The last time Zahra, a 22-year-old in London, flew over Dubai, she looked out at the skyline and felt a sense of turmoil to come. It was then, she believes, that she predicted Dubai International Airport would later be hit by a reported Iranian strike on March 1. “I even saw the smoke from a place that I heard got hit by a drone weeks later,” she says. “I hold good political knowledge, but knowing Dubai would be brought into a war was something I wouldn’t have known.” Zahra considers herself psychic, albeit at the “lower end” of the extrasensory spectrum. Still, she says she gets visions every other day: she had a premonition of her grandad’s unexpected death, and swears she can tell when someone is lying – or even what colour they’re thinking of – just by looking at their face. Zahra is part of what some people are calling “the psychic generation”.

According to a recent Talker Research poll, many young adults in the US believe they have extraordinary powers of intuition. While 19 per cent of Americans considered themselves “basically psychic”, that figure rose to 30 per cent among Gen Z respondents, who reported having twice as many psychic moments — two a month — as boomers. For some, those moments do not involve predicting political events at all, but simply sensing when the energy is off or having a strong gut feeling. So, as interest in alternative spirituality continues to grow among young people, the question becomes: does Gen Z, in particular, have extraordinary powers of intuition, or are they simply more interested in — and therefore more attuned to — the mystical?

Zahra, who says she started having visions at 14, doesn’t see her intuition as a magical power unavailable to others. Instead, she describes it as a form of deep self-awareness that many people simply lack. Part of that, she says, comes from staying “aligned” with herself, but she also believes it is partly tied to a generational awareness specific to Gen Z’s life experience. “We as a generation grew up with the best of both: some life prior to social media, but a huge chunk of life with,” she says. “We have been made too aware and burdened as the first childhood generation with access to this level of information.”

Kyle, a 28-year-old in Brooklyn, says she experiences “psychic moments” every couple of months. “When I randomly mention a certain person or movie, and someone who has some kind of connection to that person or movie dies shortly after,” she says. “For example, I started getting into David Lynch sometime in January 2025, and after I watched Inland Empire, I wrote in my Letterboxd review on January 12 that David Lynch might be one of my favourite directors.” Lynch died a few days later, and Kyle says similar things have happened before. But her experiences are not always death-related: she also has predictive dreams and says she can “sense people’s intentions” toward another person or situation.

The emergence of a “psychic generation” has taken place within a broader rejection of tradition: an embrace of spirituality over organised religion, and of intuition in a moment when institutional authority feels less stable. In the age of AI, it makes sense that young people might return to inner knowledge when outer knowledge can so easily become distorted. Porsche Little, a tarot reader, spiritualist and host of Spot On, says she has noticed a shift in the way young people engage with intuition. “Younger generations are more open about spirituality, not necessarily more spiritual, because spirituality itself is natural to human beings,” she says. “Older generations were often taught to push feelings aside, stay logical, or avoid conversations around instinct – but younger people are more likely to pause and ask themselves why something feels heavy, uncomfortable, or energetically wrong.”

Little also believes we are living through a cultural moment in which being “psychic” is being reframed. Rather than leaning into stereotypes of spirituality as theatrical or detached from reality, more people are beginning to understand it as part of emotional intelligence, pattern recognition, nervous-system awareness, ancestral wisdom and self-connection. “Alternative spirituality has become less about predicting the future and more about understanding yourself deeply,” she says. “The more digitally saturated life becomes, the more people seem to seek experiences that feel emotionally real, personal, or unexplainable, and intuition gives people a feeling of intimacy that many are missing elsewhere.”

“The more digitally saturated life becomes, the more people seem to seek experiences that feel emotionally real, personal, or unexplainable, and intuition gives people a feeling of intimacy that many are missing elsewhere”

That reimagining may explain why some members of the so-called psychic generation – people with strong gut feelings but no actual premonitions – still consider themselves psychic, while others who do experience psychic moments shy away from the term altogether. Narges Hekmat, an 18-year-old “earth listener” in Brooklyn, is one of the latter. “I’m not sure I would call myself a full psychic, but I do believe in universal power and manifestation,” she says. “I think my god is the Earth, and the Earth tells me what to do spiritually; sometimes it comes to my conscious mind, and sometimes it doesn’t, but most of the time I do what the Earth is telling me.”

Hekmat says the universe speaks to her through dreams: visions of things that then happen the next day, like dreaming that her cousin took her phone to an electrical shop to sell it, only for the phone to be stolen the following day. She is not exactly sure what to call these experiences, so she often puts them down to “gut feelings”. “I can easily tell when something is off and can have a conversation with someone and know what type of person they are,” she says. “I think our generation has shed a layer of judgment that belonged to past generations, and people are realising how the societies and systems of government that were built decades ago have shaped us – it allows people to read each other’s energies and understand how things actually feel.”

Sam Tracy, a writer and artist in New York, does not call herself psychic – that would feel like too much pressure – but she does say she lives by her gut instincts and experiences psychic moments a couple of times a month, including sensing when her childhood friend’s mother died of cancer. Other times, it is smaller flashes of intuition. “I’ve had a gnawing, unrelenting thought of someone whom I hadn’t spoken to in months, and then their name pops up on my phone,” she says. Online, this is often framed through “red string theory”. But it is not something Tracy believes everyone is tapped into. “Unfortunately, nowadays, people are out of tune with their bodies, and not everyone experiences these instinctual responses to their surroundings,” she says. “Deja vu is a common phenomenon which, to me, suggests an alternate universe.”

Across social media, in spaces like #TarotTok and #AstrologyTok, discussion of psychic abilities has been pushed to the forefront – so much so that some now believe their algorithm can hint at the future. This, says Mystic Michaela, an aura reader and author of What’s My Aura?, has heightened people’s ability to perceive the unseen world. “The online world has a lot of filters, glamour and fakeness, so Gen Z’s survival actually depends on their ability to pick up if someone is being authentic or not,” she says. “This current social media climate is a perfect context in which to practice our natural abilities to pick up what is not always so obvious, and we are becoming better psychics simply by co-existing in this online world.”

In Michaela’s recent psychic-reading workshops, she has noticed an increase in people’s ability to “read a picture” – meaning not just sensing a stranger’s personality from their face, but also their profession, relationship status and even whether or not they have children. “I have noticed that Gen Z is quick to call out inauthentic behaviour, liars and false fronts in the online world, often with compelling arguments based on a quick, energetic scan of an Instagram wall or collection of TikToks,” she says. “They quickly not only feel what is untrue, but also immediately accept it as fact.” But that can be dangerous, especially given what we already know about the pipeline between online spirituality and wellness content and conspiratorial thinking (sometimes referred to as conspirituality).

If being psychic is not some mystical gift possessed by only a few, but simply the ability to be perceptive – as Michaela believes – then Gen Z may be becoming “the psychic generation” by force. Teresa, a 27-year-old in LA who also sees herself as part of that generation, says young people have tapped into their intuition because they “had no other choice”. She says she has experienced psychic moments “every day of her life”, including animated visions of the future in which infants can talk before they can walk. “I was on a path of destruction, drug abuse and suicide the farther I went away from my psychic path, but once I came back and accepted it slowly, everything started making sense again,” she says. “My generation was born to a generation of parents who followed the structure given to them that promised success; do these things to be fulfilled! But I know that there are a million ways to do life.”

By living through – and having to practise discernment within – the information and misinformation age, many young people have learned that the only thing they can truly rely on is their own gut. A harder lesson, though, may be that openness to alternative spirituality does not always make people more open-minded overall, especially when their view of the world is shaped by ultra-personalised snap judgments. For Kyle, though, it is all part of the collective consciousness. “I think that young people are just maybe more tapped into the universal mind,” she says. “And that influences my ability to sense that something might happen in the future.”