Needless to say, I spend a lot of time thinking about astrology—it's my job, after all. But beyond that, I believe that as an astrologer, I need to be deeply aware of my own birth chart and its timing. If I’m going to have the audacity to predict other people's futures, I should be my own guinea pig first and foremost.
Now, as much as I’d love for this entry to be about a perfect prediction I made for myself, it's actually quite the opposite.
Today, I want to talk about the fallibility of astrology, the imperfections of the astrological profession, and, of course, the shortcomings of the human condition when it comes to peering into the future.
My failed astrology prediction
If you’ve been following my blog or newsletters recently, you know I’ve been wrestling with immigration issues. It started out with a bit of naiveté and snowballed into what felt like a Mercury Retrograde's worth of paperwork and delays.
As both an astrology nerd and a chronically impatient person (thanks to my fiery temperament), I went deep into my charts. I used techniques like Annual Profections, Solar Returns, and Firdaria to try and time the exact date I’d get the green light from the immigration office to make my long-awaited move a reality.
I thought I found the perfect date—everything seemed to line up. The astrological configurations were loud and clear for any good astrologer to see. These charts were practically screaming that on this specific day, something positive about my living situation would manifest. But when the day came, there was no message from the immigration office, just an automated note from my lawyer saying he’d be out of the office for a bit.
The day wasn’t a total loss, though. The charts were indeed signaling positive developments, just not the one I was expecting. Keep this in mind—it’s crucial to understanding the moral of today’s story.
Although the immigration situation was my primary focus, there was another scenario related to my home that I had been giving much less attention to.
After deciding to move to the U.S., I left my previous rental, which required some repairs. Sorting through these repairs with an uncooperative landlord was a nightmare. Long story short, not only did I have to make the repairs myself, but he also unfairly took a chunk of money as a “safety deposit.” After a lot of back and forth, the repairs were made, but he wanted to wait a few weeks to ensure the job was done properly before returning my money. I reluctantly agreed, hoping that one day I’d see my deposit again.
You probably see where this is going. On the day I thought I’d be receiving my immigration papers, what actually happened was that my previous landlord refunded me for my troubles and apologized for being inflexible. While my astrology wasn’t entirely wrong, it felt like a consolation prize to someone eager to settle down as soon as possible.
Why you should be skeptical of astrology
This experience is one reason I often try to predict things for myself or consult with other astrologers. It helps me empathize with my clients, feeling firsthand the impact of receiving a prediction.
In many ways, predictive astrology risks doing a lot of damage. In my case, this wasn’t a particularly sensitive scenario, but it could have been. The confidence I had about that day deeply influenced how I lived in the lead-up to it. And the disappointment of having my hopes crumble is something I’m still processing as I write this.
This doesn’t mean astrology doesn’t work—clearly, it did in this case. However, managing expectations is key for both astrology clients and practitioners.
I often think of astrology as the study of the shape of time. Our modern scientific cosmology already accounts for time as a dimension. We experience spatial dimensions like up/down and left/right, but time is also part of that (hence, the space-time continuum).
However, understanding how this time dimension works remains elusive. The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt has a digestible video on the topic if you’re interested. My own belief is that all of time already exists—some might call it the Great Saturnine Container we’re all in. To put it simply, I believe we move through pre-existing time, rather than creating it as we go. It’s a determinist cosmos, but one I find great comfort in (more on that in a future entry, perhaps).
The point here is not to emphasize how capable astrology is, but rather to highlight how vast and complex the system we’re interacting with is.
Yes, we may live in a pre-determined world, and by extension, astrology—essentially a very accurate calendar—can help us decipher the shape of events. But no human, not even your favorite astrologer, can predict the future with infallible accuracy. There are too many factors for our human minds to fully process. And the tricky part is that we often fill in those gaps with our biases—both astrologers and clients are guilty of this.
So, the moral of the story is that while astrology is powerful and an excellent time-keeping system, the practice of astrology isn’t infallible.
Astrologers are prone to mistakes, and our biases and hopes can influence interpretations—whether we’re predicting for ourselves or others. The best way to approach astrology is to keep it at arm’s length, to remain skeptical of your interpretations (and your astrologer’s), while staying open to the guidance astrology can offer about the direction of your life.
Astrology, like any forecasting tool, deals in likelihoods, and we should treat it as such. Our art occupies this magical space that makes it easy to elevate it to a near-religious status. While there’s certainly something glorious about using astrology to plan our lives and understand ourselves better, it only provides a small piece of the puzzle. A puzzle we may never fully complete, but one we can get close to finishing if we focus more on the fun of assembling it, and less on what the final image will look like.
Astrological predictions are NEVER certain, but the fact that you have a life to live is. So don’t put your life on hold for a prediction that may or may not come true.
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