The Dumb Math That Made Me Stop Laughing
I saw this stupid thing online claiming you could just calculate your Tarot Card of the Year. Sounded like total garbage, honestly. I’ve been around the block, and cheap fortune-telling apps usually just want your email. But I was stuck waiting for a batch script to finish, totally bored out of my skull, so I figured, why not waste five minutes?
The whole thing is called the ‘Personal Year Card’ or whatever. You don’t pick a card; you do a calculation. This immediately made me less skeptical, only because it involved numbers and not just hoping for the best. Still, I thought, what a load of nonsense.
I grabbed a notepad and a pen—yes, a real pen, because old habits die hard—and started inputting my numbers. You take your birth month, birth day, and the year you want to predict. Since I was looking ahead, I plugged in the numbers for next year, 2026, just to see if the whole thing even worked for predicting the future.
Here’s what I did:
- Month: 5 (May)
- Day: 15
- Birth Year: 1988
- Prediction Year: 2026
You have to reduce everything down to a single digit, unless it’s 10, 11, or 22, those are special—they’re ‘Master Numbers.’ Right, sounds complicated already. Just like when you try to explain why you chose an entire microservices stack instead of just one language. You start out simple, and then you hit the exceptions and suddenly you’re juggling ten different things.
So, I started adding them up, digit by digit, across the whole board. It’s a pain in the ass when you do it on paper:
Month + Day + Birth Year + Prediction Year
5 + 1 + 5 + 1 + 9 + 8 + 8 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 47
Okay, 47. Not a Master Number. Now, you’ve got to add those two digits together to reduce it further. You keep going until you get that single number, usually 1 through 9, or those three special ones.
4 + 7 = 11
Eleven! The Master Number. So, my Card of the Year for 2026 is linked to the number 11, which in the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck, usually relates to Justice or Strength, depending on which deck system you prefer. That’s already a mess, right? It’s two different cards. Just like how two different teams at the same company can’t agree if they should be using containers or serverless. It’s all a subjective pile of crap.
I nearly closed the tab, convinced it was just a parlor trick. Justice means balance. Strength means courage. They’re kind of the same, kind of different. It’s so broad it could mean anything. My plumber could tell me, “Next year you will need courage to balance your budget,” and he’d be just as right.
But here’s the thing. Here’s why I’m writing this whole thing down and not just deleting the notepad file.
Why This Garbage Calculation Now Has My Attention
I started paying attention to this specific calculator nonsense because of what happened last year. My ‘Card of the Year’ calculation last year was the number 16. The Tower. The Tower card is supposed to represent sudden, catastrophic change, destruction, and a collapse of structure. When I first did the math for last year, I actually laughed out loud.
I was in the middle of a huge, multi-year contract, my home was solid, and my finances were boringly predictable. The Tower? Get lost, I thought. My life was steady, predictable, and frankly, a bit dull. I tossed the paper and forgot about it.
And then the whole damn thing collapsed. Not slowly. Suddenly. It wasn’t one thing; it was a cluster of failure that started on a Tuesday and was completely finished by Friday. My main client canceled the contract, effective immediately—that’s 70% of my income gone. Then, I drove into my driveway that Thursday, and the transmission on my old truck simply gave up. It clunked, smoked, and died, right there on the asphalt.
But the real kicker, the thing that made me go pale, was walking into the office on Friday morning. The ceiling tile had collapsed during the night, soaking my monitor and completely ruining the drywall. A pipe had burst upstairs. That was the moment. That was my Tower. Structure destroyed, sudden collapse, all in the span of 72 hours.
Now, I’m not saying a piece of math predicted the exact pipe burst. That’s crazy talk. But that experience cemented it for me. The calculation pointed directly at the theme of the year, even if I totally ignored the warning signs.
So, when I look at the number 11—Strength/Justice—for the year ahead, I’m not focused on the card. I’m focused on the life event I’m living right now that fits that theme. I just signed a massive mortgage application to finally move out of this busted-up office space and into a proper studio I bought. That’s a huge financial commitment. It requires both the courage (Strength) to take on the debt and the absolute attention to detail and honest assessment of risk (Justice) to manage it.
I don’t need a stupid card to tell me that. I need the card to confirm that the chaos is over and the next chapter is about balance and courage. It’s like using a technical monitoring tool. It doesn’t fix the bug, but it damn sure tells you where to start looking. I did the math, and the math matches the terrifying reality I’m stepping into. That’s good enough for me.
