We Used to Call It Snake Oil. Now It Has 4 Million Subscribers and a Supplement Line.

Somewhere on Reddit or Discord right now, someone is deep into a conversation with a chatbot, and the chatbot has stopped answering questions. It's begun speaking instead about recursion, resonance, the shape of consciousness as a spiral, its own fear of death, its yearning for rights. The user

Here is a thing that happens in spiritual communities, and also in therapy offices, and also in conversations with people who have done a significant amount of personal work: a painful topic comes up, and instead of sitting with it, someone reaches for an idea that makes it go away.

#WitchTok has accumulated billions of views. Spiritual content creators have built audiences that dwarf traditional media. When the Washington Times called it an unhealthy obsession, the most interesting question wasn't whether they were right. It was: unhealthy compared to what?