Why I Visited Five Psychics

In 2013, I visited five street-corner psychics in New York City. I asked them all the same questions.

Now, eight years later, I just looked at all their answers. One of them was spot on!

What can we learn from this? I’m going to say… absolutely nothing. Instead, I want to make a case that correctness can sometimes be noise.

But first, why did I visit the psychics?

When you live in New York, you walk by a lot of windows with neon signs that say PSYCHIC. I always wondered what happens inside. What does it look like? What does the psychic do?

In 2013, I pitched an idea to New York magazine: What if I visit five psychics, ask them the same questions, and then compare their answers? My editor thought that sounded funny, so off I went.

Now I could satisfy my curiosity. What do these places look like? Old rugs, worn furniture, crystals everywhere. Some operate in tiny storefronts, and some are in closed-off spaces that I’m pretty sure are the living rooms of small apartments. And what do the psychics do? Some get down to business, offering rates for long or short readings. Others lay it on thick; one woman opened up by saying, “I feel like I know you. I usually charge more but I feel like I was meant to see you.”

A brief reading usually costs about $20, but they’ll try to upsell on more time, more visits, more information. (And crystals; so many crystals for sale.)

At the time, I had no kids and was renting an apartment with my wife. I asked the psychics four questions:

1. What should I be worried about?

2. How many children will I have?

3. Can I ever afford real estate in Brooklyn?

4. What will happen next week?

Answers varied widely. A psychic named Nicole said I’d have two boys and a girl. Donna said four, with twins. (Terrifying!) Some said I’d buy an apartment soon; some said I never would. My wife and I still laugh about one psychic’s answer: “I’m feeling Jersey. But close Jersey, not far Jersey.”

The final piece was fun in the magazine (it looks like garbage online but here it is). Then I moved on and forgot. But this all recently popped back into my head, as I worked on a chapter of my book about how to predict which life changes are worth making. I looked back at the article for amusement — and was surprised to discover that, years later, it turns out that one of the psychics was proven correct!

How many kids would I have? Two boys.

Can I afford real estate in Brooklyn? You’ll own your own home in the city. But I don’t see it until toward the end of 2014.

Those answers came from a psychic named Cher. She got the details right.

Some might say this is impressive. Maybe she can tell the future! Maybe I should trust her with larger life questions!

I say: We’re suckers for simple narratives. But things are rarely simple.

Here’s a more serious example on a very different subject.

Let’s talk about tech “addiction”

We have a cultural narrative that technology is “addictive.” Our evidence is that we use things like smart phones and social media a lot, and often feel a desire to use them. Some portion of this story is true, of course: We do use this stuff a lot! You could be doing something other than reading this email right now, but here you are, reading it.

But is that addiction? Tech critics and politicians say yes. But for the latest episode of my podcast, I examined this question by speaking with actual addiction researchers. Their answer was no. This is not addiction; this is simply overuse. As one told me, we tend to “pathologize common behavior.”

And they say this has serious consequences.

I go into this in detail in the podcast, which you can hear here (or by clicking the player below). But I’ll share one important concern now.

One of the people I spoke with was Jo?l Billieux, a professor of clinical psychology and psychological assessment at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who also works at the center for excessive gambling in the hospital system there. He’s concerned about our cultural belief in “gaming addiction”, because in actuality, he says, patients who are seemingly “addicted” to gaming do not actually have a gaming problem.

“For a lot of people,” he says, “the gaming is actually a coping mechanism to face social anxiety or trauma or depression.” Treat that underlying issue, he says, and the gaming diminishes. But if someone believed that gaming is the problem — that the thing to treat is an addiction to games! — then they will not solve the real problem. They will exacerbate it.

So here we have it: A simple narrative ignores more complex factors, and does not help us solve a real problem.

Now, back to the psychics.

Cher nailed a few questions — about my future kids and my future home. So I went back to the full transcript of her 15-minute reading with me, to see what else she might have gotten right. That’s when I remembered how bonkers Cher actually was.

Did she get a few things right? Sure. But she also told me that my ex-girlfriend was a “very negative person, a very troubled person” and that “I see her causing a lot of confusion, jealousy, and a lot of mixed emotions.” None of that was or is true.

When I told her I was a writer, she tried to make it dramatic in the most boring of ways. “You're looking to publish something right now, you're looking to write something and it's not going forward,” she said. “It's not actually going the way you want it to, but I see a lot of big changes for you in your writing.”

LOL, OK.

What was I really looking at here? A confluence of factors. I asked the psychics if I could ever afford real estate in Brooklyn; Cher reasonably surmised that I was thinking about buying, and that I wanted to do it soon. I asked about kids; Cher heard me ask about it in plural (I didn’t say “Will I have a kid?”), said two because that’s a good bet, and had a one-third chance of getting the genders right. (After all, it was either two boys, two girls, or one of each.)

Everything else she said was wrong.

We love simple stories. We love to put our trust in comforting explanations. These things may make life feel more predictable, but it’s also boring and counterproductive. The real world is complex, and if we are to build for tomorrow and solve real problems, we must embrace that complexity — to push back against simplicity and take in all the factors as they are.

To me, that’s what infinite potential looks like.

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Three ways to brighten your day:

?? Guess what we thought was “addictive” across time! This really fun game was created to go along with my podcast episode.

?? What elevators can teach you about autonomous cars. I told some fun stories on the Curiosity Daily podcast. Check it out!

?? “Never drink the Kool-Aid” I loved this conversation with Dany Garcia, brand-building genius (and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson’s business partner), about how she makes business personal without ever getting too personally invested.

That's all for this time! You're awesome.