People used to look at the sky and chart the seasons. Now they look at the sky and blame Mercury for their bad haircut.
Somewhere along the way, humanity decided it was far too exhausting to understand even the most basic facts about the universe, so we invented a shortcut: Sun Sign Astrology. Why bother studying the complexities of human behavior, environmental influence, genetics, psychology, and choice when you can just sort the entire species into twelve personality types based on what month they squirted out of the womb?
You’re not complicated. You’re a Libra. You’re not emotionally unavailable because you refuse to deal with your unresolved childhood trauma — you’re a Virgo. You didn’t make three consecutive bad dating choices because you have attachment issues. No, no. You’re a Cancer, and Mercury was in retrograde. Mystery solved.
The most depressing part isn’t just that people believe this drivel. It’s that they do so without even a kindergarten-level understanding of the actual astronomy that astrology pretends to be based on.
Four seasons. Two solstices. Two equinoxes. The ancient Babylonians understood this. Peasant farmers with nothing but a stick in the dirt could track the sun and stars across the sky with more rigor and respect than a modern adult scrolling through Instagram captions about “what it means to be a Pisces.”
The entire point of tracking the Sun’s movement wasn’t to predict whether Chad would text you back. It was to mark the solstices — the longest and shortest days of the year — and the equinoxes, when day and night are perfectly balanced. Four cosmic landmarks. Two turning points and two tipping points. Every ancient civilization understood this without needing a BuzzFeed quiz to explain it. The seasons shift because the Earth tilts. The Sun’s path rises and falls in the sky. That’s it. That’s the big secret. You live on a rock hurtling around a star. And somehow, in the grand march from sowing fields to surviving winters, we ended up with “Scorpio Season Vibes” memes.
For the record: you have two luminaries in your astrological chart — the Sun AND the Moon — but somehow that tiny fact escapes notice in every blaring “What Your Sun Sign Says About Your Love Life” magazine article clogging the collective mental arteries. You also have seven traditional planets somewhere in your so-called “chart” — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — and if you’re feeling generous (and delusional), you can throw in Pluto for good measure, even though astronomers demoted it twenty years ago and it’s been sulking ever since.
Every single celestial body visible to the naked eye has a position at the time of your birth. All of them. The Sun didn’t just shine a spotlight on your soul while ignoring literally everything else happening in the cosmos. Yet Sun Sign Astrology insists that the only thing that matters is what house party the Sun happened to be crashing when you showed up.
This isn’t mysticism. It isn’t ancient wisdom. It’s lazy, flat-pack, idiot-proof fortune cookie philosophy, pre-sliced into twelve neat slices because that’s the only way the average brain can apparently handle reality now — color-coded, hashtagged, and dumbed down until even the Earth’s own seasons seem like optional trivia.
Sun sign astrology is the intellectual equivalent of trying to diagnose a car’s engine problems by kicking the tire and listening for a vibe. It’s the cognitive face-plant of a culture so terminally distracted it can’t even be bothered to remember that there’s more than one object in the night sky. It’s not just bad science — it’s bad imagination.
If you truly believe the sum total of your identity was stamped onto your forehead by the Sun like some kind of cosmic barcode, congratulations:
You are proof that de-evolution is alive and well.
And if you need me, I’ll be outside, screaming at the constellations for failing to warn us about this sooner.