trend content is just tarot reading
Trends Have a Truth Problem
Despite living in the information age, it often feels like we know less than the day before—no matter how much we try to catch up. We’re awash in content and still somehow unsure what’s real. What is reality, even? We scroll endlessly, absorbing influence, parsing aesthetics, attaching ourselves to cultural bellwethers and “recession indicators” like they’re gospel.
The more I try to find something in this noise, I think about how circumstantial evidence alone cannot win a trial. I keep thinking about bias in data—and about the absence of data entirely. I return to the saying, “those who go looking for god often find the god they were already looking for”
Wanting to Know vs. Needing to Believe
Last summer I picked up Superforecasting, a book about a ragtag group of amateur forcasters contained some of the best predictive minds in the world. They weren’t professionals, just people trained to interrogate their assumptions, test their gut against reality, and update accordingly. It made me want access to the same toolkit—forums, messy process, the inner scaffolding of intuition and logic (unfortunately, it is not open to the public). Since then, I’ve been chasing the connective tissue between identity, class, status, politics, and desire in fashion, beauty, and presentation. I’ve been trying to understand how longing drives both ends of the trend cycle: the consumer and the brand and trying to figure out how I might call out what will be coming down runways and sparking interest in two years time.
At the root of every trend isn’t a product or a palette or even a vibe—but a want for the feeling we think “it” might give us. It requires absence. It burns desire as fuel. Sometimes it feels like the entire internet is just a marketplace for yearning.
Which is why trend forecasting often reads less like analysis and more like divination. It’s not about spotting what’s popular now, but intuiting the next shape our collective hunger might take. Forecasters aren’t just documenting taste—they’re predicting the future of longing. And we eat it up. Because we want to know what to want next. We want to believe there’s a version of ourselves on the other side of this next thing, that we will continue evolving, shivering with anticipation.
The Performance of Proof
Foresight isn’t a formula—it’s a qualitative practice. But still, I find myself asking: where are is all of this coming from? Too often, “data” in trend discourse and in fashion content is just aesthetics with numbers. Stats are cited with vague or dubious sources, scales aren’t defined, and phrases like “we’re seeing more of X” and 2 runway examples pass for proof.
When creators (myself included) cite data, I worry it’s cherry-picked, shaped by availability bias, or serving vibes more than insight. And again, that phrase echoes: those who go looking for god…
Which makes me wonder: when a trend forecaster with millions of views posts a take, are they identifying a pattern—or creating it? If the thing that gets the most views becomes the most referenced, then what’s “real” might just be what’s loudest.
It’s possible we have a simulacra problem on our hands. Our algorithmially encouraged culture of self-reference (see: “NYC influencers are boring” discourse) doesn’t help. It’s naive to assume trends emerge purely organically, only to be monetized later. But it’s equally naive to think they’re all manufactured top-down. The truth is probably in the blurry, unsexy middle, like in “Body meets dress, dress meets body”. Still, the fact that manufacture feels more plausible says something about the environment we’re in—an economy that thrives on novelty, virality, ubiquity, and planned obsolescence.
This tension—between prediction and fabrication, between pattern recognition and invention—mirrors a deeper cultural craving for control in a world flooded with information. As Baudrillard might say, we’re no longer dealing with reality itself, but with trends that only point to other trends. In the same way, trend discourse becomes less about understanding, and more about performing understanding (guilty). And when certainty becomes a commodity, the line between insight and entertainment gets fuzzy, fast.
Black-and-White Thinking
Our desire for certainty meets an environment built to reward overconfidence. As Nikita Walia writes in The Rise of the TikTok Oracle, “algorithms reward certainty, prioritizing content that provokes immediate emotional responses rather than thoughtful consideration.” And they don’t just reward it—they condition it. There are entire accounts built around sensationalist, AI-generated conspiracy theories that exist solely to rake in creator fund money.
Walia notes that these algorithms “encourage audience participation through affirming or rejecting ideas rather than engaging in sustained interpretation.” Certainty becomes a kind of sport. Just as creators are pushed to distill complexity into bold, tweet-sized claims, audiences are trained to treat critique as entertainment.
We’re being fed the illusion of understanding instead of having actual coherence demanded of us.
To be clear, I don’t think numbers on their own hold “the truth” and that all else is pure conjecture. We have to contextualize data, interpret it, ask who collected it and why. I don’t believe in a hierarchy between quantitative and qualitative—they’re complementary. But when that balance tips too far in either direction, our grasp on reality starts to wobble.
What We’re Actually Worshipping
But what if trends don’t reflect our reality at all—but create a shared fantasy we agree to believe in? What if realness, in this context, is less about authenticity and more about shared consensus?
We’re constantly co-authoring our own illusions. A trend doesn’t become real because it’s authentic—it becomes real because it’s shared.
Zoom out far enough and it starts to look a lot like religion. Or myth. Or theater. There’s a ritual to it: the repetition, the internal storytelling and negotiating, the collective buy-in. Even the performance of trend adherance and sharing your personal curations starts to feel liturgical. This week I saw someone share their “weekly digital garden”, a series of screenshots of higher-brow content they consumed or saved this week on Substack, Youtube, and Pinterest, and people in Notes went nuts over it. Their prayers of status through taste, finally answered.
The overplayed idea that we’ve replaced god with consumerism isn’t wrong, exactly—it just doesn’t go far enough. If we find the god we’re looking for, then in this case, maybe we’re all just praying at the altar of longing itself.
And the rise of trend forecast content, even when it’s more broadcast than forecast—is a facet of that worship. Not because we need to be right, but because we need something to believe in and look forward to.
This weeks reads/watches (my digial garden, and bibliography I suppose):
Contrapoints’ “Conspiracy”
Partially inspired this newsletter! I wait with baited breath for a Contrapoints video to drop and this one did not disappoint.
Bliss Foster’s “When Personal Style Isn’t Personal”
I love the take that most people use clothing as a functional tool for perception (a costume for a performance if you will) and his differentiating that from expression.
- ’s essay on the digital ecosystem of a piece of media holding more audience value than the media itself.
And these:
