Man, this all started back when I was totally burned out on the whole “optimization” game. I was sitting there, doing the same routine every single day, staring at dashboards that didn’t mean anything to anyone outside of our weird little team. I needed a break, a total mind reset, but I couldn’t get any time off. So, I figured, if I can’t leave the office, I’ll just find the dumbest, most pointless thing on the internet and dive deep into that instead. That was my practice. Just a total escape hatch.
The Great Horoscope Deep Dive
I started with something completely random: the daily horoscope. Specifically, mine—Virgo. I had never bothered with that stuff before, but I needed a distraction that felt like research without actually being useful. So, my “practice” began with opening a new incognito window every morning, typing in “Virgo daily horoscope,” and just hitting the first five results I saw. Seriously, five different sites, every single day, no matter how stupid they looked.
First, the data collection.
I didn’t use any fancy tools. I opened a basic text document—no, not Excel, just Notepad—and I started copying out the key phrases from each site. It was insane how much they all overlapped. Site A would say: “Unexpected financial gain.” Site B: “A chance meeting will improve your resources.” Site C: “Keep your wallet open, good news is coming.” It was the same garbage, just rephrased by some poor content mill worker.
I tracked them for three weeks straight. I was trying to find the source. Was there some master file? Some secret server pumping out this vague nonsense that all these millions of sites were just sucking up? I wanted to know where the pipe started. I felt like a detective, but for something that didn’t even exist. I spent maybe six hours a day on this, totally neglecting my actual job. It felt great.
- I logged the time it took for the page to fully load on my old laptop.
- I tallied the number of times they used words like “alignment,” “cosmic,” or “retrograde.”
- I cross-checked the ‘lucky numbers’ they gave out, which were never the same, by the way.
- I even started calling my old high school buddy, Pete, who’s a Libra, and making him read his to me over the phone so I could track his too. He thought I was finally losing it.
Then came the realization, the actual discovery.
The slowest site, the one with the most hideous, pop-up-ridden layout, was the one that was consistently using the exact same vague prediction as the fastest, sleekest, most optimized site. And I mean down to the punctuation. The difference was speed. That slow site took a full seven seconds to load on my connection, while the fast one popped up instantly.
I went over to Mark, the guy who sits three desks over and spends all day trying to fix the coffee machine, and I asked him, “Hey, what daily horoscope do you check?” He’s a Cancer, but whatever. He pulls out his phone, and guess what? He opens the slow, ugly, pop-up-hell site. I asked him, “Why that one? It takes forever to load.” He just shrugs, “I don’t know, man. It was the first one I clicked like five years ago, and I never changed it.”
That hit me like a ton of bricks. My whole optimization team was spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours fighting for milliseconds, tweaking the backend, reducing latency down to nothing, and this guy, a regular user, was sitting there patiently waiting seven seconds because he was too lazy or too comfortable to click the ‘back’ button. It wasn’t about the perfect code or the perfect speed; it was about simple, stubborn user habit.
The Aftermath of Cosmic Study
I realized my whole career was focused on a problem that most people just tolerate. My practice of looking at fake star predictions every day showed me that our ‘metrics’ were completely divorced from how real people lived and used the web. I finished my logging, closed the Notepad file, and didn’t open it again. I just kept the information in my head. A couple of weeks later, my boss gave me some huge presentation to work on, all about squeezing another half-second out of our app load time. I just looked at him and said, “Sir, Mark waits seven seconds for his daily fortune.”
He didn’t get it. Of course, he didn’t. They never do. They’re too busy looking at the charts. I finished the project anyway, handed in my two weeks’ notice that Friday, and walked out of there. I needed to do something that actually benefited from simplicity and human comfort, not something that needed to be surgically optimized to the nanosecond.
That company is still out there, hiring people like crazy to fight for those milliseconds. And every now and then, I quickly check a Virgo prediction, just to remind myself that simple habits beat expensive technology any day of the week.
