Man, June 2020. I still get this tight feeling in my chest just thinking about it. Things were already shaky, but that month, the floor just completely fell out from under me. I was working at this big outfit—nothing fancy, just steady cash, or so I thought. We were building out some new SaaS platform, the whole deal. Then, one Tuesday morning, out of nowhere, they drop the bomb: they’re freezing all major projects until further notice.
I wasn’t laid off, see, that would have been clean. Instead, they hit us with the “mandatory reduced hours and unpaid leave” garbage. They said, “Stay ready, things could change next week!” But my rent wasn’t staying ready. My landlord wasn’t accepting “potential future revenue” as payment. I watched my bank account just gasp for air for three straight weeks. That’s when I started to really freak out.
The Scramble: Why I Even Looked at Star Signs
I’m not a crystal ball kind of guy, never have been. I believe in spreadsheets and hustle, not Jupiter transits. But when your entire world is upside down, and the actual human experts—the economists, the CEOs, the managers—they all look just as clueless as you feel, you start grasping at straws. Big time.
My wife, bless her heart, she was the one who left a printout on the fridge. It was a generic “Virgo Career Forecast” for Q2 2020. I laughed, crumpled it up, and tossed it. But that night, I couldn’t sleep. I was staring at the ceiling, cycling through all the disaster scenarios. What was I supposed to do? Go back to school? Start flipping burgers?
At 3 AM, I fished that crumpled paper out of the trash. I read it. Garbage. Total generic fluff about “new opportunities” and “paying attention to details.” I was mad I even wasted the three seconds.
But the damage was done. My brain clicked onto this weird new path. I thought, If this is all B.S., how much B.S. is out there? And that’s what started the whole practice. I dove into the deep end of crazy.
The Deep Dive: Mapping the Madness
My practice wasn’t about believing in the stars; it was about data mining the desperation. If a million people read this stuff, what are they all being told? What is the consensus delusion? That’s what I wanted to know.
I went full nerd on it. I opened 20 browser tabs. Every major horoscope site—the big newspaper ones, the weird indie blogs, the YouTube channels with terrible graphics.
I focused only on Virgo, only on career, and only on the June 2020 outlook. I started copying and pasting every single prediction into a giant master document.
This is what my raw data looked like:
- Site A: “A sudden and shocking turn requires a quick pivot. Don’t fear the void.”
- Site B: “Focus on internal growth. Education is key. The outside world is too volatile.”
- Site C: “Wait until the 20th. Do not make a major move before then. Conserve resources.”
- Site D (YouTube): “Your ruling planet signals a clash with authority. Don’t fight—retreat.”
- Site E: “The money is in the network you already built. Call old contacts.”
I kept tracking them, trying to find the common thread, the signal in the noise. It took me a solid two days just to compile it all. My eyes were burning, but I was getting a weird kind of clarity.
The Shocking Outlook & The Real-World Test
The shocking outlook wasn’t that I was going to lose my job—I already half-expected that. The shocking part was the consensus of inaction. Almost every single source, in one way or another, told me to STOP. Don’t aggressively search. Don’t apply for 50 jobs. Don’t panic and take a bad gig.
The consistent message was: retreat, study, and wait for the right moment. Wait until the transit shifts, wait until the chaos calms down. For a high-strung Virgo like me, that was the most counter-intuitive, shocking advice imaginable. My gut was screaming “HUSTLE!” but the stars—or the people writing about them—were saying “Chill out, dude.”
So, I tested it. I forced myself to stop applying for random jobs. Instead, I picked one new skill that had been on my back burner forever—it was some heavy data visualization stuff I never had time for. I spent June and half of July just slamming that courseware. I didn’t network, I didn’t scroll job boards, I just learned. I trusted the weird, stupid consensus.
And guess what happened?
The company I was at completely folded in August. Not just frozen, gone. Everyone who was “staying ready” suddenly had zero warning and zero leverage. They had wasted two months sitting around, waiting for a door to reopen that had been welded shut.
Me? I didn’t care. I had just finished my certification. I had a rock-solid, demonstrable new skill. I put it on my barely-used portfolio and applied for exactly two jobs in mid-August. They were specialized positions that needed exactly the visualization stuff I had just spent two months learning.
I got the first one. It was a better title, better pay, and I was working with people who knew what stability meant.
The stars didn’t save me. Reading a bunch of internet fluff didn’t save me. But the process of looking for an external answer—that weirdly consistent, shocking advice to slow down—it forced me to take control of the only thing I could: my own skill set. The whole “shocking outlook” was just the mechanism to trick my anxious brain into focusing on the right thing at the right time. That’s the real trick to success, man. Find something that makes you focus, even if it’s reading a dumb horoscope.
