Digging Up 2020’s Career Predictions: A Messy Retrospective
Man, 2020. What a time. You’d think by now I’d have purged every piece of digital debris from that era, but nope. I was actually clearing out an old cloud folder—the one where I just dumped random junk files and screenshots—and I stumbled right onto an old article preview. It was titled something like Virgo Monthly Career Horoscope 2020: Find Out the Biggest Surprise Month!
I swear, I had zero memory of even reading that thing back then, but seeing it pop up now just made me stop. I figured, since I’m always telling folks to document everything, even the silly stuff, I might as well document this rabbit hole I was about to jump down. Could I actually find the original article, and more importantly, did the prediction even come true for the Virgos I know? I had to find out. It felt like proving a point to the universe, you know?
The Hunt for the Original Source
My first step, obviously, was to punch the whole title into Google. I figured it would pop right up. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. I hit maybe five or six pages of search results, and all I got back was SEO garbage. A bunch of current-day articles trying to bait clicks with similar headlines, or pages that had scraped the content but stripped the year off. It was a proper mess. Every time I thought I found it, the link either redirected me to some cheap psychic reading site or it was just a dead page.
So I had to pivot. If the current internet had swallowed the content, I needed an archive. I remembered using that old Internet Archive Wayback Machine tool a few times before, so I went there. This part was tedious, let me tell you. I had to start testing out potential domain names that astrology sites used back then. I spent a good hour just typing in different variations of “trusted astrology source dot com” and “cosmic outlook dot net,” waiting for the calendar to load, and then clicking through the 2020 snapshots. I felt like a digital archaeologist, sifting through broken pottery shards just to find one complete text.
Finally, I nailed it. I found a solid snapshot from late 2019 that showed the article preview. I clicked the link, and boom! There was the full article, frozen in time. I quickly captured multiple screenshots—just in case the archive decided to crash on me—and started extracting the key points.
Extracting the Month-by-Month Claims
The goal wasn’t to read the whole thing, just to document the structure and pull the core predictions. The article was set up like a typical monthly rundown, but it kept teasing this one huge “surprise month.”
I set up a fresh spreadsheet—I know, old school, but it works—and went month by month, jotting down the prediction summary for Virgos. It looked something like this:
- January: Focus on networking, slow start.
- February: Minor budget stress.
- … (Skipping the boring parts)
- July: High stress, but major skill building.
- August: A financial opportunity appears.
- September: The article claimed this was the month the “big shift” would start to form.
Then I got to the grand finale. The article officially declared October 2020 as the Biggest Surprise Month. The description was vague, of course, talking about “unexpected opportunities that redefine long-term stability” and “a shift in leadership dynamics.” Standard horoscope jargon, but the claim was set: October was the date.
Verifying the Octobers of 2020
Okay, now for the actual practice: verifying the data. I don’t rely on astrology myself, but I keep detailed records of my friends’ professional lives—with their permission, naturally—because I sometimes help them with career planning. I knew I had two close Virgo friends (let’s call them V1 and V2) who kept detailed logs of their professional ups and downs in 2020.
I reached out to V1 and V2 and told them exactly what I was doing. They laughed, but they were game. I asked them to pull up their journals or career trackers for the period of September and October 2020. I told them to look specifically for “unexpected opportunities” or a “redefining moment.”
The results were fascinatingly chaotic.
V1’s Documentation: V1, who works in logistics, had a genuinely messy October. They documented a major project collapse (the opposite of an opportunity) that resulted in them being reassigned to a different department, which they hated. However, in November, that reassignment led to a new, better manager and a massive pay bump. So, the ‘surprise’ was late, and October was actually just a painful pivot point. I logged V1’s actual surprise month as November.
V2’s Documentation: V2, who is in graphic design, had a relatively quiet October. Nothing major changed. They did document a big shift—getting headhunted for a completely remote role—but that happened in March 2020, right when the pandemic really kicked off. That was definitely the “biggest surprise,” but it was way off the horoscope’s mark. I documented V2’s surprise month as March.
Final Documentation and Tally
I looked at the results and just shook my head. The amount of effort I had to put in just to retrieve and then compare this prediction was ridiculous. I spent three hours tracking down a flimsy article, and then another hour cross-referencing it with real human documentation.
What did I learn? That old internet content is a pain to retrieve, and even when you track down specific, archived claims, they rarely align perfectly with reality. The practice wasn’t about proving astrology right or wrong; it was about systematically testing a public prediction against private documentation. The process itself—the retrieval, filtering, extraction, and comparison—was the valuable part.
I finalized the practice documentation, noting that for my two test subjects, the predicted “Biggest Surprise Month” of October 2020 was either late by a month or completely missed the actual major career disruption that happened seven months earlier. The whole experience just reinforced my belief: keep your own records, folks. Don’t trust the stars; trust your spreadsheet.
