19: Systems In Flux: Birth of the New Spiritual Consumer

Unseen Unknown

For the fourth and final episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about seemingly new emerging forms of spirituality, and how new spiritual brands are positioning themselves to take advantage of our collective movement towards wanting to be both categorized but at the same time free from conventional binary definitions.

Everything is being catered more and more to us as individuals—and religion seems to be shifting in that direction, too. Part of that shift is the way we understand what religion is in the first place, and our youngest generations are pushing us further toward newly remixed ideas of spirituality that borrow from a wide range of traditions.

Allegra Hobbs is a journalist who’s explored the phenomenon of the Enneagram. The Enneagram is a newly-revived derivative of the teachings of the Bolivian-born philosopher, Oscar Ichazo, that practitioners believe can lead to improved self-awareness. She found that the Enneagram and other categorizing devices like it have also seemingly crossed over into the mainstream because we find ourselves in a perpetual state of isolation and alienation—something Rachel Lo discovered as she developed the dating app Struck, which helps match people based on their astrological signs.

This episode explores what these new forms of spirituality mean and how they’ve come into the mainstream with the emergence of a new spiritual consumer, and while discussions about spirituality can be challenging for a number of reasons, our conversations ended up revealing surprising potential implications for equity and inclusion in everything from how we find meaningful relationships to how we conceptualize our work.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• “Mucho Mucho Amor” documentary about the legendary astrologer Walter Mercado (Netflix)
• Psychologist Carl Jung on synchronicity (Arts of Thought)
• The Personality Typing System for Every Personality Type (Allegra Hobbs’ piece on Medium’s Forge)
• Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tera Isabella Burton (Amazon)
• Like Astrology and Natal Charts? Try the Struck Dating App (LA Times)

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