Is Astrology Making You Crazy?

Anosognosia: A condition in which a person with a disability is cognitively unaware of having it.

I SUPPOSE A LESS PROVOCATIVE title would be Is Astrology Waylaying Your Willpower? Feel free to replace the clickbait title with this other one. Your call. Although, on the flip, both titles might apply.

Some versions of those questions have been banging around my head for years now. I work every day with clients who trust me to talk with them about important things like meaning and dreaming. Always, running beneath the ground of our exchange is my commitment to maintain a sane, realistic approach to their inquiry.

During the last decade, I’ve developed an exaggerated cynicism about contemporary astrology—especially as it’s presented on the Internet. Learn your life’s true purpose! Embrace your authentic self!! Marry your soulmate!!!

None of these highflown promises can ever be fulfilled by astrology or an astrologer. And yet, as astrology continues to degrade into viral memes and idiotic quizzes, more and more inexperienced, uneducated astrologers are hanging shingles and blowing up social media feeds.

With a natal Mars in Pisces, I’m hyper-attuned to protecting the vulnerable and defenseless. I cannot watch, read or listen to anything that involves harming animals or children. And when people consult with astrologers, they are a combination of those qualities: vulnerable and defenseless.

People are often drawn to astrology because their volition has gone offline. This failure of faculty can occur for countless reasons. But dependence on astrological insights can foster a limiting kind of magical thinking. A passivity that requires a stream of astrological data to sustain the rationale for not engaging with life. “I’ll wait until Jupiter is conjunct my Mars and then get out of bed.”

And online, there are scores of dimwits ready and willing to provide this kind of misguided ‘guidance.’ Many of them via videos and podcasts.

Used Car Salesman Vibes

Yesterday, while producing new content to publish on YouTube, I spent a day investigating a cavalcade of astro-themed videos on the platform. Aside from considering who in the fuck watches a 90-minute video talking about what one can expect from a new Moon in Sagittarius, I sat back, disenchanted, and moved my attention along the darker outline of a childhood memory. Namely, the time when, as a teenager, my dad took me to a nuthouse to visit a recently admitted family member.

All of the videographed astro-gobbledegook I’d watched yesterday generated the same dissonant sound of crazy that I’d fixated on while my dad met with his sister in her beige-decorated space. Nonsensical muttering from the bodies milling the hallway outside my aunt’s hospital room.

Physician Heal Thyself

A friend asked me the other day if the transits to my natal horoscope indicated this or that about a particular event I was invested in. I texted back and explained that I only consult my chart a couple of times each year to get a basic theme or lay of the land for each season. I’d stopped hovering over my chart years ago. And in doing so, I felt relief and release by simply living life instead of framing its every pulse within astrology’s endless variety of explanations.