Man, May 2023. What a train wreck of a career moment that was. I was sitting there, staring at the ceiling and the ugly fluorescent office lights, thinking, “Okay, I need a massive change.” I didn’t need a new job title; I needed a total gut renovation of my working life. That whole routine I was stuck in had completely drained the color right out of me, you know? My work was fine, steady, paid the bills, but I was just existing. I felt totally stalled.
The Start: Analyzing the Nonsense
I’m a Virgo, right? And I’ve always been obsessed with organization and detail. So instead of doing the sensible thing, like updating my resume or calling up an old mentor, I took a wild detour. I figured, maybe the easiest, most absurd way to figure out what the heck I should be doing was to map out what everyone thought Virgos were supposed to be doing career-wise right then. I wanted to see the collective unconscious projected onto my star sign for May.
My first step wasn’t networking. It was a massive, days-long deep dive into the absolute trash heap of online astrology content. I decided I was going to treat the whole thing like a data analysis project. I needed to see what the common denominators were in the fake career advice pool. My “practice” was finding my path by proving the uselessness of the paths suggested by the stars.
I bought two cheap throwaway domains—something with “luck” and “future” in the name—just to immerse myself completely. I really got into character.
- Step 1: Scrape and manually copy every single “Virgo Career May 2023” piece of content I could find. No matter how sketchy the site looked.
- Step 2: Aggregate all the advice into one giant document, ignoring all the flowery language about Jupiter and Uranus.
- Step 3: Identify the five most repeated pieces of advice. I bet you anything they’d be vague enough to apply to a goldfish.
The Process: Drowning in Vague Keywords
I spent two whole weekends locked away, ignoring my phone and ordering too much takeout. I threw together a quick little script—not some fancy corporate software, just a sloppy bit of code—to rip the text off dozens of those “know your luck” pages. I printed out the whole mountain of content. My desk was a disaster area, buried under paper, coffee cups, and highlighter pens.
I didn’t care about the cosmic jazz or the planets being in retrograde. I just wanted the solid, repeating keywords. And they were everywhere. It was like they were all copying off the same cheat sheet from the nineties. The redundancy was almost beautiful in its laziness.
What did every single one of them say?
I swear they all used the same five phrases. Over and over. It drove me nuts, but also proved my point.
- “Communication is key.” Always. In what job is talking to people not key? It’s meaningless.
- “Networking opportunities will arise.” Translation: Go talk to a stranger at the water cooler and hope something good happens.
- “Unexpected meetings will be beneficial.” This felt like the astrology version of “check your email.”
- “Focus on details and planning.” Hello, I’m a Virgo. That’s just a personality trait, not a prediction.
- “A financial windfall is possible late in the month.” The oldest trick in the book: give them hope but tie it to a nonspecific time. Always possible, almost never happens.
I had pages of this recycled, vague nonsense. I used a thick red marker to circle every single time those keywords showed up. I was practically building a statistical model of generic life advice. The practice I was engaging in wasn’t career planning; it was pattern spotting in a massive pile of useless, public data.
The Pivot and the Result
The realization hit me when I looked at my giant stack of marked-up articles. The advice itself was utterly worthless—it had to be generic enough to apply to millions. But my response to it wasn’t worthless. My brain wasn’t just reading the content; it was aggressively analyzing the structure and the delivery mechanism. I was figuring out what made people click, what patterns the content creators fell into, and how to synthesize noise into a coherent system.
I realized that that skill—tearing apart other people’s messy systems and finding the underlying logic, even in something as silly as horoscope data—was what my corporate job was completely failing to use. I was following other people’s plans. This whole ridiculous Virgo career deep dive showed me my brain works best when it’s breaking down the things people take for granted.
That totally useless May 2023 panic, framed by a ridiculous horoscope title, was the weirdest catalyst I could have asked for. I didn’t get a financial windfall that month, but I got something way better. I got the solid kick in the pants I needed to actually use my head for something genuinely interesting instead of just chasing some vague “luck” that someone else wrote for clicks and ad revenue. I immediately started sketching out a plan to use this analytical side to share my own messy, real-world attempts at breaking down processes. That’s why I’m here now. The real change wasn’t in the stars; it was right there in the stacks of marked-up astrology printouts on my floor.
