What astrology gets right — and why calling yourself a skeptic is the tell

In March I had both feeds open at the same time. FT Markets Today on one side, Thought Catalog on the other. The FT piece was about oil prices and what positions were getting squeezed. The Thought Catalog piece was called "What Your Guardian Angel Needs You To Know This Week (Tarot Reading)."

I wasn't reading it for research. I wasn't reading it to understand an audience. I was reading it because it was in my feed and I'd put it there.

Here's what I've noticed about that: people who say "I'm a skeptic about astrology" — that's almost always a tell. Not that they don't believe in it. That they're uncomfortable with how much they already use it.

Think about the pattern-recognition systems most people run on. Myers-Briggs. Enneagram. Birth order. Creator archetypes — the founder type, the connector, the operator. Star signs. These systems keep working on people who are smart enough to know they shouldn't. The obvious explanation is that we fall for narrative tricks. But I don't think that's what's happening, or not exactly.

What these systems do — all of them, Thought Catalog zodiac included — is organize your experience into a story with a protagonist. You're not just having a rough quarter, you're in a phase that asks for consolidation before the next push. You're not just bad at confrontation, you're an Enneagram 9 whose default move is harmony over assertion. The content is almost beside the point. The function is that you now have a protagonist and a structure and something to do with the week you're in.

The alternative is not no framework. The alternative is a framework you won't name.

Most people I know who've never read a horoscope are running on something like "hard work plus good decisions equals outcomes" — which is itself a framework, a story about how the world works, one that the actual data does not entirely support. They're not operating on first principles. They're operating on received assumptions they've never had to examine because nobody laughed at them for it.

Calling yourself a skeptic protects you from that examination. It says "I don't use those systems" without ever having to answer the question "what systems do I use?"

I'm not arguing that astrology is predictive. I'm not arguing for any specific cosmological claim. I'm saying I found something in that Thought Catalog piece in March that I wasn't finding in the trade content, and what I found was not irrational. It was a way to think about what to attend to and what to release. That's a tool. Whether the underlying theory is correct is a separate question — one most of us never actually engage with when we apply frameworks like GTD or the startup playbook or any other system we'd be willing to say out loud at a conference.

By March 2026 I had 65 Thought Catalog spirituality items in my Inoreader feed from a single month. "If God Feels Quiet, Read This." "What Ecclesiastes 3:1 Teaches Us About Divine Timing." "The Missed Exit Theory: What's Meant For You Will Find You." None of them annotated. I wasn't taking notes for anything. I was just reading them, same as I was reading about creator market trends and search traffic shifts.

I didn't do anything to reconcile those two feeds. That's the part I want to be specific about.

The people most vocal about not falling for these systems are usually the ones who've built the most rigid alternative ones. The hyper-systematic types who have a morning routine and a weekly review and a project management system — they need predictability as much as anyone reading a horoscope. They've just named their need differently, in a language that gets less social friction.

What you're actually reading when you read about guardian angels and what they need you to know this week: you're reading a permission slip. Permission to believe that what you're in has a shape, that it's temporary, that there's a protagonist in the story who gets through to the other side.

That's not weak. That's the thing almost no optimization content ever gives you.

The skeptic tell is that you think contradiction needs resolving. I read FT Markets and divine timing posts in the same hour and I don't see a contradiction worth fixing. Both are trying to make sense of uncertainty. Both are asking me to hold something loosely and keep moving.

One of them I'd be willing to cite in a professional context. That gap — between what we'll admit to using and what we actually use — is where most of the interesting stuff lives.

If you're in my orbit and you've got something like this going on, grab my inbox. Not to talk you into anything. Just that it's a very big world and most of us are working from more frameworks than we've officially admitted to, and that's fine.