Travis Day regrets being so strict with his ex-partner about never sleeping in the same bed.

According to human design, the New Age “synthesis” of astrology, the I Ching book of Chinese wisdom, Kabbalah, and the chakra system, “everyone should sleep in their own bed at night” to preserve their auras, says the blond 38-year-old Los Angeles county-based surfer, who’s been following the practice rigidly for the last five years.

“She was not happy and really hated having to go back to her place,” says Day, now a human design coach with 11,000 followers on Instagram. He didn’t know how much the “auric distancing” bothered her, “until she finally expressed it when we were breaking up.”

Human design dictates that people inevitably fall into five different archetypal personality categories: manifestors, generators, manifesting generators, reflectors, and projectors, like Day, who was advised that he shouldn’t hustle hard but instead follow the intuition of his spleen, the little understood organ in the upper abdomen which is traditionally believed to be the seat of bad temper.

The mystical, mechanical inner discovery system turned Day’s life around when he spontaneously received a reading on a beach just outside of LA in August 2020. He was at a financial and emotional “rock bottom” amid the failure of his “beachproof” dog accessory brand, but that initial personality analysis represented “the first time someone actually saw me.”

“For a long time I had depression and talked terribly to myself,” the California native tells me over a Zoom call. “But human design showed me that I actually hated not being me.”

Human design, a philosophy that spans self-improvement to more extreme beliefs like life being predetermined, alien influence on earth, and a coming planetary shift, is approaching a high watermark cultural moment. It might not be long before the phrase, “that’s so mani-gen” is as common, in certain circles, as “that’s so Leo.” Some human design coaches have more than 100,000 followers on social media, offering people advice on everything from finding the loves of their lives to how to get rich.

There are coaching programs and entire centers dedicated to learning and teaching the practice as retreats are cropping up in wellness hotspots from Puerto Escondido, Mexico, to Sofia, Bulgaria. Readings can cost hundreds of dollars; tiktokker Kendra Hilty, who went viral after documenting how she fell in love with her psychiatrist, was receiving $3,000 for three months of weekly human design readings, according to The Cut. Even as I’m writing this article, I pass a bookstore in Vancouver, Canada with a human design book prominently displayed in its front window.

The buzz around this radical system is leading people to take life-changing decisions like ending their marriages or moving countries after single readings, which can also be conducted solely through ChatGPT. “You may realize you don’t love your partner, you hate your job, you can’t stand where you live, and you’re dying inside,” Day says. But he tells WIRED there are culty elements in the ecosystem of training connected to this “new astrology.”

In the new season of Love is Blind: UK, contestant Patrick Justus, a human design coach and “splenic projector,” like Day, propels the phrase “trust your spleen” into the zeitgeist; the show has used the slogan in its marketing ads next to Justus wearing an eyemask. “Listening to my spleen is the best way for me to find the love of my life,” he tells one of his first dates on the show.

After several promising dates with singer Aanu Adewole, Justus starts to doubt the message from his spleen, noting it is “silent.” He dumps Adewole after she appears reluctant to sing for him and confesses that if her mother vetoed him she would have to acquiesce to the parental instruction. “I have to follow my spleen,” Justus told her. “It breaks my heart to tell you I’m breaking up with you.” (It later emerged that another woman may have been pregnant with Justus’ child during the filming of the series and that he had omitted to mention it. In a statement Justus provided to the show for its reunion episode, he said: “2025 has been life-changing as I embrace the joy of becoming a father.”

Justus’ seemingly strict adherence to his human design is not an anomaly. One coach tells WIRED she decided to divorce her husband after doing a reading on a flight to Hawaii, where they were due to start a new life together. To follow the teachings attached to one’s human design is to “decondition” from the societal influences which have molded people to be not their true selves. But Redditors report being scared to “decondition” and make the drastic lifestyle changes required to bring them into greater accordance with their design.

Others claim to have gone to extremes in attempts to live fully in accordance with the teachings and what Day describes as “not self-conditioning forces.” These show up when one is out of alignment with their design and can include frustration, anger, bitterness, or disappointment. The drastic measures some have taken to “self-harmonize” have included moving alone to remote areas. In an Instagram reel, one human design advocate promotes the consumption of “single ingredient foods”—meals with only one ingredient—such as polenta, to live within their design.

Erin Claire Jones, a human design coach with 172,000 followers on Instagram, says the detail in human design assessments is also part of its appeal.

“I’ve seen the most skeptical people fall in love with it because it’s practical, but it’s also so specific,” she says, noting the rise of human design from the extreme fringes towards the mainstream in recent years reflects an increasing collective desire to “learn about ourselves,” warts and all.

Over the past decade she has sold 43,000 personalized design guides mostly for $95 each, conducted sessions with 4,000 people, and trained another 1,500 in how to give readings, en route to publishing this year the book How Do You Choose? with publisher HarperCollins. “Human design is far more mechanical [than astrology] in terms of, ‘Hey, this is how you make decisions.’” Sometimes she observes people and guesses their designs at parties, but she admits to not always getting them right.

Jones, who has blonde highlights and well-defined cheekbones, says she has worked with a host of start-ups and CEOs of small companies to help improve teamwork and boost productivity. Some people, like her, are using knowledge of human design within their own families to help foster more harmonious relations. “My daughters both have entirely different designs than mine, my husband does too,” she says, explaining that she is a projector, like many other coaches like Day. “It’s been so useful to be like, ‘I’m not expecting either my daughters to be anything like me’.”

Human design was born in 1987 when Canadian former advertising executive Robert Krakower, a rumored ketamine enthusiast who had been living like a hippie and residing in a dilapidated casita in Ibiza, claimed to have had an intense transcendental encounter with “the voice” over the course of eight days. As origin myths go, his makes Moses at the burning bush sound almost low-key.

Krakower, a bearded Mufti headdress-wearer who worked part-time at a local school, was walking with his dog when it picked up a scent and approached an abandoned house, noticing a light beneath the door. He shouted at the door and demanded to know, “Who’s there?,” he recalled once in a lecture in Germany. Once inside, the heavy smoker said he heard a voice he imagined to come from “a cigar-smoking 155-year-old woman.”

Then Krakower claimed he started gushing with sweat from head to toe. He went back to his nearby home and said “the voice” instructed him to place his Bible, Bhagavad Gita and Stanford biology textbook together, along with a chessboard and a copper coil. He was told to burn a combination of herbs from the shelves and said a series of cosmic revelations ensued, spanning the Big Bang, the nature of being, the “crystals of consciousness,” and “rave cosmology,” a far out prophecy he went on to make, predicting alien influence in a prophesied influx of disabled and mute children born in or after 2027.

All of this information would help Krakower—who soon renamed himself Ra Uru Hu, a play on his name Robert, a word from “the voice”, and the moment when he demanded to know who was behind the door—forge the pseudoscientific human design system and the bodygraphs which help uniquely define each person according to a series of numbers in his 1992 guide, The Black Book. “Madness is an interesting thing,” said Krakower, who was a “splenic manifestor” and died in 2011 of a heart attack at age 62. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Like, caught in this incredible, choiceless movie.”

In accordance with Krakower’s prophecy, Richard Beaumont, the director of Human Design UK, who worked closely with Krakower for years before his death has already purchased the domain name silentbabies.com. “There’s going to be a new species coming in February 2027,” he says, while sipping a glass of white wine in front of a human design chart over Zoom from his home in the west of England.

“They’re not going to be human, but they will come through human women.” (The human design school Krakower founded, the Jovian Archive, sells an online course centred on the alien prophecy for $2,079, and the organization warns of “imitators and unlicensed black marketeers” across the global network of licenses, trademarks and authorized teachers.) Human design is not a belief system, says Beaumont, who has 38,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. “This is an endless knowledge … We’re not here to interfere with who we are; we’re here to decondition.”

Day —who recently founded a “projector only” online community dedicated to “deconditioning” and other activities like singles nights—claims that some leading figures can be incredibly prescriptive. Last year, he won a raffle to attend a retreat hosted by certain high-profile teachers. There, he says, the cultic, controlling tendencies of parts of the community were laid bare.

“I had never seen so many unhappy, angry people,” he recalls. “People get really attached to making it into rules and then saying, ‘This is what you can do, and this is what you can’t do based on your design.’” He saw people telling others such things as: “‘You’re out of alignment’, ‘You have an open throat chakra, and you’re not supposed to do this’.” It’s a “fucking wild west,” Day says of the sprawling human design industry. “If you want to manipulate someone … The easiest thing to do is sell them on inspiration.”

At the same time, he admits giving human design readings for $250 each has turned his fortunes around; he does at least three readings per week, in addition to offering other services.

Perhaps my fortunes will change, too, if I live more in accordance with whatever my design is, following a recent split which left me soul-searching.

I give Day my time and date of birth and the name of the city I was born, just like with a Zodiac reading, and he inputs the information into a website that conjures a diamond-shaped “bodygraph” which, he says, reveals a distinct numeric genetic code underpinning my “manifesting generator” personality. “Your mind will say you always need to be looking for love and direction, [but] you’re super sensitive to others’ frequencies,” fellow singleton Day tells me. Therefore, it is extremely important that I sleep in my own bed each night to preserve my aura.

But I do hope to find love again, so maybe I’ll allow a sleepover once in a while.