The Hand You're Dealt
I didn’t expect to feel sorry for them.
Battle of Fates is a Korean survival show where 49 fate readers — shamans, tarot readers, saju masters, face readers — compete to prove they can actually read destiny. On paper it sounds like glorified entertainment. Forty-nine mystical figures in a room, one winner. I went in half-sceptical, half-curious, the way you approach anything that sits just outside what you’re willing to believe.
What I didn’t anticipate was how human they all were. And I mean that in the heaviest sense of the word.
Every single one of them had a story. Not a fun origin story — the kind with a montage and a triumphant score. The kind you carry quietly. Grief, loss, illness, years of being misunderstood. The kind that doesn’t resolve, it just becomes part of how you move through the world.
The one that stopped me was Young Master Byeon. He started his journey at five years old. Five. We’ve all seen this archetype in other forms — the piano prodigy who was practising Chopin while other kids were watching cartoons, the chess grandmaster who never really had a childhood to speak of. We tend to celebrate these stories. But watching Byeon, the feeling I got wasn’t admiration. It was something closer to grief. Whatever opened in him at that age, he never really got to be a child after that. No clean stretch of ordinary life before the weight arrived. It just arrived early and stayed.
I sat with that for a while.
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We romanticise people like him. The gifted one, the seer, the person who can perceive what the rest of us can’t. There’s a kind of glamour to it — in movies, in folklore, even in the way we half-jokingly consult fortune tellers at Waterloo Street and then think about what they said for three days after. The gift feels powerful from the outside.
But watching these 49 people, I kept wondering: what if it’s less gift, more weight? What if the sensitivity that lets you read someone else’s fate also means you can’t quite switch off? What if the same thing that makes you perceptive also makes ordinary life feel a little harder to inhabit?
I don’t know if fate reading is real. I genuinely don’t. But I think that question might be less interesting than this one: what does it cost the person doing it?
Byeon wasn’t an exception. The more episodes I watched, the more I noticed the pattern.
There was Seolhwa, who was told she would have a short life. She knows this. She continues anyway — reading other people’s fates, showing up, doing the work — with that knowledge sitting somewhere in her. I don’t know what to do with that kind of person. I’m not sure I have the vocabulary for it. “Brave” feels too clean.
Then there were the shamans who are parents. What struck me about them wasn’t the rituals or the intensity, though there was plenty of both. It was something smaller: the fear that their children might inherit this path. They didn’t choose to become shamans — in Korean shamanic tradition, the calling chooses you, often through illness or crisis. You resist it, you suffer more. You accept it, and your life becomes something most people wouldn’t recognise as ordinary.
And these people, who have built their entire identity around this path, quietly hope their kids are spared.
If that’s not a review of the life, I don’t know what is. Nobody lies awake worrying their child will inherit something good.
Here’s what makes it complicated though.
People still seek them out. In droves. The show’s guests — celebrities, ordinary people — sit across from these fate readers and open up in ways they probably don’t with their therapists. They cry. They nod. They say how did you know that.
So there’s something being exchanged in that room, regardless of what you believe about the metaphysics of it. These wounded people, with their heavy histories, are giving something real to the people who come to them. Maybe the suffering is precisely what makes them good at it. Maybe you can only see certain things clearly if you’ve had to look at hard truths your whole life.
None of them chose this. Not Byeon at five. Not Seolhwa with her shortened timeline. Not the shamans who resisted the calling until resistance became its own kind of suffering.
But here they all are. Showing up. Reading strangers. Carrying their weight and somehow still making it useful.
And they’re not alone in that. Most people carrying a hard hand never end up on a show. They’re just out there — the single mother holding three jobs together with sheer will, the kid who grew up too fast because someone had to, the person who rebuilt quietly after losing everything. No cameras. No audience. Just the daily decision to keep going anyway.
We don’t get to choose the hand we’re dealt. Some people get a harder one than most, and no amount of positive thinking changes that. But what stays with me, watching all 49 of them, is that the hand isn’t the whole game.
You still get to decide how you play it.