Mercury Retrograde Is Over So Why Does Everything Still Suck?

Astrology is having a moment. Instagram is full of astrology meme accounts, and having a zodiac emoji in your Insta or Tinder bio is prime starter pack material. Glossier even has a little planet as its loading symbol. But is it as harmless and innocent as it seems?

The internet will tell you that millennials are turning to a new kind of structure and belief system to make sense of the weird, scary world we live in. If you’re not into astrology and you don’t know what this is all about, then firstly, hello and welcome to the internet, and secondly, let me introduce you to the queen of astrology herself, Susan Miller. This is her explanation:

‘In astrology, we always believe the following rule is true: “As above, so too below.” By that we mean there is a fractal relationship between the orbits in the heavens and human activity down here on Earth.’

Sounds kind of nice, right? My life has been chaos lately, and blaming it all on Mercury made me feel better, like I had to accept that sometimes things were out of my control. But now retrograde is over, and my life is...still chaos? Weird. (I might have blamed both lunar eclipses and the previous Mercury retrograde too.)

The last Mercury retrograde was from July 26 to August 18, and I made it my personal scapegoat. According to astrology, Mercury is meant to keep an eye on a lot of important things in life, but especially communication. This is what Queen Susan has to say about it:

‘When a planet retrogrades, astrologically it is in a resting or sleeping state. Therefore, while Mercury naps, the activities that it governs don’t have the benefit of a well-functioning, wide-awake planet to supervise them. Expect a certain degree of pandemonium to ensue!’

Look at that exclamation mark. Pandemonium! Sounds like a pretty convincing scapegoat if you ask me. It helps that my friends buy into astrology too, so I exist in an echo chamber of astrological understanding and acceptance. But then my mom came along. I casually mentioned Virgo season, which led to a discussion about astrology. ‘Is that healthy?’ asked my mom. I’d never questioned it; what started out as a joke with friends has become a normal part of our communication with each other. It’s stars and planets, of course it’s fine.

Life is weird, dating can suck, and sometimes things happen for no understandable reason. Whether you’re into it seriously or ironically, astrology can be a security blanket for modern life, but since my conversation with my mom I started to wonder if it could be doing as much harm as good. There are positive and negative traits associated with each zodiac sign and the astrology-based Instagram accounts floating around definitely seem to focus on the negatives. Can you really blame the stars for being a shitty person? I’m notttt so sure.

I love these accounts, but maybe astrology—at least in its purest meme form—is in danger of justifying some sketchy personality traits. We’re having a hard enough time as it is, we don’t need the planets to throw our flaws (real or imagined) into our news feeds, and we definitely don’t need to be accepting or embracing them as concrete, unchangeable parts of ourselves.

How deep you choose to dive into zodiac world is up to you, but if Mean Girls taught me one thing (it actually taught me loads, but whatever), it was how to recognize a frenemy. Astrology is cool, memes are fun, but justifying bad or damaging behavior in the name of Susan Miller is less chill. So this Virgo-Libra-cusp is going to lay off the more negative memes and stick to ones like this. And this.

Either way, the third Mercury retrograde of the year begins on November 16th so BE PREPARED.