2025: The Year of The Hermit
Last week, you may have seen my reflection on 2024 as The Year of Strength, the 8th card in the tarot. If 2024’s tarot card was Strength, this means that 2025’s tarot card is The Hermit.
The Hermit is the card of introspection, self-reflection, personal journeys and spending time alone. In essence, it is focused on our internal world, rather than the external. Personally, I have always loved this card, but it is actually one of the most divisive cards of the tarot deck. A lot of people fear this card, or at the very least, dislike seeing him in a reading, and what I have come to find is that, generally, our opinion of The Hermit seems to reflect how comfortable we are being alone with our thoughts. For some of us, spending time alone feels like peace and tranquility, to others, spending time alone feels like our own personal brand of hell.
Regardless of whether we are comfortable in The Hermit’s presence or not, I must stress that his presence is usually incredibly positive. Introspection leads to growth, it leads to enlightenment, it leads to self-love. Improving our relationship with ourselves is invaluable. At the end of the day, the only person we can count on being with us from the moment we’re born until the day we die is ourselves, so having a good relationship to self can only be a good thing.
So, what does this mean for 2025, and what can we learn this year?
The Loneliness Epidemic
There has been so much research coming out about how lonely we are as a society, and it seems that this has steadily ramped up over the last few years, but time and time again, it has been proven that a core part of our humanity is our desire for human connection. We are social creatures, and we crave to bond with people. With this being the Year of The Hermit, it’s quite possible that the loneliness epidemic could really come to the fore this year. While this might sound like a bad thing, it’s important to remember that, when issues are brought to our attention, they are so much more likely to be solved. As such, this year could lay the foundations for us to build a more connected society.
Time To Unplug
The irony is that, though we are a lonely society, we are also constantly in connection and in conversation. We’re constantly available. In the digital era, we’re ‘on call’ always. There’s also the information overload that comes in the form of content, content, content! No wonder we find it hard to quiet our minds. But The Hermit calls us to do just that. In this way, 2025 could be a good year to find time and space to ‘unplug’ - and that’s not just digitally.
It strikes me just how many people came out of COVID lockdowns having completely rethought their life choices. Consider the fact that so many people quit their jobs, whether that be because they wanted to improve their work/life balance, pursue a completely new career or relocate their lives. The time and space forced upon us in that difficult time was incredibly damaging in many ways, but it also highlighted the ways in which people were living on autopilot, just keeping on keeping on, without really considering whether any of it was what they wanted, whether they felt satisfied or fulfilled in the life they were living.
The Hermit is a card where we get deeply introspective, where we truly come to ‘know ourselves’, and we can only do that when we stop for long enough to listen to what’s going on inside our mind.
There’s No ‘We’ in ‘Me’
At its core, The Hermit is a focus on ourselves, and while that can be healthy, enlightening and deeply healing, which we will touch on in a moment, it can also be a tad narcissistic. This may sound like a reductive interpretation of The Hermit, but all of the tarot cards contain multitudes, all of them have a light and a shadow, and the shadow of The Hermit certainly can lean towards an obsessive navel-gazing and self-absorption, at the expense of all else.
I consume a lot of self-help content, whether that be online, in podcasts or reading books, and one thing I keep seeing lately is the notion that, “It takes a village.” Right now, our villages are getting smaller and smaller, and many people don’t have anyone they can rely on for support whatsoever, especially when we are favouring digital communities over IRL ones. But the smaller our in-person communities become, the more insular our lives are, and the more isolated we get, the more self-focused we can be. Again, we may see this becoming more evident in the coming months, with people withdrawing into their own little worlds, their own lives, and consequently, social networks shrinking.
But this is not always a bad thing. In fact, for many people, this could be really wonderful. Those who are used to people pleasing, who are running on empty, feeling like it’s impossible to say the word ‘no’, that aren’t pursuing dreams for the fear of being judged or criticised by those closest them, this is a year for putting up some boundaries and prioritising your own goals. No, it’s not selfish to do that - it’s being true to yourself.
The thing is that so many of us live our lives to other peoples expectations and standards, and we don’t do things that would make us extremely happy and fulfilled because we don’t want to disappoint others. People pursue careers that will make their parents proud. They marry partners that are accepted by their wider circle, and live in certain locations because they worry how moving would impact their loved ones, or whether their friendships would suffer. People hide core, fundamental parts of their being for fear of judgement and rejection. All of these things make us miserable, and while those important people in our lives might approve of our choices, you are the only person who has to live with the consequences of those choices. At the end of the day, those people have to go and live their own lives, and deal with the consequences of their own choices too.
So, while it’s important not to be insensitive of other people’s thoughts, feelings and opinions, and the impact of our choices on other people, we should not be living our life in service to someone else, because it’s not going to make anyone happy. You can only live your life for you. The thing is, the more fulfilling your life is, the more content you’ll be, and the more content you are, the better you can show up for your loved ones. So that’s what we call a win-win, right?
On top of all of that, it enables you to show up with others as your truest, most authentic self. People can actually get to know you, as in the person you really, truly are. If you are living your life by other people’s expectations and standards, the person they know is not really you, it’s a mask, a facade. If you take that mask off and these people can’t accept what’s underneath, then it’s clear that this person can’t accept you. Perhaps this can help us to re-prioritise the people in our lives. To be clear, that’s not about just brutally cutting people out, but perhaps that person becomes a less prominent fixture in our lives. As such, our social network might shrink. Although that can be a bad thing, it can also be a good thing. Connection is only good for us when the connections are real and make us feel loved and supported. Surely, it’s better to invest our energy into a small circle of people who really love and understand us, who see us for the person we really are, rather than a massive circle of people who can’t respect our boundaries, are constantly imposing their own viewpoints on us with no consideration for our own and that persistently demand of our time and energy, while not being willing to reciprocate.
Something’s Not Right
Ultimately, the key thing we need to consider about The Hermit is why we withdraw into this space and why his step in our journey through the Major Arcana of the tarot matters. We enter into the space of The Hermit knowing that something in our lives doesn’t feel right. In a sense, we have to get to a place of discomfort, in order to venture out on the journey of The Hermit.
As a collective, I think discomfort is an understatement at the moment.
And so, what The Hermit suggests is that, in 2025, that feeling of discomfort can be utilised as a motivating force, to take us on a journey deeper into ourselves, so that we can form a greater understanding of who we are and who we want to be, and when we understand the answers to those questions on a personal level, we can start to bring those ideas into the collective, and that’s where real change can happen.
Within this context, it’s important to acknowledge that the card of the year for 2026 (talking about that sounds insane, I know!) is the Wheel of Fortune, a very misunderstood tarot card due to its usage in movies as a harbinger of bad luck. Ultimately, what it talks about is change, and it has a rather mysterious, unknown quality to the card. It is also an opportunity for patterns and cycles to be broken. As such, The Hermit is illuminating our path to change, because we have to understand what is wrong, we have to understand what needs to change, before we can be presented with an opportunity to change it - and certainly, it feels like what needs to change is being thrown in our faces every day at the moment!
All of this considered, The Hermit asks for deep reflection, and so everything that is going on in the world at the moment, everything going on in your life right now, The Hermit asks you to examine all of it, to really contemplate it, and come to an understanding of how it sits with you, how you feel about it. This is your lantern, the ultimate Hermit symbol, that will guide you through the darkness and into the light. It is your very essence, the light within you, that seeks to find the light externally.
Individually, we must recognise our own light, so that we can see that same light in others.
And the more of us that can harness our individual light, while we may each only possess a small glow, together, we can make the world a brighter place.
Did this resonate with you? Do you have different expectations for this year, based on The Hermit being the Card of The Year? Let me know in the comments below!
Love & Light
N x
