I Don't Believe In Astrology
I made it a goal of mine to start writing about my political, religious, social, economic, and philosophical views again at some point, and since I can't sleep, this is as good an opportunity as any. I'm not here to antagonize or proselytize, but simply to get out of my quiet little corner and stop hiding from the world. I do plan on getting back to my morbidly unsettling introspection, but I would rather cross this off my list and get this off my chest. As the group indicates, today's topic is astrology.
Growing up, I never really put much stock into being labelled a Capricorn. I knew it had to do with the day I was born on, but aside from that I didn't think it meant anything significant. In my eyes, your zodiac sign held as much influence as your birthstone or the #1 song on the radio that day.
I knew too that horoscopes were linked to your astrological sign, but also figured that they were about as valuable as a fortune cookie. It's just generally good advice that people might pay closer attention to if they feel a personal connection. It was just a neat little gimmicky belief leftover from our more superstitious ancestors, not unlike wishing on a star or saying 'bless you' to a person when they sneeze.
It wasn't until I got to college that I realized that there were many people that judged their romantic compatibility and friend groups according to the zodiac. Furthermore, there were people that took horoscopes as a direct message from the cosmos about how to handle life and which decisions to make. It definitely baffled me how much the untested and unexplained beliefs of an ancient civilization can have so much impact on a modern society.
As someone with severe trust issues, my natural skepticism kicked in and I sought to take a stab at what I saw as absurd behavior. It was then that I learned about the Barnum/Forer Effect, whereby people will take very vague and generic pieces of information and believe that it applies specifically to them. There were even experiments by popular and influential skeptics like Penn & Teller, Richard Dawkins, and James Randi that showed how horoscopes directly lead to this effect.
The experiments consisted of giving people horoscopes that may or may not have aligned with their zodiac sign and seeing whether or not people believed it applied to their lives. Should horoscopes be true, people would pick the horoscope that applied to them and reject the ones that didn't. What the experiments showed were that even if people born under various zodiac signs were given identical horoscopes, the majority of them believed that the generic horoscope applied to them. In another experiment, people were given the horoscope that corresponded to their specific zodiac sign and only about 50% of them accepted it as accurate, which is basically the same odds as a coin flip.
But relationship compatibility is also a huge part of astrology, as people believe that certain signs are better suited to others and that certain signs should be avoided depending on your own. However, I got to see some pretty interesting graphics that looked at the marriage and divorce rates in the US and the UK between people according to the zodiac signs of the bride and groom. Should this aspect of astrology be accurate, you would see certain sign combinations with higher marriage or divorce rates depending on whatever compatibilities determined astrology.
Much like the other experiment, so too was this facet of astrology seemingly debunked, as none of the suggested zodiac pairings show a statistically significant deviation from randomness or chance when it came to either marriage or divorce. This collection of research would lead one to believe that your astrological sign has no influence on the type of people you would best get along with.
After seeing those results, I concluded that horoscopes, and therefore all of astrology, was just a bunch of BS. For years I was content with that conclusion and didn't seek any further evidence. But over time I kept seeing people describe Capricorn traits and personalities and couldn't shake the feeling as if someone was reading my soul back to me. It was intensely personal how inextricably precise many of the descriptions were. Even though I knew about the Barnum effect, I weighed that against the difficulties that I've had securing and maintaining relationships due to my distinct personality and attitudes. I've never been one to follow a herd, so setting myself apart should make me harder to categorize and qualify, but still the feeling remained.
The interest grew and I began feeling comfortable with the idea that even if I couldn't explain astrology, the similarities between my own personality and the qualities associated with Capricorns was too much of a coincidence to disregard.
It was not long after that when I got a Tinder match with a lady that was very into astrology. I'm fairly confident that the only reason she agreed to date me was because I was a Capricorn, as that was one of the first questions she asked me. I knew that was a red flag, but online dating is a cold, desolate place for average-looking men, so I took the chance anyway.
I admitted to her that I didn't know much about the intricacies of astrology, but was willing to learn. She had fully bought into that belief system, so we discussed a little bit about rising planets and what influence the sun and moon had. It was part fascinating and part 'what the f##k did I get into?', but it was an informational conversation nonetheless that I accepted with an open mind. The connection with her ended up going nowhere despite our supposedly cosmic chances of success, so I wonder how that fits into her belief system.
My pathetic dating life aside, I still retained a curious interest in astrology and zodiac signs and decided to give it another chance while still bringing along my inner skeptic. I was determined to find a final answer to the question: does the alignment of the cosmos influence human personalities and behavior?
It was not long into this journey that I discovered some very interesting omissions from astrology that neither the ancient Babylonians nor our dear friend Ptolemy accounted for. For one, the cosmological influence of the planets within our Solar System only goes up to Saturn. Neptune and Uranus (and our favorite underdog, Pluto) are nowhere to be found in astrology. That's because those planets were not discovered until a few hundred years ago. It's highly unusual that everything else in our Solar System has an influence on our lives while those two planets don't. So to rectify these glaring omissions, die-hard astrologers retroactively ham-fisted these planets to fit their ancient belief system with intentionally vague descriptions that hold little significance since all the good stuff was given to the other planets.
Another significant hole in the story comes from the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer. Ophiuchus lies along the same celestial latitude that all the other zodiac signs lie on, yet it is glossed over in astrology. Despite Earth sharing as significant an amount of time under this constellation as any other in the zodiac, nobody identifies as Ophiuchus. The reality is that in order to have a consistent belief system, there should be at least 13 zodiac signs (some could argue even more since there are other constellations along the same latitude) instead of 12, but the ancient Babylonian obsession with the mathematical properties of the number 12 lead them to purposefully exclude our celestial snake wrangler from their zodiac and continue the belief system without it. It may possibly be the first case of lying by omission known to history.
And it is actually this obsession with the number 12 that really sinks the whole argument about astrology, since even though each of the 12 zodiac signs is given a roughly equal number of days on our calendar, the actual number of days our planet spends under a given constellation varies considerably. The constellations are not evenly spread apart, not even when you account for the cosmic expansion that has happened in the last few thousand years since this belief system was founded. Our cosmological calendar paints a much different picture as it portrays a false image of equality under the stars.
However, the biggest, and likely most embarrassing to devout astrologers, inconsistency comes from the gradual tilting of the Earth's axis. The calendar dates and zodiac signs attributed to them have not been aligned in a long, long time. In the roughly 3000 years since the Babylonians developed astrology, the Earth's axis has tilted in a way where our rotation through the zodiac constellations no longer align with their assigned months. Every single astrology sign is now approximately a month later than we believe it to be. So while I've been nodding and agreeing with the majority of Capricorn traits I believed defined me, I've been a Sagittarius this whole time.
Now, even though I've pretty conclusively shown astrology to be a bunch of pseudoscientific bunk, I do want to explore the idea that your birth month influences personality. A lot of people that believe in astrology do so because their character traits and the traits of the people they know align far too perfectly with their assigned zodiac sign. Even though astrology is the unviably deformed love child of ancient astronomers and math nerds all high off pareidolia, maybe there is a nugget of truth to their beliefs.
The Earth has the luxury of going through fairly consistent seasons. People can reliably predict when it will get rainy, cold, snowy, or otherwise. We know that seasonality exists in our produce, which gave way to the eventual rise of farming and away from our hunter-gatherer ways. We also know that there are various things that can affect the health and development of a baby during pregnancy. Doctors will recommend staying away from certain foods or drinks or bad habits for a reason.
Though to wrangle together these loose thoughts into a semi-coherent theory, what if the things pregnant women and developing infants experience during this seasonality somehow lead to distinct neurological developments that pave the way for the traits and qualities attributed to astrology? Maybe the lack of sunlight in the winter causes a decreased intake of vitamin C and a lowered production of dopamine that can possibly impact the fetus in distinct ways. Maybe the abundance of fruits and vegetables in the spring create a complex enough nutritional profile that also impacts the fetus. Maybe a baby born in the cold season spends an inordinate amount of time bundled up and sheltered which delays certain neurological developments. There are a lot of what-ifs we don't know and haven't adequately researched, but maybe, just maybe, those quirky star-children were actually onto something.
It'll take a long time before we will ever know, and I may never know personally, but it's an interesting thought to have.
Growing up, I never really put much stock into being labelled a Capricorn. I knew it had to do with the day I was born on, but aside from that I didn't think it meant anything significant. In my eyes, your zodiac sign held as much influence as your birthstone or the #1 song on the radio that day.
I knew too that horoscopes were linked to your astrological sign, but also figured that they were about as valuable as a fortune cookie. It's just generally good advice that people might pay closer attention to if they feel a personal connection. It was just a neat little gimmicky belief leftover from our more superstitious ancestors, not unlike wishing on a star or saying 'bless you' to a person when they sneeze.
It wasn't until I got to college that I realized that there were many people that judged their romantic compatibility and friend groups according to the zodiac. Furthermore, there were people that took horoscopes as a direct message from the cosmos about how to handle life and which decisions to make. It definitely baffled me how much the untested and unexplained beliefs of an ancient civilization can have so much impact on a modern society.
As someone with severe trust issues, my natural skepticism kicked in and I sought to take a stab at what I saw as absurd behavior. It was then that I learned about the Barnum/Forer Effect, whereby people will take very vague and generic pieces of information and believe that it applies specifically to them. There were even experiments by popular and influential skeptics like Penn & Teller, Richard Dawkins, and James Randi that showed how horoscopes directly lead to this effect.
The experiments consisted of giving people horoscopes that may or may not have aligned with their zodiac sign and seeing whether or not people believed it applied to their lives. Should horoscopes be true, people would pick the horoscope that applied to them and reject the ones that didn't. What the experiments showed were that even if people born under various zodiac signs were given identical horoscopes, the majority of them believed that the generic horoscope applied to them. In another experiment, people were given the horoscope that corresponded to their specific zodiac sign and only about 50% of them accepted it as accurate, which is basically the same odds as a coin flip.
But relationship compatibility is also a huge part of astrology, as people believe that certain signs are better suited to others and that certain signs should be avoided depending on your own. However, I got to see some pretty interesting graphics that looked at the marriage and divorce rates in the US and the UK between people according to the zodiac signs of the bride and groom. Should this aspect of astrology be accurate, you would see certain sign combinations with higher marriage or divorce rates depending on whatever compatibilities determined astrology.
Much like the other experiment, so too was this facet of astrology seemingly debunked, as none of the suggested zodiac pairings show a statistically significant deviation from randomness or chance when it came to either marriage or divorce. This collection of research would lead one to believe that your astrological sign has no influence on the type of people you would best get along with.
After seeing those results, I concluded that horoscopes, and therefore all of astrology, was just a bunch of BS. For years I was content with that conclusion and didn't seek any further evidence. But over time I kept seeing people describe Capricorn traits and personalities and couldn't shake the feeling as if someone was reading my soul back to me. It was intensely personal how inextricably precise many of the descriptions were. Even though I knew about the Barnum effect, I weighed that against the difficulties that I've had securing and maintaining relationships due to my distinct personality and attitudes. I've never been one to follow a herd, so setting myself apart should make me harder to categorize and qualify, but still the feeling remained.
The interest grew and I began feeling comfortable with the idea that even if I couldn't explain astrology, the similarities between my own personality and the qualities associated with Capricorns was too much of a coincidence to disregard.
It was not long after that when I got a Tinder match with a lady that was very into astrology. I'm fairly confident that the only reason she agreed to date me was because I was a Capricorn, as that was one of the first questions she asked me. I knew that was a red flag, but online dating is a cold, desolate place for average-looking men, so I took the chance anyway.
I admitted to her that I didn't know much about the intricacies of astrology, but was willing to learn. She had fully bought into that belief system, so we discussed a little bit about rising planets and what influence the sun and moon had. It was part fascinating and part 'what the f##k did I get into?', but it was an informational conversation nonetheless that I accepted with an open mind. The connection with her ended up going nowhere despite our supposedly cosmic chances of success, so I wonder how that fits into her belief system.
My pathetic dating life aside, I still retained a curious interest in astrology and zodiac signs and decided to give it another chance while still bringing along my inner skeptic. I was determined to find a final answer to the question: does the alignment of the cosmos influence human personalities and behavior?
It was not long into this journey that I discovered some very interesting omissions from astrology that neither the ancient Babylonians nor our dear friend Ptolemy accounted for. For one, the cosmological influence of the planets within our Solar System only goes up to Saturn. Neptune and Uranus (and our favorite underdog, Pluto) are nowhere to be found in astrology. That's because those planets were not discovered until a few hundred years ago. It's highly unusual that everything else in our Solar System has an influence on our lives while those two planets don't. So to rectify these glaring omissions, die-hard astrologers retroactively ham-fisted these planets to fit their ancient belief system with intentionally vague descriptions that hold little significance since all the good stuff was given to the other planets.
Another significant hole in the story comes from the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer. Ophiuchus lies along the same celestial latitude that all the other zodiac signs lie on, yet it is glossed over in astrology. Despite Earth sharing as significant an amount of time under this constellation as any other in the zodiac, nobody identifies as Ophiuchus. The reality is that in order to have a consistent belief system, there should be at least 13 zodiac signs (some could argue even more since there are other constellations along the same latitude) instead of 12, but the ancient Babylonian obsession with the mathematical properties of the number 12 lead them to purposefully exclude our celestial snake wrangler from their zodiac and continue the belief system without it. It may possibly be the first case of lying by omission known to history.
And it is actually this obsession with the number 12 that really sinks the whole argument about astrology, since even though each of the 12 zodiac signs is given a roughly equal number of days on our calendar, the actual number of days our planet spends under a given constellation varies considerably. The constellations are not evenly spread apart, not even when you account for the cosmic expansion that has happened in the last few thousand years since this belief system was founded. Our cosmological calendar paints a much different picture as it portrays a false image of equality under the stars.
However, the biggest, and likely most embarrassing to devout astrologers, inconsistency comes from the gradual tilting of the Earth's axis. The calendar dates and zodiac signs attributed to them have not been aligned in a long, long time. In the roughly 3000 years since the Babylonians developed astrology, the Earth's axis has tilted in a way where our rotation through the zodiac constellations no longer align with their assigned months. Every single astrology sign is now approximately a month later than we believe it to be. So while I've been nodding and agreeing with the majority of Capricorn traits I believed defined me, I've been a Sagittarius this whole time.
Now, even though I've pretty conclusively shown astrology to be a bunch of pseudoscientific bunk, I do want to explore the idea that your birth month influences personality. A lot of people that believe in astrology do so because their character traits and the traits of the people they know align far too perfectly with their assigned zodiac sign. Even though astrology is the unviably deformed love child of ancient astronomers and math nerds all high off pareidolia, maybe there is a nugget of truth to their beliefs.
The Earth has the luxury of going through fairly consistent seasons. People can reliably predict when it will get rainy, cold, snowy, or otherwise. We know that seasonality exists in our produce, which gave way to the eventual rise of farming and away from our hunter-gatherer ways. We also know that there are various things that can affect the health and development of a baby during pregnancy. Doctors will recommend staying away from certain foods or drinks or bad habits for a reason.
Though to wrangle together these loose thoughts into a semi-coherent theory, what if the things pregnant women and developing infants experience during this seasonality somehow lead to distinct neurological developments that pave the way for the traits and qualities attributed to astrology? Maybe the lack of sunlight in the winter causes a decreased intake of vitamin C and a lowered production of dopamine that can possibly impact the fetus in distinct ways. Maybe the abundance of fruits and vegetables in the spring create a complex enough nutritional profile that also impacts the fetus. Maybe a baby born in the cold season spends an inordinate amount of time bundled up and sheltered which delays certain neurological developments. There are a lot of what-ifs we don't know and haven't adequately researched, but maybe, just maybe, those quirky star-children were actually onto something.
It'll take a long time before we will ever know, and I may never know personally, but it's an interesting thought to have.
31-35, M
