YouandTheTarot

  Off to the slammer. That's where visionaries Elizabeth Holmes, who was going to upend healthcare, and Bernie Madoff, who heralded that for investing, wound up. They were false prophets whose fraud could have impinged on your retirement. And now after those disclosures, you might wonder if the bad guys you have to watch out for will include the front lines of AI. That's especially if the bots go rogue and plunder civilization as we know it. Good lawyers, as with the fatal contamination of peanut butter, can put business leaders in prison. What did they know and when did they know it? Lots to think about. But the current reality is that we have more to fear from how the world is changing on its own. Maybe mankind did get that started, as with urban density and fossil fuels. But the universe is running with the consequences of all that on its own. In the tarot that is symbolized by the Tower card. This has become a pressing issue for the aging like you. The majority of my tarot...

  "That colleague blocked me. No conversation why." A new client told me that. But the lament wasn't new to me. This is "cut-off culture."  No longer do people feel the responsibility or the need to talk about why they're exiting your life. The client was intuitive. So they had a hunch that this particular former friend sized them up as "stuck." In this fast-moving world in which just about everyone has to scramble for an edge, being perceived as stuck is right up there with being known as unethical or hostile. As we proceeded in the tarot reading I picked up that this client wasn't stuck. They were changing. The reality, though, is that they weren't doing that fast enough. At least, not what it takes to be in synch with 2026. Instead of taking concrete steps in a reset in how to earn a good living, they remained in the limbo of emotionally gearing up. Obviously, that was being held against them.  The focus of the reading shifted to what wa...

Euphoric, Brad Karp drove from college to the hospital to show his dying father the acceptance letter from Harvard Law School.  But, in addition, Karp told his mother he would go to Yale Law School, where he was also accepted, to be located close enough to help her out. She turned down the offer.  That was 45 years ago. Back then this now partner at Paul, Weiss was ready to do what adult children did at the time: sacrifice to care for a vulnerable parent. Now, that value is being questioned. Often, with great confusion, plus seething resentment and some guilt.  More and more in tarot readings clients are essentially asking "permission" to ask if they "have to" be responsible for their parents as they age. That ranges from hands-on care to any legalities. In the tarot that internal turmoil is depicted by the Tower card. Those askers are in their 40s. They're spotting decline in parents. Vividly they're also having flashbacks from childhoods which weren't ...

  "I helped a colleague. Why did I do that?" In our professional lives we tend to learn the most from hands-on client situations.  Over and over it has come up recently in tarot readings that both females and supposedly hard-nosed males were thrown for a loop. They assisted a "drowning" or at least vulnerable co-worker. The aid was not reciprocated. Now and then those helped even turned on them. This interpretation of those dynamics won't get me friends. But it resonates with clients. Immediately, they identify.  Long story short: Christianity socializes us to reach out to the weaker. Classic is Luke 10:25. That's the parable of Good Samaritan.  The meme is selfless reaching out to help, even when that might fit with dominant social norms. Actually, that whole mindset is the antithesis of capitalism, an individualistic economic system. It is the individual, not the system, who is responsible for success and for failure.  In its rawest form it mandates moving...

It was a version of "Karen" which blew up the alleged sexual misconduct at Fox.  Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit contending that was the standard MO of Fox founder Roger Ailes. Soon enough the Murdoch brothers called in law firm Paul, Weiss to investigate. That was the end of the Ailes era. Yet, the concept of a Karen carries so much negative baggage. If you are a white middle age female who reports suspected wrongdoing or subpar service you risk being type-cast as obnoxious. For example, your server brings the steak well-done, not rare. After you complain, everyone in the kitchen laughs and rolls their eyes about your being a Karen. You bet, you can feel the vibes. So, chastened you might tend to surrender your ability to change a snippet of the world as we know it. In tarot reading the Karen Effect is symbolized by the World Card.  It exudes possibility. Life opens, even in the midst of obstacles. On free streaming platform Tubi, featured are film genres about the SS'...

The slow-moving minimalist 2016 film "The Interrogation" is extraordinary. All the moving parts push us to actually have sympathy for former commander of Auschwitz Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoss. The movie is now playing on free streaming platform Tubi. Essentially the plot is about Polish Judge Albert's assignment to get a confession from Hoss. Albert, although young, has been successful in the past. He is at this too. But what is disclosed creates questions about the justice of the coming death penalty for Hoss as well as some other SS members. What Hoss feels is his real crime was his lack of courage. Himmler forced the Auschwitz "mission" on him. Quickly Hoss sized up that he didn't have it in him to say, no, I can't handle this. That's because he also sized up what that could cost him professionally. The rest is history.  Later, when on the job, Hoss also couldn't summon the courage to allow anyone to see that he experienced compassion for th...

  There we oldest of the Boomers were: jumping through the system's hoops to get into the college of our choice and simultaneously embracing as our hero teen rebel Holden Caufield from "Catcher in the Rye."  We ran around eager to denounce among ourselves the phonies. Of course, we didn't share that bit of subversion with authority.  Well now hitting 80, we're back. This time we have very little to risk fingering the phonies in very public ways. Since we're now more worldly we can expand the category beyond people to ideas and institutions. But unlike the zest with which we did that as high school juniors and seniors it's with sadness. In the tarot that's captured in the Five of Cups card. You bet, we regret how we might have been duped for more than half a century.  At the top of the list is our hefty consumption of higher education. The mindset was: The more education the better. Only the non-ambitious stopped at the BA/BS.  We scramblers after succe...

In 2024, at the Academy Awards,  Robert Downey Jr. thanked his unhappy childhood when accepting the award for best supporting actor. Pop culture writer Molly Jong-Fast got a bestseller "How to Lose Your Mother"  from growing up with self-absorbed problem-drinker Erica Jong as primary caretaker.  And Eminem, Gloria Steinem and myself are among those in creative/activist professions who had mentally ill mothers. Mine committed suicide. The research , expert opinion and observations about how a crappy childhood can generate unique professional success are piling up. Those include: No Hallmark/Disney world view, later to be shaken off when reality intrudes. From the get-go, the gestalt is that life is tough and survival is up to us. Problem-solving is embedded early. Mine was to ace high school in order to get a scholarship to an out-of-state college, away from the crazy family.  Raw resilience. With instability the norm so is the necessity to continually regroup. We ...

Was that blood in dog Bentley's stool? Or just traces of dye from treats? I could have done a cold search among Google links for information. Instead, since I also needed to be calmed down and comforted, I keyed in a prompt on a free version of ChatGPT. No, it wasn't s a specialized AI mental-health app such as Abby and Ash . Instead, it was the old trusty free ChatGPT I have been using since November 2022 when OpenAI released the chat bot.  I was not disappointed. The tone was empathetic. Also since ChatGPT has a memory feature it could customize the response. For instance, it factored in that Bentley was an older dog - more than 10 years old. In addition, the chat bot understood that I tend to worry and over-react. So, essentially the takeaway was what we in Buddhism call the "sacred pause" : Wait and see, hold off planning, with specifications about how long. As usual, the bot pointed me in the right direction, along with providing emotional support. The symptom va...

  Several   years from now will the new cultural power structure be laughing hilariously at Meta, VW and more which boasted how efficient they are and how more efficient they would become.  Actually, even in its heyday - that is right now - the efficiency mandate seemed comically overwrought. The ethos reminds us of all those back-seat drivers who insisted Route A was the most efficient. Verboten was taking the scenic one that treated us to the serene snippets of cows and horses grazing, ghost towns and general stores.  In the tarot the anti-efficiency card is The Chariot. The journey is being determined by natural contours. Yeah, let it be. Don't hold tight to the reins.  The biggest successes in my career emerged when I was off the efficiency game. Beyond burnt out to deep fried, I had left methodically chasing revenue through ghostwriting/speechwriting. I fell into dabbling in blogging, often staying up all night playing around in that new medium in 2004....

  Hardened with regret, lumbering with age and excess weight Helga Bahlmann arrives at a hotel to conduct on-film a reconciliation session.  Back in 1942, as the 2026 movie "Aryan Papers" depicts, she was a youthful enthusiast of the Nazi regime. That prompted her to participate in the Lebensborn, a breeding program for Aryan babies. During that time, she took it upon herself to murder Jews and others she found lacking the right views.  From the get-go in the reconciliation process, Helga has to confront the question: How can she forgive the younger so misguided, so cruel self. Initially she distances herself from that entity, referring to that self in the third person. Then she comes around to owning that monster was her. "Aryan Papers" is currently available on free streaming platform Tubi . Just key in the title in the search bar. With humans living longer more are "doing a Helga." They are forced to dredge up a self that is so incongruent with who th...

  If you were young in the 1950s, lower middle class (or even lower) and based in the New York Metro area you probably grew up much like Jeffrey Epstein.  Today The New York Times captures the details of how it was for all of us back then. And, as the entries from his pals from those days for his 50th Birthday Book testify, there was (and is) great nostalgia for how it was. Essentially the defining characteristic of that unique childhood and our teenage years was this, reports the NYT: "the unwatched way they grew up."  Families were too overwhelmed financially surviving to supervise us.  The Catholics among us had too many kids to seem to be able to keep track of the ever-increasing number.  And the recent immigrants were preoccupied with chaos within the home such as drinking problems.  My gallows humor years later was that if my sisters and I hadn't come home for several days no one would even notice.  Unwatched by adults, we were formed by our frie...

  Every driver's nightmare: The engine light goes on. After I got the Toyota hybrid Prius to the Toyota dealer for a diagnosis I knew where to go next. That was online to ChatGPT. What could be the problem and what was the estimate for each kind of fix? ChatGPT has a memory feature. So, it knew that I veer into extreme anxiety. Immediately in its response to the prompt it reassured me that the repair could be simple such as the coolant. That would run about $600 or so. Then it eased me into the big-picture stuff. Some repairs, it warned me, such as the need to purchase a whole new hybrid battery might not be worth it. After all, the car had plenty of miles on it.  It was going to be three days before the diagnosis was scheduled. That gave me time to search for options. I had had good luck with those affordable Smart Cars for Two. I tracked down available ones in the area. In addition, there were businesses which paid for non-operational vehicles so I might even get a few bucks...

 It was that dream overreach. We were all Jay Gatsby. "They" warned us that if we continued to hunger for more we would wind up just like him: Destroyed, eventually literally. Gatsby, the tragic presence F. Scott Fitzgerald conjured up, came from nothing, achieved great wealth but that wasn't enough. He also chased the old-money ethos, embedded in Daisy.  So, culturists and clergy hammered: Enough is enough. You are enough. That was one of those luxury kinds of moral teachings, from a much better time. Maybe players like Goldman Sachs' Kathy Ruemmler weren't paying attention. The evil genius of Jeffrey Epstein is that he was able to size up that seeming hunger and move right in. Now, it's likely too many overreachers have collapsed into a frightened Willy Loman. I pick up that tragic presence often in tarot readings. In the tarot it's symbolized by the Nine of Wands. No surprise Broadway has a blockbuster in that revival of Arthur Miller's "Death ...

  We tarot readers don't need to use Survey Monkey to discern what's going on in the culture, as well as in minds and hearts. Our clients come to us with it all. And during the past 18 months what I have had confided to me during a tarot reading is what I am now reading in the June 2026 edition of Esquire Magazine . Editor at Large Dave Holmes lists "25 Things We Have Learned in the 21st Century." Item number one is: "Everyone will sell out, and the ones who don't will be considered suckers." In essence, the message is that no rational human being will cave to principle, at least if they can get away with it. Of course, clients come for a tarot reading because something is eating at them. Not because everything is happy-clappy. What is eating at them is frequently just that: if they can get away with some snippet or maybe a bigger type of wrongdoing.  No, they don't ask me what would be the right thing to do. I am neither a member of the clergy nor a...

We read about it all the time: the "it." That is a mass shooting which seems to have no obvious motivation. And it's all too human to assume that will always be somewhere else. To remain sane and going about your lives you have to assume a sense of safety. Well, this evening about 5:30 PM in what is my new hometown - Toledo, Ohio - there was the "it."  So serious was the "it" that it made national and international news. UK publication Daily Mail reports: "Multiple people have been shot near an annual historic festival [Old West Festival] in [Toledo]  Ohio sparking a huge emergency response and sending people running for their lives."  Details remain sketchy, including the number of victims and the extent of the injuries. The suspect hasn't been caught. This reinforces the tarot fundamental that life is uncertain. That's symbolized by the Wheel of Fortune card. And with the current geopolitical situation, AI, upheaval in the Law of ...

  The Fool card is the first in the tarot deck. It represents the importance of taking wise risks. Isn't that what life is all about. And the mystical tarot is about putting together the best life for yourself. Do that right - that is taking smart risks - and the odds are you will get much of what you want - and almost magically. Do that carelessly and you can lose it all, including second chances. In 2026, with so much uncertainty and change it's increasingly difficult to calculate risk. For example, you haven't received a pay raise or promotion. Typical in current times. But connecting the dots on whether to take another job or do a startup is filled with info holes. Moreover, at your age, what is current stomach for risk.  But there is one type of risk which is easier to assess. That's the decision to matriculate for an academic degree beyond the BA/BS. The intel on the peril of that - especially low ROI - goes way back in time to The Wall Street Journal's expose...

  Memories of dealing with roommates, for financial reasons. Bunking with a spouse or lover as the relationship yielded diminishing returns. Those offspring hanging on at home. Bearing witness to friends who are stuck co-living. And, oh, that first 18 years of life with family before fleeing to college where even dorm life wasn't as bad. Having to no longer put up with any of that has been a blessing for a growing number of my over-50 clients. Their deep satisfaction is symbolized in the tarot deck by The World Card.  To achieve it usually they have made sacrifices.  Common was pulling up roots in a High Cost of Living (HCOL) area to a Low Cost of Living (LCOL) in order to afford their own habitat. Another was continuing to work to pay the differential single people have to live with. A third was investing the energy into reaching out to build social support systems.  However, such a content state of being isn't universal. In Debbie-Downer manner, The Wall Street Jou...

  Silence. Meditation/Prayer. Simple daily routines. Those are the defining elements of  monasticism , a lifestyle more and more in America are embracing.   Those new monastics include Nicholas Cage . Recently he began to crow about his personal shift from the fast social lane to a monk-life existence.  But before my exhausted clients go that route I warn them: If you need to earn a good living you need to be very out there, connecting.  When I deliver that lesson, now I can leverage the example of Cage: He already has developed big-time name recognition and built wealth. That gives him the ability to do less connecting and more monk-like stuff. Call the mandatory combination of monasticism and connection The Wonderful Double Life. Classic is the tragedy of an eight-year associate in a large law firm. He continually would tell his wife and close friends, "It's like being a monk. That's what I do 14 hours a day." Well, he should have invested some of th...

 "Efficiency." That's the word dominating the films depicting the Nazi era in Germany. Free streaming platform Tubi is hosting those movies, including the 2021 "The Auschwitz Report. " Efficiency also dominated the Industrial Revolution.  Human dignity was erased.  That was how the Nazi controlled prisoners in the camps. In his novels, Charles Dickens showcased that inhumanity to man as machines in factories replaced craftspeople laboring in their cottages. Currently, despite its shameful uses in earlier centuries, the concept of efficiency is embedded in best practices for business.  It was in 2023 that Meta launched "The Year of Efficiency." But the massive layoffs kicked in a year earlier. By the end of 2023, 21,000 humans lost their jobs. Perhaps those were the lower-value humans Standard Chartered Bill Winters will also lay off in the next few years. Meanwhile, this week Meta cut another 8,000 humans. With human dignity erased the rest of the huma...