I used to read my horoscope right after Garfield and before settling in with “Ask Ann Landers.” It appeared opposite the comics that I turned to first in the newspaper. As a child, I learned a few things from “Landers” author Eppie Lederer, mainly about people’s desires to ask questions that they definitely already knew the answer to, on the chance someone else might grant them official self-justification in print. But what did the horoscope teach me as a nine-year-old boy? Let’s be real. What could it possibly teach anyone?
I don’t know that astrology is actually more popular now than it was when one consumed it as part of a regular newspaper syndication diet, back when I already knew the cursed question of “What’s your sign?” as encapsulating the decade that my parents came of age. But it is clear that astrology has now breached the container of the horoscope and been absorbed into the swirl of celebrity standom, political and pop-culture sniping, and generalized paranoia that passes for online discourse today. And in the same way that the latest meme format or nostalgia cycle grants incurious people with nothing to express, other than their own predetermined loyalties, a crumb of largely recycled content to broadcast to likeminded oomfs, astrology has become a medium that supplies the message. She’s a Leo! What more is there to say?
To be clear, the problem is not (simply) that we seem less and less capable of communicating in anything other than clichés. It is, and I can’t believe that I have to enter this into the record, that astrology is completely made up. You know, this right? So why are you, as a 31-year-old, blaming “eclipse season”??
I’m not saying intelligent people can’t be into this stuff. In my twenties, I dated a very smart, well-traveled, and slightly older woman who showed me new parts of the world and introduced me to sophisticated new friends. She also, one time, kept my cousins rapt for hours at a family party by doing their charts. She could never officially complete mine — my mother was unsure what exact time I was born. But she knew my sun sign and tentatively pegged my moon, and she definitely had ideas about all the ways that I lived up to the secrets they told.
(FYI, it’s hard enough to hold your own in a fight with your more worldly girlfriend. When that girlfriend can also apparently read your whole personality as it might be mapped in the stars — and you’re passing through the “Saturn return” that she has already emerged from — suddenly your passenger princess is very much in the driver’s seat.)
People have always had their eccentricities, which often read as “cute” in a a relationship at first and then become irritating later on. But today, our culture is shaped more than ever by our affectations, our frailties, our vanities. Our babyish love of ignorance is chewing holes through the foundation of our culture. It’s not just what “doing your own research” has done to American politics. I don’t know how genuinely scared of sex scenes Gen Z is, how many Boomers are saying “Amen” to Shrimp Jesus, or whether Disney Adults are a corporate invention or true Millennial archetype. But I’ve seen enough, including the proud embrace of astrology, to say with confidence that adults today are profoundly unserious.
Is astrology an easy target? Of course. Have humans ascribed meaning to utterly meaningless events, like two rocks passing each other in space, since the dawn of time? Sure. Let’s have fun out there; life on this particular rock is nasty, brutish and puzzling at best. But if you’ve talked out loud or posted in earnest about “mercury retrograde” and “Scorpio behavior” as a tax-paying adult you probably shouldn’t assume you’ll be taken seriously about anything else. Because what is astrology really but the silliest, most cosmos-sized conspiracy theory of them all?
—G. Galilei
This is such an Aries take.
Wow, someone who hates astrology? Groundbreaking