Astrology Isn’t Ancient Wisdom. It’s Ancient Wishful Thinking.
Astrology is the art of blaming your personal failures on the cosmic movements of balls of gas millions of miles away. It’s the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for people who refuse to accept that sometimes, Brenda, you’re just bad at picking men — it has nothing to do with Mercury’s “energy shifts.”
At its core, astrology is built on the completely rational idea that the moment you emerged screaming into a bacteria-laden hospital room, the exact configuration of distant planets and burning stars determined your entire personality, career, love life, and favorite Starbucks order.
Sure. Makes perfect sense. Gravity doesn’t even noticeably affect you unless you’re standing on Earth, but somehow, Venus being in retrograde made you bomb your job interview? Okay.
I love how astrology expects you to take it seriously while offering some of the most broad, meaningless advice ever cobbled together.
“Beware of conflict today.”
Wow, Susan. That’s incredibly specific. It’s almost like conflict is part of daily human existence.
“You may meet someone important!”
Yeah, it’s called ordering a cheeseburger from a teenager making minimum wage at Wendy’s. Fate is wild, isn’t it?
The zodiac signs themselves read like character sheets for the world’s worst RPG. Aries are “bold leaders,” Scorpios are “passionate and intense,” Pisces are “emotional dreamers,” and Capricorns are, apparently, the universe’s designated hall monitors.
You could swap the adjectives around like magnetic poetry and no one would notice. If you actually read the descriptions without the zodiac headings, you’d think they were all talking about the same person — namely, a highly unstable emotional wreck who oscillates between ambition and daydreaming depending on whether it’s before or after lunch.
Astrologers will insist it’s an ancient, sacred practice. You know what else was ancient? Bloodletting, human sacrifice, and treating migraines by drilling holes in your skull. Not everything that’s old is profound. Sometimes it’s just old and stupid.
And don’t get me started on Mercury retrograde. Every time someone tells me their phone died because “Mercury’s in retrograde,” a little part of my soul withers up and dies from secondhand embarrassment.
Maybe your tech issues aren’t the fault of a distant rock looping around the sun — maybe it’s because you’re still using a phone you dropped in the toilet in 2017, Karen.
Final thought? Astrology isn’t guidance. It’s cowardice in glitter eyeliner. It’s a way to blame fate instead of your own bad decisions. It’s a way to feel special without having to be responsible.
If the stars really did dictate everything about your life, maybe the universe looked at you, shrugged, and said, “Good luck, dummy.”