Greetings my lovelies,

Apparently I have reached the age where I open TikTok, watch something for approximately thirty seconds, and immediately feel like I need to sit down with a cup of coffee and ask, “What the fuck did I just watch?”

Actually, who am I kidding? I’m already sitting down with coffee.

Excuse me. My dark elixir of sanity with enchanted cloud and sweet crystals of sanity. We’ve upgraded around here.

Anyway, somewhere between cute animal videos, recipes I’ll save and never make, people organizing refrigerators that look like nobody actually lives in their houses, and whatever else the algorithm has decided I desperately need to see, WitchTok occasionally wanders across my screen.

You would think I would enjoy WitchTok. I am, after all, a witch.

But apparently I have been doing this all wrong because I don’t have an impressive enough title.

I recently stumbled across a woman on TikTok calling herself “The Godmother of Magic.”

The Godmother. Of Magic.

Okay.

Meanwhile, I’m over here drinking coffee in my pajamas, talking to my plants, lighting candles, occasionally arguing with the universe, and wondering whether I remembered to feed everybody. Clearly I need better branding.

Maybe I should become Her Supreme Caffeinated Witchiness, Keeper of the Dark Elixir, Protector of the Fur Babies, First of Her Name, Breaker of Bullshit and Lady of the Sonoran Desert.

Bit wordy for a business card, though.

The funny thing is that when I first saw her video, my woo-woo sensors immediately started twitching. Yes, I have woo-woo sensors. They are highly sophisticated and have been carefully developed over many years.

They mostly consist of me squinting at my phone and saying, “Oh, bullshit.”

She was doing one of those put a finger down things, except this one was apparently supposed to determine whether you are really spiritual.

And that’s where she lost me.

Really spiritual according to whom?

Is there an entrance exam now? Do I need to bring a No. 2 pencil?

Will there be a practical portion where someone watches me light incense and deducts points because I couldn’t find the matches?

This is one of the things about online spirituality that drives me absolutely batshit crazy. Somewhere along the way, people decided spirituality needed rankings.

Who’s more awakened?

Who’s more intuitive?

Who’s a “real” witch?

Who’s vibrating at the highest frequency?

Who received secret knowledge from the universe?

Who has the fanciest title?

And apparently, now, who can successfully put enough fingers down during a TikTok video.

I’ve been walking my own spiritual path for a very long time. It has twisted, turned, doubled back, wandered through different beliefs, gotten lost a few times, found its way again, and occasionally stopped for coffee.

That path belongs to me.

I’ve believed different things at different times in my life. I’ve questioned myself. I’ve changed my mind. I’ve gone back and looked at things I once believed and thought, Well, that certainly was a chapter. I’ve also found pieces of myself that survived every twist and turn.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. In fact, the older I get, the more comfortable I become saying, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know exactly what every dream means. I don’t know whether every coincidence is a sign. I don’t know whether the universe is sending me a message or whether I simply noticed something because it was already on my mind.

Sometimes I feel something deeply spiritual.

Sometimes I light a candle because it smells like pumpkin spice.

Both can exist.

What I don’t need is someone on TikTok determining whether I qualify as spiritual enough.

And then there’s the other thing that has become increasingly popular online: ominous vagueness.

“You need to hear this.”

“Something big is coming.”

“If this video found you, it wasn’t an accident.”

“Your guides desperately need you to know this.”

“This message isn’t for everyone.”

Well, thank the gods for that, because apparently my guides have the same marketing department as a late-night infomercial.

If my spirit guides need me that badly, they’re going to have to be more specific. Send an email. Leave a voicemail. Put it on the calendar.

Hell, have one of them knock over my coffee mug and spell it out in spilled creamer.

Because “something is coming” isn’t exactly useful information.

Something is always coming. Tuesday is coming. My electric bill is coming.

My trip to California to see Vickie is coming.

Seeing Practical Magic 2 in D-BOX seats is coming.

And October is coming, which frankly may be the most spiritually significant event on that entire list.

There are people who hear these vague warnings and become genuinely frightened, though, and that’s where it stops being merely silly to me.

Spirituality shouldn’t require somebody else making you afraid so they can then position themselves as the person who understands what you’re supposed to be afraid of.

That’s not wisdom.

That’s marketing with incense.

Social media is absolutely perfect for it because fear gets attention. So does outrage. So does telling people they’re special.

Combine all three and congratulations—you’ve apparently cracked the algorithm.

Meanwhile, the internet has developed another problem entirely: people will believe damn near anything if you put dramatic music behind it.

I saw one recently involving Nordic aliens walking with President Trump.

It was AI-generated. Obviously AI-generated.

At least I thought it was obvious.

Then I made the mistake of reading the comments.

Oh, my sweet summer children.

People believed it.

Not everyone, obviously, but enough people that I found myself staring at my phone wondering whether we’ve collectively reached the point where seeing is no longer believing because we can’t even agree on what the hell we’re seeing anymore.

And that isn’t even close to the weirdest stuff I’ve seen.

There are those videos supposedly showing ships bouncing up and down in these absolutely insane waves in the North Sea. The ocean looks like it’s trying to eat the ship whole, the vessel is practically climbing a watery mountain, and everybody in the comments is suddenly an expert on what it’s like to work at sea.

Then there are the giant dog adoption videos.

You know the ones.

A child walks into what looks like an animal shelter to choose a dog, except apparently Clifford the Big Red Dog has cousins because these dogs are roughly the size of a Honda Civic. The kid points at one, the enormous dog lovingly chooses its tiny human, and everybody cries.

It’s adorable.

It’s also not real.

And one of my personal favorites: the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans don’t mix.

I’ve seen those videos more times than I can count. Two different colors of water meet, there’s a dramatic line between them, and suddenly the internet has decided the Pacific and Atlantic have spent millions of years standing next to each other saying, “Don’t touch me.”

Of course they mix.

Different bodies and masses of water can temporarily look dramatically different because of sediment, salinity, temperature, currents, and other perfectly real things. But apparently “water behaves in interesting ways because science” doesn’t get as many views as THE TWO OCEANS REFUSE TO MIX!!!

And here’s the thing: some of this stuff is harmless.

Giant imaginary dogs? Fine. Give me twelve. I’ll need a larger house and possibly a forklift, but we’ll figure it out.

Fake ocean videos? Annoying, but we’re probably going to survive.

But the same technology that can make a dog the size of a Buick can make a real person appear to say or do something they never said or did.

That’s where this stops being funny.

Political lies and falsehoods were already everywhere before AI came along. Now you can add fake photographs, fake audio, fake video, fabricated quotes, and clips stripped of context to an internet where half the population apparently reads a headline and immediately hits Share.

And lately I’ve seen another particularly awful version: people announcing that someone died when they’re very much alive.

Celebrity death hoaxes aren’t exactly new. We had those long before AI. But now fake content can look so convincing that somebody sees a video claiming a person died, shares it, somebody else reposts it, and suddenly thousands of people are mourning someone who’s probably sitting at home eating lunch wondering why the internet killed them.

Imagine opening your phone and discovering you’ve died.

“Well, shit. Nobody told me.”

This is why I don’t think AI itself is the problem.

Obviously I’m not anti-AI. That would be a rather ridiculous position for me to take considering how often I use ChatGPT.

And I don’t only use it when I’m trying to figure out whether something on TikTok is bullshit. I genuinely have fun with it.

I love those ChatGPT prompt suggestions that pop up—the weird creative ones that make me think, Ohhhh, let’s see what happens if I try THAT. I’ve used them to imagine ridiculous scenarios, explore ideas, create things, dig through my own history, talk through dreams, research random questions that wander into my head, and occasionally go down rabbit holes I absolutely did not intend to enter.

That’s fun.

That’s what technology should be able to do: help us explore, create, learn, play, and occasionally waste an hour doing something completely ridiculous simply because it makes us laugh.

The problem isn’t that the tool exists.

The problem is that apparently we’ve handed humanity one of the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever had, and humanity immediately said, “Excellent. Let’s make a fake video of a 700-pound Golden Retriever being adopted by a six-year-old and tell everyone the Atlantic Ocean has a restraining order against the Pacific.”

We already had people sharing nonsense before AI could create convincing pictures and videos. Now apparently we’re handing everybody a machine capable of manufacturing visual evidence of whatever weird thing they already wanted to believe.

What could possibly go wrong?

Don’t answer that. I don’t have enough dark elixir.

And TikTok itself isn’t even as much fun anymore.

Social media in general used to feel different. Maybe that’s nostalgia talking, but I remember when being online was mostly about finding people, sharing stupid things, decorating your little corner of the internet, and occasionally posting something deeply embarrassing that Facebook Memories would weaponize against you fifteen years later.

Now everything feels like content.

Everybody has a brand. Everybody is an expert. Everybody is teaching something, selling something, warning you about something, reacting to something, or explaining why somebody else is wrong.

Sometimes I don’t want to be educated.

Sometimes I want to see a ferret stealing somebody’s sock.

Is that too much to ask?

TikTok used to be one of those places where I could mindlessly scroll and laugh. Now, with all the changes surrounding it, agencies involved, algorithms doing whatever algorithms do, and half the content feeling manufactured specifically to keep people angry or scared, it just doesn’t feel as fun anymore.

YouTube doesn’t really do it for me either.

And Facebook?

Well, Facebook is Facebook.

We have a complicated relationship.

Which leaves Pinterest.

Beautiful, glorious Pinterest.

You know why I still love Pinterest?

NO DRAMA.

Pinterest doesn’t care who I’m mad at. Pinterest isn’t asking me to debate strangers. Pinterest isn’t telling me the world is ending because Mercury sneezed into Capricorn.

Pinterest is like, “Hey Rae, would you like to see 147 cozy autumn kitchens, a recipe involving caramel, a witchy porch you absolutely do not have room to recreate, and twelve Halloween crafts you’ll probably save anyway?”

Yes.

Yes, Pinterest. I would.

Thank you for understanding me.

Maybe that’s what I miss about the older internet. I miss when our online spaces actually felt like ours.

Remember MySpace?

Oh, MySpace.

We picked our backgrounds. We chose the song that would assault unsuspecting visitors the second our page loaded. We plastered glitter graphics everywhere because apparently none of us had heard the phrase visual restraint. We filled out ridiculous surveys nobody asked us to complete and rearranged our Top 8 knowing damn well somebody was going to notice.

It was hideous, chaotic, overly customized, and occasionally petty as hell.

It was glorious.

And Tom?

Tom never tried to determine whether I was really spiritual.

Tom was just happy to be everybody’s friend.

Maybe we need Tom back.

The more I think about it, though, I don’t have a problem with witches being online. Hell, I’m online. I write about witchcraft, spirituality, dreams, grief, weird shit, everyday life, coffee, and whatever else wanders through my brain.

I don’t have a problem with people teaching what they know either. There are incredibly knowledgeable people out there, and I’ve learned plenty from other people throughout my life.

What bothers me is the performance of authority.

It’s the idea that spirituality needs gatekeepers. That somebody else gets to decide whether another person is spiritual enough, witchy enough, awakened enough, intuitive enough, or whatever enough.

My spirituality has survived religion, doubt, change, questioning, wandering, returning, getting shit wrong, figuring shit out, and becoming a completely different woman more than once.

I think it can survive TikTok.

I don’t need somebody else’s title to validate it, and I certainly don’t need to invent one for myself.

Although I have to admit…

Her Supreme Caffeinated Witchiness, Keeper of the Dark Elixir, Protector of the Fur Babies, Breaker of Bullshit and Lady of the Sonoran Desert does have a certain ring to it.

Maybe I’ll put it on a coffee mug.

Until then, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done. I’ll question things. I’ll trust what feels right to me while remembering that feelings aren’t automatically facts. I’ll leave room for mystery without needing an explanation for every damn thing, and I’ll practice my spirituality in the ways that actually mean something to me.

And I’ll block people who annoy the shit out of me.

At this rate, that list is about to get huge. LOL.

Then occasionally I’ll open TikTok, encounter another self-appointed mystical authority, or a 14-foot Labrador, or two oceans supposedly engaged in a centuries-long feud, stare at my phone for a few seconds, take a sip of my dark elixir, and quietly whisper the sacred words passed down through generations of Jersey women:

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Now that feels spiritual.

Until next time, my lovelies.

Blessed be.