At the end of every year, on New Year’s Eve, I draw a bunch of tarot cards. I have a “section” of my life that I want insight on for the following year, as well as bigger picture themes - e.g., “the vibe of 20XX” or “politics.”

For context, during the 2024 election, I drew a card to gain insight about what lessons we would learn from the electoral process. I got the Devil card, upright. To me, that indicated we were going to lean into our most carnal instincts as a country, and that we were not really going to learn anything because we were too focused on what would “feel good in the moment” as opposed to what needed to happen long term. It also told me the country was collectively going to follow its instincts: its racist, sexist, and greedy instincts.

Putting aside the fact that Trump’s personality has a lot of overlap with the aspects of the Devil card, the outcome of the election when I drew the card in late summer 2024, was pretty clear.

Fast forward to New Year’s Eve, just a few days ago. The card I drew for 2026: X of Swords. (It was in its upright position, if you track that; I personally do depending on how the card tells me to read it.)

For those who do not know X of Swords, it is of a man lying on his back with ten swords lodged upright in his spine. It’s safe to say that he is dead. The sky above is full of dark clouds, but on the horizon it is light.

The X’s (tens) of any suit in tarot’s minor arcana - wands, pentacles, swords, or cups - tend to sum up everything you learn from the smaller-numbered cards of the suit. Each suit pertains to a grouping of themes, and the swords is the realm of the mind. It’s our thoughts and ideas. It’s the stories we tell ourselves or each other. Swords are rational where wands are passionate, cups are dreamy, and pentacles are materially practical.

The tens also indicate a completion of a cycle. Something has ended and it’s time to accept it, remember the lessons, and look to the next cycle just ahead.

So, what’s that say about 2026?

I took it to mean that the stories we tell about ourselves are no longer applicable to the situation that we are in. The stories of hope and progress and innovation - i.e., the ones framed around capitalism - no longer are going to serve us. The logical structure (i.e., cognitive dissonance) we’ve put in place to ignore the workings behind the curtain is going to break down. We are going to have to find a new way to think, talk, and narrate the story playing out in front of us.

Those who know me well enough are probably rolling their eyes - here he goes again about “collapse” - but I think the presence of this card indicates that many of us are going to be talking very frankly about it this year. Collapse (natural disasters, “mysterious” illnesses, fascism, etc.) will no longer be discussed as this far-off thing happening in colonized countries; such realities will be talked about in the first person.

Just today as I wrote this, Trump held a press conference about his takeover of Venezuela. (Let’s not delude ourselves that this was to “save” anyone from anything.) People in other countries - especially Mexico, Greenland, Canada, and Cuba - were wondering out loud on social media whether their homes were next.

We are only three days into the year, and we had a president bypass all his checks and balances (which, let’s be real, exist only in name) to take control of a country that has a resource he wanted.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty blatant tell about what he and his billionaire buddies are thinking about the state of the world. You don’t snatch at resources unless you smell blood on the water. You don’t build luxury bunkers in Hawaii for fun. You don’t talk about moving to Mars because you think it’ll “just be cool.”

However, I digress from the original point.

When we dispose of the narratives we’ve told ourselves for years, and understand that the rationality by which we’ve lived is actually not all that rational, we will have space to actually talk about how we’re going to get through this. We can end this cycle of enforced madness and move towards something that’s more in line with what’s happening on that 5-dimensional chessboard I keep hearing about.

In truth, when we work out what it is we are actually facing as a global population, I think we’ll find that the moves being made are in plain sight.