The Madness Started With a Simple Question
You know how it is. Sometimes you get stuck on an idea and it just won’t let go. For me, that idea came last month when I was cleaning out an old cloud storage folder and stumbled upon a massive dump of screenshots. What were they? Daily Virgo horoscopes from the entire year of 2015. Yeah, I was apparently super into tracking them back then. Seeing them sitting there, 365 days of vague predictions, I just had to know: was any of it actually right? Or was I just wasting my time back then?
So, I dove into it. I decided this wasn’t just a quick look; this was going to be a full-on audit. A ridiculous, time-consuming project, maybe, but I needed to prove or disprove the whole daily star reading business once and for all. This quickly became way more complicated than I expected.
Scraping Together the Data and the Reality
The first step was consolidating the data. Luckily, I had the 2015 readings saved, but they were a mess. Different websites, slightly different wording, all mixed together in hundreds of files. I had to create a huge master spreadsheet, and manually input every single daily reading. This alone took me three solid evenings. I labeled columns: Date, Prediction Source A, Prediction Source B (for comparison), and then the all-important column: Actual 2015 Event.
Getting the ‘Actual Event’ data was the real nightmare. I had to become a digital archaeologist.
- I started with my old Outlook and Google calendars. That gave me major appointments, travel dates, and big work deadlines.
- Next, I dug through old text messages and email archives, searching for keywords like “stress,” “fight,” “promotion,” or “surprise.”
- I even scrolled through thousands of old photos on my phone, trying to jog my memory about specific mundane days. Did I feel especially creative on July 14th? I had no idea.
The problem, just like when you try to trace a huge company’s tech stack, is that it’s all a massive patchwork quilt. My memories were fuzzy, the calendar entries were incomplete, and the horoscopes themselves were so general they could apply to Tuesday or Christmas Day. It was a digital haystack, and I was looking for a single straw.
The Terrible Scoring System I Invented
To make the audit somewhat meaningful, I knew I couldn’t just say “yeah, sounds about right.” I had to invent a scoring system for accuracy. It was completely subjective, which drove me nuts, but necessary.
I set up three levels of match:
- Level 3 (Direct Hit): The prediction mentioned a specific action (e.g., “A surprise financial windfall is coming”) and it actually happened that day or the next (e.g., I got an unexpected bonus). This was super rare.
- Level 2 (Thematic Match): The prediction was vague (e.g., “Focus on your emotional well-being”) and my records showed a relevant event (e.g., I had a big argument with my neighbor or started going to the gym seriously). This was the majority.
- Level 1 (Total Miss/Nonsense): The prediction was about romance, and I was literally stuck on a business trip miles away from anyone I knew, or the prediction was about success, and I got fired that day.
I spent two full weekends cross-referencing these entries. I assigned a score from 0 to 10 for each day, with 0 being a total failure and 10 being prophetic. The average score, by the way? A disappointing 4.1. Most of the ‘matches’ were Level 2—generic advice that could fit anyone’s life on any day.
Why Did I Bother With This Mess? The Real Reason.
Why would a grown man dedicate nearly a hundred hours to grading seven-year-old horoscopes? Just like that guy in the example who suddenly ended up in embedded development after getting isolated, I did this because I needed a project that was tedious and demanded focused, non-emotional effort.
I had recently gone through a stressful work situation where a major project I had spent months leading got completely scrapped—not because of poor performance, but because the CEO decided to change direction on a whim. I felt like the future was completely out of my hands, a victim of random fate.
My wife told me, “You need to stop worrying about what you can’t control.” And I, being stubborn, responded, “I will prove control doesn’t exist by showing that even predetermined fate is a bunch of messy, inaccurate garbage!”
It was a massive overreaction, I know. But the process of meticulously breaking down the 2015 readings and realizing how flimsy the “evidence” was actually helped me. I saw that even the things claiming to predict fate were just vague placeholders. It brought everything back to reality.
The final conclusion? Daily horoscopes from 2015 were mostly vague nonsense. But the real realization was that the process of systematically reviewing the past, even in a silly way like this, helped me feel like I was back in the driver’s seat today. It was a ridiculous, self-imposed archive project, but it worked.
