Why Millennials and Gen Z Are Turning to Digital Love Fortunes
At 2 AM on a Saturday, sprawled across her Brooklyn apartment floor, 24-year-old Ava Rodriguez did something she never thought she’d do: she asked a phone app whether she should text her crush.
The app a digital love fortune based on Japanese koimikuji traditions , told her to wait. “The timing isn’t right,” it warned in a delicate script across her screen. “Patience will bring clarity.”
She put her phone down. The next morning, her crush texted first. They’ve been dating for three months now.
“Was it the app? Probably not,” Ava laughs, tucking her hair behind her ear. “But it stopped me from making a desperate late-night move. Sometimes you just need something, anything, to tell you to slow down.”
Ava’s not an outlier. Across cities like New York, LA, and beyond, young people are increasingly turning to digital fortune-telling apps for relationship guidance. It’s a trend that might seem bizarre at first glance—tech-savvy generations consulting virtual fortunes like their ancestors might have visited fortune tellers. But dig deeper and it starts making perfect sense.
The Dating App Burnout Is Real
Let’s be honest: dating in 2026 is brutal. Swipe culture has turned romantic connection into a commodity. You’re not meeting people—you’re shopping for them. Left, right, left, left, maybe right. It’s exhausting, dehumanizing, and incredibly lonely despite being surrounded by thousands of potential matches.
“Everyone’s on the apps, but nobody actually likes them,” says Jamal Stevens, 27, a software engineer in Manhattan. “It’s like we’re all trapped in this system we hate but can’t escape because that’s where everyone is.”
The paradox is crushing. More options have led to less satisfaction. Research shows that having too many choices actually makes people less happy with their selections. When you could potentially swipe through hundreds of people tonight, how do you know you’ve found the right one? What if someone better is just three swipes away?
Enter love fortunes. They can’t tell you who to date, obviously. But they offer something dating apps fundamentally lack: guidance that isn’t algorithm-based. These aren’t recommendations generated by machine learning models analyzing your behavior patterns. They’re random draws that force you to think differently about your situation.
“The algorithm wants to keep you swiping,” points out Dr. Lisa Chen, a psychologist specializing in digital behavior. “Fortune apps want you to reflect. That’s a fundamentally different relationship with technology.”
Rituals for the Ritual-Less
Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: millennials and Gen Z have fewer life rituals than any previous generation. We’re not religious in traditional ways. We don’t have consistent family structures. Career paths aren’t linear anymore. Even friendship circles constantly shift as people move cities for jobs, relationships, or just change.
Everything feels temporary, uncertain, in flux. That’s terrifying, actually.
Daily love fortunes provide structure in this chaos. Check it every morning with coffee. Before a first date. After a fight with your partner. During the agonizing wait for a text back. These become personal rituals, small moments of consistency in otherwise unpredictable lives.
“My friends think it’s silly,” admits Sarah Kim, 22, a college senior. “But I’ve checked my love fortune every single day for eight months. It’s part of my routine now, like brushing my teeth. It grounds me somehow.”
The ritual matters more than whether the fortune is accurate. It’s creating a dedicated moment to think about your romantic life, your feelings, your patterns. In the endless scroll of Instagram stories and TikTok videos, that focused attention is revolutionary.
The Illusion of Control
Modern dating strips away agency in weird ways. You can’t control who swipes right on you. You can’t determine if someone will ghost you. You can’t predict when attraction will fade or when it might grow stronger. The whole process often feels like you’re just along for the ride, hoping things work out.
Love fortunes paradoxically restore some sense of control by acknowledging you don’t have control. Instead of pretending you can engineer perfect romantic outcomes through the right profile photos or carefully crafted opening messages, they suggest a different approach: pay attention, be patient, trust timing.
“Getting a ‘bad’ fortune actually helps sometimes,” explains Marcus Thompson, 29. “Like when it tells me this isn’t the right time to pursue someone, I can let go of that obsessive energy. I couldn’t control it anyway, right? The fortune just makes that easier to accept.”
Psychologists call this “learned optimism”—finding positive framing even in negative situations. A fortune that warns of romantic difficulties ahead isn’t a curse. It’s permission to lower expectations, protect your heart, focus on other areas of life. That’s valuable guidance in a culture that insists we should always be optimizing our love lives.
Authenticity Over Algorithms
There’s deep irony in using a digital app to escape digital culture, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Dating apps feel manipulative because they are—they’re designed to maximize engagement, not successful relationships. Every swipe, every match, every message is data being harvested to refine algorithms that keep you using the platform.
Fortune apps don’t want that from you. They’re not tracking who you’re attracted to or predicting your behavior to sell to advertisers. You open the app, draw a fortune, read it, close the app. That’s it. No infinite scroll. No push notifications trying to lure you back. No game-ified features designed to trigger dopamine responses.
“It feels cleaner somehow,” says Ava, the woman from Brooklyn. “Like the app isn’t trying to trick me or get something from me. It just offers this one thing—a fortune—and then leaves me alone. I actually trust that more than I trust Tinder’s algorithm.”
This gets at something important: young people aren’t anti-technology. We’re anti-exploitation. We’ve grown up watching social media companies monetize our attention and dating apps commodify our loneliness. We’re hungry for digital experiences that feel different, more genuine, less extractive.
Fortune apps, with their simple premise and lack of ulterior motives, scratch that itch. They’re technology in service of contemplation rather than consumption.
Cultural Crossroads
The fact that many popular love fortune apps draw from Japanese traditions isn’t accidental. Millennials and Gen Z have grown up in an increasingly globalized culture. Anime, K-pop, Japanese street fashion, Chinese social media platforms—we don’t see these as “foreign” in the way previous generations might have. They’re just part of our cultural landscape.
Japanese spiritual practices carry particular appeal because they’re not trying to convert you. There’s no religious dogma attached. You can engage with koimikuji or omikuji without joining a church or subscribing to a belief system. It’s spirituality without strings attached—perfect for generations that describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”
“I like that it comes from actual tradition,” says Sarah Kim. “It’s not some Silicon Valley startup that invented fortune-telling last year to make money. These practices have existed for centuries. There’s weight to that, even if I’m accessing them through an iPhone.”
Do They Actually Work?
Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: it doesn’t really matter.
When Ava’s fortune told her not to text that night, was it divine intervention? Cosmic wisdom? Random chance? Who cares—it gave her pause, and that pause led to a better outcome than her impulse would have.
When Marcus uses his fortune to accept that he can’t control romantic outcomes, does the fortune have magical powers? No—but it provides a helpful mental framework that reduces his anxiety.
When Sarah creates a daily ritual around checking her love fortune, is the app really seeing her future? Obviously not—but the ritual itself creates stability and reflection in her life.
The fortunes work not because they’re prophetic but because they make people think, pause, and approach their romantic lives with more intention. In a world of mindless swiping and algorithmic matching, that’s more than enough.
“I don’t believe in magic,” Jamal says firmly. “But I believe in taking a minute to actually consider what I want from dating instead of just reacting constantly. The fortune app makes me do that. Whether the fortunes are real or random? Honestly, I’m fine not knowing.”
What This Says About Us
The rise of digital love fortunes among young people reveals something important about this generation’s relationship with technology, spirituality, and romance.
We’re not as secular as we seem. We’re searching for meaning, guidance, connection to something larger than ourselves, we’re just doing it in non-traditional ways. We’re not giving up on love despite dating apps making it harder. We’re looking for any tool that might help us navigate romantic chaos with more grace and less anxiety.
We’re hungry for ritual and routine in lives that often feel untethered. And we’re willing to embrace practices from other cultures if they offer something our own culture lacks.
Most importantly, we’re trying to reclaim agency in systems designed to remove it. Dating apps want to control our choices through algorithms. Fortune apps hand control back to us, even if through the illusion of cosmic guidance.
“At the end of the day,” Ava reflects, “the fortune doesn’t make my decisions for me. It just helps me make them more thoughtfully. In dating, in 2026, with all the noise and chaos and options—that’s everything.”
She’s right. Maybe real fortune isn’t what the app tells you. Maybe it’s the moment of stillness you create by asking the question in the first place.
