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I’ve seen several trends in my 10-year teaching career: bottle flipping, fidget spinners, viral vandalism. This year teachers are reporting a new trend: “Coin Boys.” Although I haven’t (yet) seen it myself, an exasperated teacher on Reddit explains:

“The newest thing here is a flock of self-proclaimed ‘coin boys’ who carry a quarter on hand at all times and constantly flip it. They have their entire personality revolve around coins, coin flips, and chance. When we went around doing an ice breaker, 4 or 5 of the kids said some variation of ‘I live by the coin and die by the coin’ as their fact.

Just about an hour ago, when I assigned the first assignment of the school year, one of the coin boys was bold enough to say ‘heads I do it, tails I don’t.’ I told him if he flipped the coin he would be getting a call home on the first week of [high school]. He flipped it anyway and it came up heads (thank god for that at least). 

But then the other coin boy in that class flipped his coin and it came up tails. He said the coin has spoken and he’s not doing it. I say very well, enjoy your 0 and your call home — what a great way to start off the school year and your high school career.”

I find this account delightful, as a teacher, as an observer and amateur anthropologist of Generation Z, and — most of all — as a student of religion. For the past few years, I’ve taught a Comparative Religions elective course to high school students, and I’ve been intrigued by the innovative ways that Gen Z chooses to engage with religion and religious practices. The “Coin Boys” are just another example of this. These “Coin Boys” are likely unaware that they are reviving an ancient and venerable religious practice: cleromancy, a form of divination in which an outcome is determined by random means, such as the casting of dice, the drawing of cards, or the flipping of coins.

I should note that it’s difficult to confirm if the Coin Boys anecdote is true. Reddit is an online forum in which anonymous “Redditers” can post under pseudonyms. Although the various “subreddits” (forums organized by topic of interest) have moderators, posts are not fact-checked or vetted like mainstream news outlets. Indeed, internet sleuths have discovered good reasons to believe the story is an amusing fabrication by an online “troll” or prankster.

But it’s noteworthy that the post was “upvoted” more than 13,000 times by users on r/teachers; this suggests to me that very many teachers found the story plausible. As an experienced teacher myself, I absolutely found the story believable. Some 1,500 teachers commented on the thread, most thanking the original poster profusely for the heads-up, grateful that they might strategize in advance how to meet the challenge posed by the Coin Boys if or when the trend arrived at their school. And even if the original anecdote was a hoax, the Reddit post was widely re-posted on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), and so I’m quite confident the hoax has spawned copycats “IRL,” or “in real life,” as my students would say.

But even if the Coin Boys story were verifiably true, it wouldn’t be especially interesting if it was just an idiosyncratic example of a hyper-local high school subculture. But the Coin Boys (real or fictitious) are plausible to teachers like me because Gen Z has consistently demonstrated a unique interest in cleromancy — and most notably Tarot cards (a sub-genre of cleromancy called cartomancy). “Tarot Booms as Gen Z Sorts Out Spiritual Path,” reads one typical headline. A recent survey found that 51% of respondents ages 13-25 engaged in “tarot cards or fortune telling.” The Coin Boys, whether real or not, represent a well-documented magical-religious worldview among Generation Z.

(Image source: Cristian/AdobeStock Ashley Britton/SheKnows)

What, therefore, might we learn from the Coin Boys? I think the anecdote provides important insights into young people, play, education, psychology, and the persistence of religious ideas in our so-called secular age.

In cultures with a magical world view, there is no such thing as “randomness,” “chance,” or “coincidence.” As anthropologists Rosalie Wax and Murray Wax have written, “It is [only] we [moderns] who accept the possibility and logic of pure chance, while for the dweller in the magical world, no event is ‘accidental’ or ‘random’, but each has its chain of causation in which Power, or its lack, was the decisive agency.” Because everything apparently random is actually caused by the power of some (supernatural) agent, cleromancy is a mechanism by which these powers can be tested and their will discerned.

For thousands of years, the Chinese engaged in cleromancy by flipping coins or passing yarrow sticks from one hand to the other to consult the I Ching. The Ancient Hebrews made use of the Urim and Thummim, which may have been a pair of sacred dice, or else “were two flat stones, one side of which was the auspicious side and one the inauspicious, so that if they both fell with the same side upward the answer was given, while if they revealed different sides there was no answer.” The Hebrews also drew lots (1 Samuel 14:42; Jonah 1:7), as did the Romans. (We still talk of “drawing the short straw” to talk about a person to whom an unwelcome task or fate falls.) The practice of cleromancy is ubiquitous in cultures across time and geographical space.

Of course, one might argue that the “Coin Boys” are not engaging in a religious practice at all, but merely teenage play, and to confuse the two is to insult religion and place undue importance on what is, in the end, only silliness. But Johann Huizinga, the preeminent cultural historian of play, convincingly argued in Homo Ludens that there has always been the closest affinity between play and religion.

Huizinga argued that ritual and myth are rooted in what he called the “play instinct” or “ludic function.” He writes, “In all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit is playing on the border-line between jest and earnest [. . .] sacred rites, sacrifices, consecrations and mysteries, all of which serve to guarantee the well-being of the world, [are performed] in a spirit of pure play truly understood.”

Huizinga makes compelling connections between religious activities and the children’s games that take place on the playground. Both religious ritual and the games of children put a pause to “ordinary life” and transport the participants to another world. Both involve aspects of role-play or pretend. Both utilize a peculiar vocabulary unique to the context of the game or the ritual. Both mark out a sacred space, hallowed spot, or boundary within which special and arbitrary rules are strictly enforced: “Formally speaking, there is no distinction whatever between marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes of sheer play. The turf, the tennis-court, the chess-board and the pavement-hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle.”

You can sense the truth of Huizinga’s argument if you observe the earnest concentration of a group of schoolchildren playing hop-scotch: the clearly delineated squares in chalk like a magic circle; the mantra-like rhymes recited by the skipper, passed orally from one generation of school children to the next; the earnest seriousness of the inviolable rules. One can sense it in a baseball game: the painted diamond; the special vocabulary (innings, dugout, strike, shortstop); the esoteric hand gestures and signs between catcher and pitcher; superstitious rituals of pitchers and batters; the dramatic and impractical costuming and eye-black.

As further proof of the overlap between the earnestness of religion and the frivolity of play, Huizinga reminds us that in many cultures the gods themselves play games of “chance”: “In the Mahabharata the world itself is conceived as a game of dice which Siva plays with his queen… Germanic mythology also tells of a game played by the gods on a playing-board: when the world was ordained the gods assembled for dicing together, and when it is to be born again after its destruction the rejuvenated Ases will find the golden playing-boards they originally had.” In other words, play was never beneath the dignity of the gods; games of chance were one of the gods’ favorite pastimes.

But if there are historical precedents, it also seems that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between cleromancy as practiced by ancient people and the coin flipping of the Coin Boys. Ancient practitioners saw in the world a deep order and logic, and cleromancy was a way to discern that order and reconcile oneself with it. To the contrary, I suspect these Gen Z Coin Boys see a lack of order and logic in the world, and use their coin flipping to express their frustration with the randomness, and maybe even the futility, of their situation.

There is mounting evidence that Gen Z is not okay. Experts are calling it a “crisis” —  anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation are all way up. I speculate, though I cannot confirm, that the Coin Boys’ activities might actually derive from a nihilistic worldview diametrically opposed to the worldview of ancient diviners.

But why “Coin Boys” and not “Coin Girls”? I’m convinced by firsthand experience in the classroom and by emerging research cited by scholars such as Richard Reeves (author of Of Boys and Men), that boys are disengaging from school. Reeves notes that male students, on average, earn worse grades and enroll in fewer advanced courses than their female classmates. Currently, girls represent two-thirds of the top 10 percent of GPA scores, while boys make up two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent. Boys are also 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading, and science. The consequences of boys’ disengagement in high school are evident in the increasing disparities observed at the college level. As Reeves writes, “There is a bigger gender gap in higher education today than in 1972, when Title IX was passed. Back then, 57% of bachelor’s degrees went to men. Within a decade the gap had closed. In 2021, 58% of degrees went to women.”

According to Reeves, there are several reasons for high school boys’ disengagement: boys tend to lag behind girls in their intellectual and emotional development; the teaching force is overwhelmingly female; time for recess and gym has been dramatically reduced; and funding for career and technical education has been slashed. Some might object that these broad generalizations amount to a kind of crude gender essentialism, but Reeves’ research is compelling, and my own on-the-ground experiences lead me to believe that Reeves is on to something.

It could be, then, that the Coin Boys are asserting their autonomy in a school system that feels particularly stifling for young men. In my experience as a teacher, students (and especially boys) often experience school as an arbitrary set of disconnected tasks. Too often, students have too little input into what they learn and how they demonstrate their learning. If this is true, there’s something fitting, even poetic, about protesting the arbitrariness of school with something equally arbitrary.

An alternative explanation: Coin Boys (and those who engage in similar practices like Tarot readings) may have discovered that these practices are useful ways of self-psychologizing and discovering truths about oneself. If we are to follow the Delphic maxim to “Know Thyself,” it turns out that flipping a coin can be a good way to discover one’s own desires. In his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman gives the following advice:

“So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being ‘told’ what to do by the coin, that’s the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it’s ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option.”

Is this magic or psychology? Or both? It was the popularizer of Buddhism and Taoism Alan Watts, in his book Way of Zen, who argued that eastern methods of divination like the I Ching might be usefully compared to the Rorschach test in Western psychology. Both might be thought of as means of discovering and accessing the intuitive, or unconscious, regions of the self — what Watts calls the “peripheral vision” of the mind. We should not be so quick, therefore, to dismiss things like Tarot reading and the Coin Boys.

In 2004, psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote his book Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. According to Schwartz, the (un)official “dogma” of Western industrial societies goes as follows: to maximize welfare, you maximize freedom; to maximize freedom, you maximize choice. To maximize choice is, therefore, to maximize both freedom and welfare. Although this logic seems intuitively correct, Schwartz argues that it simply isn’t so. Instead, the “explosion of choices” available to people in modern affluent Western societies has made us more anxious and depressed. Instead of maximizing our happiness, it has led to analysis paralysis and decision fatigue. The explosion of choices has diminished our psychic bandwidth, leaving us drained and dissatisfied, constantly weighing the opportunity costs of choosing one thing instead of another.

Much has changed since 2004, and the breadth of our choices has only continued to expand. A prime example is modern online dating. Since Tinder launched in 2012, the dating landscape has changed dramatically. Just a few generations ago, one’s dating pool was limited to who you might meet at work, in your religious community, or at a bar. Now, a limitless potential pool of mates sits in our pocket, a swipe away. But this hasn’t improved our love lives; one survey found that 79% of Gen Z report dating app burnout. “Do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper of Nam,” reads one viral Tweet.

Schwartz’s work provides a suggestive framework to understand the appeal of modern cleromancy, whether through coin flipping or Tarot cards. Cleromancy could be an exceedingly effective way of cutting through the psychic smog of analysis paralysis. It could be understood as a kind 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 through which to explore the complex interplay of religion, play, and psychology in the Gen Z cohort. The ancient practice of cleromancy has been adopted and cleverly adapted by modern adolescents in response to contemporary challenges. Whether viewed as a playful rebellion against the strictures of modern life, a manifestation of nihilistic tendency, or a pragmatic tool for self-psychologizing and decision-making, the phenomenon underscores the enduring relevance, and the flexibility, of magical-religious practices in navigating the complexities of the human experience.

Corey Landon Wozniak lives with his wife and four sons in Las Vegas, NV. He teaches English and Comparative Religions at a public high school.