Prophecies for 2026
Isn't there something deeply extravagant about stupidity?
It’s not easy, having the holy curse of prophecy. I sit in the lotus position on my mountain, high above the clouds, trying to pick out some helpful and practical prophecies to bring back down the mountain for you. Meanwhile the entire future of the universe crashes continually around my ears. Since you’re not a prophet, you have no idea what it’s like. Imagine having to pick out the one voice saying something interesting in an entire football stadium of people whispering nonsense like ‘OnlyFans for pets’ and ‘They’re going to come out with a new flavour of Fray Bentos pie, it’s a sushi flavoured pie with lashings of rich onion gravy’ and ‘Noel Fielding necrophile allegations’ and ‘Asteroid impact, millions dead.’
What makes this worse is that some of you people have started climbing up the mountain while this is happening, just to taunt me about my supposedly failed prophecies. I’m floating through the infinity of things yet to come, and meanwhile some cross-eyed rustic keeps poking me in the ribs with a stick. Hey mister, he says, listen here mister big prophet, you said that ‘the second Donald Trump presidency will be dominated by a kind of apolitical populism, directed more against seed oils and xenoestrogens than imports, migrants, or the liberal classes,’ and guess what, he’s just put tariffs on the whole world. Guess you must be feeling pretty stupid now, huh? In fact, over the course of the last year there’s been a constant pilgrimage of gurning slime-farmers wending their way up my mountain, coming to tell me exactly how apolitical the second Donald Trump administration has been. Hey mister prophet, they say, the Department for Homeland Security is posting sonnenrad edits. Hey mister prophet, government cronies keep making straight-arm salutes. Hey mister prophet, Charlie Kirk tried to smug at some libs in Utah and one of them shot him through the fucking neck, right as he was talking about gang violence statistics mister prophet, how’s that for apolitical, whaddya think about that?
It’s exhausting, having to live among people trapped in time. All you can see is the present that’s right in front of you; I’m being sucked off by aliens in the twenty-eighth century. Yes, Donald Trump put tariffs on the entire world, including an island inhabited solely by penguins. What happened next? Right now, the US is selling its most advanced chips to China, and until 2027 the tariff on semiconductors is a big fat zero. This has been the pattern all year: Trump swings his fists about, trying to look like he’s engaged in some kind of genuine political contention, but there’s nothing there. The murder of Charlie Kirk was supposed to be his Reichstag Fire, the beginning of an all-out life-or-death struggle against the left. What actually happened? Three months on, Kirk’s widow is leaping around in a sparkly costume at TPUSA AmericaFest. The man’s cultural legacy consists of an AI-generated song called We Are Charlie Kirk, the ‘kirkification’ meme, which is where you replace a celebrity’s face with Kirk’s, and the word ‘lowkirkenuinely’ (lowkey+kirk+genuinely). Everyone who still remembers the man takes his death as a piece of fundamentally apolitical kitsch. It’s already retro: fun but tacky 2025iana. This is what will happen to you if you devote your life to politics in a fundamentally apolitical world. You will be a joke when you die. Meanwhile, Trump is inviting Zohran Mamdani to the White House, gazing up in admiration at this handsome young socialist, wonderful guy, we all want the same things. I prophesied that there would be zero political events in 2025, and lowkirkenuinely I was right.
Absolutely everything else I prophesied has also come to pass. I said that in 2025 AI video would finally become indistinguishable from reality, and as a result ‘there will never be another interesting AI video again.’ It’s now possible to flawlessly imitate anyone doing anything, but somehow over the last twelve months nothing remotely newsworthy has come of this terrifying new power. The closest was an AI-generated Christmas advert released by McDonald’s in the Netherlands. The gist of the thing was the Christmas is awful, so you may as well spend all of December in McDonald’s, eating one hamburger after another, until it’s over. There was not a single shot that couldn’t have been just as easily generated by pointing a camera at an object and filming it. Unknown trillions have been invested in this technology, all to reproduce something that already exists. ‘At the very most,’ I wrote, ‘AI will replace some forms of B-roll. It will be the least consequential technology of your life.’ I was right. I prophesied the return of ‘Manbooks: books for men,’ books that aren’t obsessed with therapeutic interiority, now you can’t walk down the street in London without seeing someone ostentatiously tote around a copy of Flesh by David Szalay. (The next step is for someone to write a book in which something actually happens, but that might be beyond our abilities at the moment.) Most prophetically of all, I said that as Twitter’s cultural cachet waned, it wouldn’t be replaced by Bluesky or Threads or Substack, but the real world. Not in the sense that everyone would put aside all this frothing online hysteria and just focus on their actual lives—I meant that instead of trying to whip up cancel mobs on social media, people would just start physically attacking each other. ‘As all the other Twitter methadones stop working, expect an upswing in bizarre and unaccountable acts of public violence and private revenge.’ The Charlie Kirk assassin scratched a bunch of tweets into the bullets he fired. ‘If you read this, u r gay lmao.’ This is my curse. I’m always right.
Anyway, I have once again returned from the mountain with a bundle of prophecies for the year ahead. Last year’s were generated with astrology, and the year before’s with Tarot; this time I’ve been reading the tea leaves. Here is the shape of your next twelve months:
Tasseography is fun: less like reading Tarot cards, and more like reading dreams. You have to distill the shapes yourself out of the general psychic gloop, and every guide to their meanings is provisional and contingent. What does this look like to you? I’ll tell you what it looks like to me. I see the big blob on the left as a prawn, with its square head bristling with antennae, turning back to look over its tail as it jealously clutches its pale brood of eggs. Crustaceans in tea leaves are supposed to represent opportunism, faithlessness, someone that will betray you. But what stands out to me is the prawn’s posture, bent over its own tail. This year will be a year of reversals, things going in precisely the opposite way to the one you thought. A logic that stretches so far in one direction that it suddenly recoils into its opposite. This is your 2026.
Obesity is back
GLP agonists—that’s ozempic, wegovy, grey-market Chinese retatrudite, etc—are a class of drug that can, as far as we can tell, fix absolutely everything that’s wrong with you. They will make you thin. They will help you stop drinking, stop gambling, stop taking heroin, stop having sex with evil people, and stop listlessly scrolling on your phone all night until you’re numb enough to sleep. You will no longer experience gender dysphoria. You will become smarter, and also happier. You will experience improved powers of memory. Your heart, liver, and kidneys will all function more powerfully. The drugs can reverse some of the major signs of ageing and will almost certainly increase your lifespan. It’s possible that you will become immortal. We don’t know yet. It hasn’t been studied. But it’s entirely possible that taking ozempic will turn you into a god. You will be a gorgeous, ageless, smart and skinny god, and as long as you keep injecting yourself with the stuff you will never die. You can get it on the NHS for £9.90 a month.
A lot of people are very upset about this. If you can just fix everything with a simple injection, the world is out of balance. Somewhere, there has to be a price. A portrait in the attic. In a decade or two, the ozempic users need to start bursting out in novel and surprising cancers. When they breed, these gorgeous ageless smart and skinny gods need to give birth to something monstrous, apelike, froglike, forked tongue mewling, the dumb festering animal they thought they’d transcended, bursting gorily out the womb with razor-sharp claws. And maybe that will happen. I’m not a pharmacologist. But I don’t think it needs to; the intended effect is enough.
GLP agonists work by interrupting the reward systems that produce compulsive behaviour. Emotional eaters end up joylessly mashing up material in their mouths when they remember they need the stuff to live, but not deriving any particular pleasure from the process. Gamblers notice that they’ve just let a tenner vanish into the slot machine for no good reason, and decide to call it a night. In a way, these drugs have changed nothing. I’ve been saying for years now that our problem is no longer not getting the things we desire, but not knowing how to desire anything at all. The utopians of the last century wanted a world without want, and we got it. Peptides are just a crude literalisation of that thesis. The future is a Buddhist paradise of jabbering, emaciated, undesiring arahats. One great global Wicked press tour.
Except it isn’t, because the horrible side effects these people might really regret aren’t the ones you read on the label, but the ones you read about in Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu. Once being gorgeous ageless smart and skinny is universally available, it’ll no longer represent any kind of cultural capital, and the only thing that can shock us out of the current doldrums of desire is if asceticism becomes déclassé. Right now, too much overt sexuality is considered vaguely tacky, but not for long. Nothing more valuable in a porndead world than the hunger in the eye, the violent propulsion towards life and death. Stupidity too: isn’t there something deeply extravagant about stupidity? Most of all, though, if everyone is immortal, then death becomes a luxury product. Right now, hyper-wealthy fintech lizards are competing to retire as early as possible, thirty, twenty-five; before long they’ll be competing to die. Bryan Johnson will be smoking two packs a day. It takes a lot of money to be bored with existence, and dying is the most sumptuous and extravagant thing imaginable. It also requires a massive quantity of cultural competence to do it right. You can’t get ChatGPT to do it for you. You can’t learn it in some cram school for nerds. There are no second chances. You can only do it once.
These things will take time. In 2026, though, semaglutide will do what a decade of body positivity couldn’t, and make obesity fashionable. Not any obesity, obviously. Doctors disagree, but there are clearly two ways of being dangerously overweight. There’s the spreading shapelessness that comes from eating lots of deep-fried snacks or frankly anything delivered to your door, food that comes in styrofoam and booze from plastic bottles, blasting your brain with short-form video content while you joylessly ingest. This is entirely different from the taut spherical shape you can achieve if you’re actually hungry.
There is a way of being fat that requires you to regularly eat a dozen oysters if they’re in season, a smoked eel or two, and obviously crabmeat, sucked wetly out the creature’s joints, maybe just a few plump lamb’s livers glazed with Madeira, a veal brain croquette, some great sluglike kidneys in a mustard sauce, a pig’s foot stuffed with sweetbreads and morels, maybe, why not, a jar of rabbit rillettes with cornichons and buttered toast, before the main dish, a great wodge of game pie, thick flakes of buttery pastry, steaming purple melange of terrified animals with juniper berries and little fragments of shot, served alongside pommes dauphinoise and haricots verts gently glossed in butter, and once it’s done an oloroso sherry, half a dozen rum babas doused in a pint of cream, and a crumbly pile of Stilton alongside a smaller mound of wrinkling decorative grapes, the whole thing washed down with three or four bottles of good claret and concluded with a fernet digestif. If you feel like you’re going to burst or be sick, you’re doing it wrong. This is not a special occasion; this is Tuesday. You should be able to play a full game of tennis afterwards. Do it right, and you will be rewarded with the most desirable body of 2026.