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I’ve seen a number of tendencies in my 10-year instructing profession: bottle flipping, fidget spinners, viral vandalism. This yr lecturers are reporting a brand new pattern: “Coin Boys.” Though I haven’t (but) seen it myself, an exasperated trainer on Reddit explains:
“The most recent factor here’s a flock of self-proclaimed ‘coin boys’ who carry 1 / 4 available always and consistently flip it. They’ve their complete persona revolve round cash, coin flips, and likelihood. Once we went round doing an ice breaker, 4 or 5 of the youngsters mentioned some variation of ‘I dwell by the coin and die by the coin’ as their truth.
Nearly an hour in the past, once I assigned the primary task of the varsity yr, one of many coin boys was daring sufficient to say ‘heads I do it, tails I don’t.’ I informed him if he flipped the coin he can be getting a name house on the primary week of [high school]. He flipped it anyway and it got here up heads (thank god for that a minimum of).
However then the opposite coin boy in that class flipped his coin and it got here up tails. He mentioned the coin has spoken and he’s not doing it. I say very nicely, take pleasure in your 0 and your name house — what a good way to begin off the varsity yr and your highschool profession.”
I discover this account pleasant, as a trainer, as an observer and newbie anthropologist of Technology Z, and — most of all — as a scholar of faith. For the previous few years, I’ve taught a Comparative Religions elective course to highschool college students, and I’ve been intrigued by the progressive ways in which Gen Z chooses to have interaction with faith and spiritual practices. The “Coin Boys” are simply one other instance of this. These “Coin Boys” are doubtless unaware that they’re reviving an historical and venerable spiritual observe: cleromancy, a type of divination wherein an end result is set by random means, such because the casting of cube, the drawing of playing cards, or the flipping of cash.
I ought to notice that it’s troublesome to substantiate if the Coin Boys anecdote is true. Reddit is a web-based discussion board wherein nameless “Redditers” can publish below pseudonyms. Though the assorted “subreddits” (boards organized by subject of curiosity) have moderators, posts will not be fact-checked or vetted like mainstream information retailers. Certainly, web sleuths have found good causes to imagine the story is an amusing fabrication by a web-based “troll” or prankster.
But it surely’s noteworthy that the publish was “upvoted” greater than 13,000 occasions by customers on r/lecturers; this implies to me that very many lecturers discovered the story believable. As an skilled trainer myself, I completely discovered the story plausible. Some 1,500 lecturers commented on the thread, most thanking the unique poster profusely for the heads-up, grateful that they could strategize upfront easy methods to meet the problem posed by the Coin Boys if or when the pattern arrived at their faculty. And even when the unique anecdote was a hoax, the Reddit publish was broadly re-posted on social media platforms like X (previously Twitter), and so I’m fairly assured the hoax has spawned copycats “IRL,” or “in actual life,” as my college students would say.
However even when the Coin Boys story have been verifiably true, it wouldn’t be particularly attention-grabbing if it was simply an idiosyncratic instance of a hyper-local highschool subculture. However the Coin Boys (actual or fictitious) are believable to lecturers like me as a result of Gen Z has persistently demonstrated a singular curiosity in cleromancy — and most notably Tarot playing cards (a sub-genre of cleromancy known as cartomancy). “Tarot Booms as Gen Z Types Out Non secular Path,” reads one typical headline. A current survey discovered that 51% of respondents ages 13-25 engaged in “tarot playing cards or fortune telling.” The Coin Boys, whether or not actual or not, symbolize a well-documented magical-religious worldview amongst Technology Z.
(Picture supply: Cristian/AdobeStock Ashley Britton/SheKnows)
What, subsequently, may we study from the Coin Boys? I believe the anecdote offers necessary insights into younger individuals, play, schooling, psychology, and the persistence of spiritual concepts in our so-called secular age.
In cultures with a magical world view, there is no such thing as a such factor as “randomness,” “likelihood,” or “coincidence.” As anthropologists Rosalie Wax and Murray Wax have written, “It’s [only] we [moderns] who settle for the likelihood and logic of pure likelihood, whereas for the dweller within the magical world, no occasion is ‘unintended’ or ‘random’, however every has its chain of causation wherein Energy, or its lack, was the decisive company.” As a result of the whole lot apparently random is definitely attributable to the ability of some (supernatural) agent, cleromancy is a mechanism by which these powers could be examined and their will discerned.
For hundreds of years, the Chinese language engaged in cleromancy by flipping cash or passing yarrow sticks from one hand to the opposite to seek the advice of the I Ching. The Historic Hebrews made use of the Urim and Thummim, which can have been a pair of sacred cube, or else “have been two flat stones, one aspect of which was the auspicious aspect and one the inauspicious, in order that in the event that they each fell with the identical aspect upward the reply was given, whereas in the event that they revealed completely different sides there was no reply.” The Hebrews additionally drew heaps (1 Samuel 14:42; Jonah 1:7), as did the Romans. (We nonetheless discuss of “drawing the quick straw” to speak about an individual to whom an unwelcome process or destiny falls.) The observe of cleromancy is ubiquitous in cultures throughout time and geographical house.
In fact, one may argue that the “Coin Boys” will not be partaking in a spiritual observe in any respect, however merely teenage play, and to confuse the 2 is to insult faith and place undue significance on what’s, ultimately, solely silliness. However Johann Huizinga, the preeminent cultural historian of play, convincingly argued in Homo Ludens that there has at all times been the closest affinity between play and faith.
Huizinga argued that ritual and delusion are rooted in what he known as the “play intuition” or “ludic operate.” He writes, “In all of the wild imaginings of mythology a fantastic spirit is taking part in on the border-line between jest and earnest [. . .] sacred rites, sacrifices, consecrations and mysteries, all of which serve to ensure the well-being of the world, [are performed] in a spirit of pure play really understood.”
Huizinga makes compelling connections between spiritual actions and the kids’s video games that happen on the playground. Each spiritual ritual and the video games of youngsters put a pause to “unusual life” and transport the contributors to a different world. Each contain features of role-play or fake. Each make the most of a peculiar vocabulary distinctive to the context of the sport or the ritual. Each mark out a sacred house, hallowed spot, or boundary inside which particular and arbitrary guidelines are strictly enforced: “Formally talking, there is no such thing as a distinction no matter between marking out an area for a sacred goal and marking it out for functions of sheer play. The turf, the tennis-court, the chess-board and the pavement-hopscotch can’t formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle.”
You possibly can sense the reality of Huizinga’s argument should you observe the earnest focus of a bunch of schoolchildren taking part in hop-scotch: the clearly delineated squares in chalk like a magic circle; the mantra-like rhymes recited by the skipper, handed orally from one era of college kids to the following; the earnest seriousness of the inviolable guidelines. One can sense it in a baseball sport: the painted diamond; the particular vocabulary (innings, dugout, strike, shortstop); the esoteric hand gestures and indicators between catcher and pitcher; superstitious rituals of pitchers and batters; the dramatic and impractical costuming and eye-black.
As additional proof of the overlap between the earnestness of faith and the frivolity of play, Huizinga reminds us that in lots of cultures the gods themselves play video games of “likelihood”: “Within the Mahabharata the world itself is conceived as a sport of cube which Siva performs together with his queen… Germanic mythology additionally tells of a sport performed by the gods on a playing-board: when the world was ordained the gods assembled for dicing collectively, and when it’s to be born once more after its destruction the rejuvenated Ases will discover the golden playing-boards they initially had.” In different phrases, play was by no means beneath the dignity of the gods; video games of likelihood have been one of many gods’ favourite pastimes.
But when there are historic precedents, it additionally appears that there’s a significant distinction to be made between cleromancy as practiced by historical individuals and the coin flipping of the Coin Boys. Historic practitioners noticed on the planet a deep order and logic, and cleromancy was a technique to discern that order and reconcile oneself with it. On the contrary, I think these Gen Z Coin Boys see an absence of order and logic on the planet, and use their coin flipping to specific their frustration with the randomness, and perhaps even the futility, of their scenario.
There may be mounting proof that Gen Z will not be okay. Consultants are calling it a “disaster” — nervousness, melancholy, and suicidal ideation are all approach up. I speculate, although I can’t verify, that the Coin Boys’ actions may really derive from a nihilistic worldview diametrically against the worldview of historical diviners.
However why “Coin Boys” and never “Coin Ladies”? I’m satisfied by firsthand expertise within the classroom and by rising analysis cited by students similar to Richard Reeves (creator of Of Boys and Males), that boys are disengaging from faculty. Reeves notes that male college students, on common, earn worse grades and enroll in fewer superior programs than their feminine classmates. At the moment, ladies symbolize two-thirds of the highest 10 p.c of GPA scores, whereas boys make up two-thirds of the underside 10 p.c. Boys are additionally 50 p.c extra doubtless than ladies to fail in any respect three key faculty topics: math, studying, and science. The results of boys’ disengagement in highschool are evident within the rising disparities noticed on the faculty stage. As Reeves writes, “There’s a larger gender hole in greater schooling in the present day than in 1972, when Title IX was handed. Again then, 57% of bachelor’s levels went to males. Inside a decade the hole had closed. In 2021, 58% of levels went to ladies.”
In keeping with Reeves, there are a number of causes for highschool boys’ disengagement: boys are likely to lag behind ladies of their mental and emotional improvement; the instructing power is overwhelmingly feminine; time for recess and gymnasium has been dramatically decreased; and funding for profession and technical schooling has been slashed. Some may object that these broad generalizations quantity to a form of crude gender essentialism, however Reeves’ analysis is compelling, and my very own on-the-ground experiences lead me to imagine that Reeves is on to one thing.
It may very well be, then, that the Coin Boys are asserting their autonomy in a college system that feels notably stifling for younger males. In my expertise as a trainer, college students (and particularly boys) usually expertise faculty as an arbitrary set of disconnected duties. Too usually, college students have too little enter into what they study and the way they exhibit their studying. If that is true, there’s one thing becoming, even poetic, about protesting the arbitrariness of college with one thing equally arbitrary.
Another clarification: Coin Boys (and people who have interaction in related practices like Tarot readings) could have found that these practices are helpful methods of self-psychologizing and discovering truths about oneself. If we’re to observe the Delphic maxim to “Know Thyself,” it seems that flipping a coin could be a good technique to uncover one’s personal wishes. In his ebook Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Mind, neuroscientist David Eagleman offers the next recommendation:
“So the following time a good friend laments that she can’t resolve between two choices, inform her the simplest technique to resolve her downside: flip a coin. She ought to specify which possibility belongs to heads and which to tails, after which let the coin fly. The necessary half is to evaluate her intestine feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a delicate sense of reduction at being ‘informed’ what to do by the coin, that’s the suitable alternative for her. If, as a substitute, she concludes that it’s ludicrous for her to decide primarily based on a coin toss, that may cue her to decide on the opposite possibility.”
Is that this magic or psychology? Or each? It was the popularizer of Buddhism and Taoism Alan Watts, in his ebook Method of Zen, who argued that japanese strategies of divination just like the I Ching is likely to be usefully in comparison with the Rorschach take a look at in Western psychology. Each is likely to be regarded as technique of discovering and accessing the intuitive, or unconscious, areas of the self — what Watts calls the “peripheral imaginative and prescient” of the thoughts. We shouldn’t be so fast, subsequently, to dismiss issues like Tarot studying and the Coin Boys.
In 2004, psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote his ebook Paradox of Alternative: Why Extra Is Much less. In keeping with Schwartz, the (un)official “dogma” of Western industrial societies goes as follows: to maximise welfare, you maximize freedom; to maximise freedom, you maximize alternative. To maximise alternative is, subsequently, to maximise each freedom and welfare. Though this logic appears intuitively right, Schwartz argues that it merely isn’t so. As an alternative, the “explosion of decisions” out there to individuals in fashionable prosperous Western societies has made us extra anxious and depressed. As an alternative of maximizing our happiness, it has led to evaluation paralysis and resolution fatigue. The explosion of decisions has diminished our psychic bandwidth, leaving us drained and dissatisfied, consistently weighing the chance prices of selecting one factor as a substitute of one other.
A lot has modified since 2004, and the breadth of our decisions has solely continued to develop. A first-rate instance is fashionable on-line courting. Since Tinder launched in 2012, the courting panorama has modified dramatically. Just some generations in the past, one’s courting pool was restricted to who you may meet at work, in your spiritual neighborhood, or at a bar. Now, a limitless potential pool of mates sits in our pocket, a swipe away. However this hasn’t improved our love lives; one survey discovered that 79% of Gen Z report courting app burnout. “Do married individuals watch gen z courting and really feel like they caught the final chopper of Nam,” reads one viral Tweet.
Schwartz’s work offers a suggestive framework to grasp the attraction of contemporary cleromancy, whether or not via coin flipping or Tarot playing cards. Cleromancy may very well be an exceedingly efficient approach of reducing via the psychic smog of research paralysis. It may very well be understood as a form of cathartic outsourcing of the onerous burden of decision-making in our choice-saturated world.
In any case, the “Coin Boys” phenomenon serves as an intriguing lens via which to discover the complicated interaction of faith, play, and psychology within the Gen Z cohort. The traditional observe of cleromancy has been adopted and cleverly tailored by fashionable adolescents in response to modern challenges. Whether or not seen as a playful rebel in opposition to the strictures of contemporary life, a manifestation of nihilistic tendency, or a realistic software for self-psychologizing and decision-making, the phenomenon underscores the enduring relevance, and the pliability, of magical-religious practices in navigating the complexities of the human expertise.
Corey Landon Wozniak lives together with his spouse and 4 sons in Las Vegas, NV. He teaches English and Comparative Religions at a public highschool.
The publish Reside By The Coin, Die By The Coin: Faith, Play, and Gen Z “Coin Boys” appeared first on The Revealer.
