

There are many more related articles under this blog’s “Class Observation” section, covering labor conditions, cultural capital, family conflict, and social class. You can browse them in the blog category page.

References

• Encyclopaedia Britannica：Astrology
• Encyclopaedia Britannica：How did astrology develop and spread historically?
• Encyclopaedia Britannica：Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem
• Encyclopaedia Britannica：Magic - Supernatural, Western Worldviews, Beliefs
• Bible Gateway：Deuteronomy 18:9-14, NET
• Pew Research Center：3 in 10 Americans consult astrology, tarot cards or fortune tellers