The sky as excuse

Something goes wrong. Your phone crashes, the meeting falls apart, the message you sent arrives at the worst possible moment. And someone, somewhere on social media, already has the answer: it’s Mercury retrograde.

Not as a warning. Not as a prediction. As a retroactive diagnosis. Things happened, and the sky explains why.

This is what we’ve been watching for years now. It’s not new, but it’s grown so much it’s hard to keep up. Eclipses, planetary alignments, Saturn-Pluto conjunctions, blood moons. Every astronomical event comes with its army of experts, their gradient-background stories, their rituals to harness the cosmic energy, and their candle. Always the candle.

The problem isn’t astrology. The problem is what people do with it.

Astrology carries real weight. It’s been in use for thousands of years. The ancients studied it with a mathematical precision that’s still hard to fully grasp today. A proper natal chart requires geometry, trigonometry, knowledge of planetary cycles, and years of practice interpreting how those positions affect a specific person, at a specific moment, in a specific context. This is not entertainment. It’s a serious system of knowledge, with a depth that most people never get close to seeing.

The serious astrologers, the ones who have spent decades studying and working with clients, tend to say the same thing: that they know little. That the deeper you go, the more you see what you still don’t know. Learning the basics takes at least two years of daily study. A real professional training means three to five years of intensive study and practice. And even then, the ones who know the most are the first to speak with caution.

So what does it say when someone with an Instagram channel, three months of reading, and a nice font comes along to explain how the conjunction of this planet with that one is going to affect your week?

They’re not necessarily lying. Many of them have done their research. They know what they’re saying, or at least they know how to say it. But there’s a difference between knowing the vocabulary and knowing how to use it. And that difference shows.

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This isn’t a trick unique to astrology. We’ve been watching technical language from every field get used to give authority to things that have none. Everything is “quantum” now. Quantum healing, quantum leaps, quantum reprogramming. Nobody really knows what that means in those contexts, but it sounds like science, and science commands respect. It sounds like there’s something behind it. Like whoever says it knows more than you.

Astrology works the same way but with its own glossary. If I tell you you’re unlucky, you’ll argue. If I tell you your Saturn is making a square to your north node, you’ll go quiet out of fear of looking ignorant. The technical vocabulary isn’t there to explain things better. It’s there so you can’t argue back. It’s much easier to blame Pluto in Taurus for your car engine blowing up than to admit you haven’t changed the oil since the last time your country’s soccer team won anything worth mentioning.

And when the car burns and the planet was in that position: see? Pluto is destruction and transformation. And when the car doesn’t burn: see? Pluto is giving you a break to work on your resilience. The sky is always right. You always have something to learn. And the expert always has an explanation ready.

This isn’t astrology. This is escapism with good typography.

What astrology actually is, when it’s done right, is something else entirely. It doesn’t tell you what’s going to happen. It shows you influences. And an influence doesn’t obligate you to anything. It doesn’t decide for you. You walk outside and it’s raining. You can get wet. Or you can grab an umbrella. The rain doesn’t disappear, but you have options. That’s free will. And that’s exactly what vanishes when you use the sky as an excuse.

If Mercury retrograde affects you, there are ways to work with it, to counteract that influence, to protect what needs protecting during that period. But that takes study. Three posts and a story with trending music won’t cut it.

You meet someone. Things don’t work out. Turns out they had someone else, or several, or simply never had any serious intentions. And someone explains to you, with complete conviction, that it’s Venus conjunct Saturn blocking your emotional openness. No. You just didn’t ask the basic questions. And even when you sensed the answers, you saw what you wanted to see. You don’t need to draw up a natal chart to figure out whether the person you’re meeting Saturday night is a good person or not. That one you work out by asking the questions you don’t want to ask.

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Every astronomical event comes with its dose of preventive fear and its made-up ritual for the occasion. The seven-planet alignment, the total eclipse, the conjunction that hasn’t happened in centuries. Headlines announce the once-in-a-lifetime event. The fear is already planted. And with the fear comes the candle, the affirmation, the energetic protection kit available at the link in the bio.

It’s fascinating that we use the most advanced technology in history to read a post telling us not to sign contracts today because a ball of gas 400 million miles away is in a bad mood.

This is where the seams show.

Because astrology has become the glue of the new age. And it’s managed that precisely because it has its own real credibility. The planets exist. The cycles exist. The influence exists. That genuine solidity gets borrowed to give authority to everything else: the energies, the portals, the information downloads, the activation processes. Say “astrology” and people pay more attention than if you say “energy.” Because it sounds concrete. And that concreteness gets used as an anchor to sell things that, on their own, don’t hold up.

When everything has an astrological explanation, nothing really does. When the eclipse justifies your anxiety, retrograde explains your miscommunication, and the planetary alignment announces the coming chaos, you’re no longer using knowledge. You’re outsourcing.

And you’re paying, one way or another, someone to tell you what shape your fear takes this week.

The sky isn’t conspiring against you. It’s not working in your favor either. It’s doing what it’s always done: moving.

What does exist is the tendency to look outside for what’s uncomfortable to find inside. Oracles, astrology, any system of knowledge can be a useful tool when it’s used to orient yourself and act. When it’s used to avoid acting, to justify, to wait for the sky to shift position before making a decision, it becomes something else.

The planets don’t know you exist.