The 2019 July Virgo Career Forecast Experiment: My Real-Time Tracking Log
Man, I dug deep for this one. Back in the middle of 2019, July to be exact, I was going through a phase. You know, feeling a little restless at work, thinking maybe I needed a change but too scared to actually pull the trigger. So, what did I do? I went completely against my usual logic and decided to seriously track my career moves against a pretty fluffy source: the monthly Virgo career horoscope.
I distinctly remember reading the prediction for July 2019. It was all that typical vague stuff—something about “a necessary purge of old structures” and how “the path forward requires embracing instability for long-term gain.” Sounded like nonsense, but I decided to make it my personal, long-form sociological study. I didn’t just read it; I grabbed a cheap notebook and committed to logging every major decision, every small fight with management, and every job application I dared to look at, comparing it directly to what the stars were supposedly saying.
The Implementation Phase: Tracking the “Purge”
I started with a simple spreadsheet, which quickly turned into a handwritten mess in that notebook. The first thing I tracked was that supposed “purge of old structures.” I was working at a medium-sized tech firm then, and things were stale. I started by identifying three processes that were absolutely dragging us down—our antiquated deployment system, the confusing hierarchy for sign-offs, and the fact that we had meetings about meetings.
For the next three months, I actively pushed to dismantle those things. I challenged senior staff, I wrote up internal manifestos, I busted my butt staying late trying to implement better CI/CD pipelines myself, even though it wasn’t strictly my job description. It was draining. October rolled around, and I felt like I had achieved maybe 10% of the “purge.” The horoscope update was just as vague: “Obstacles persist, but the foundation is cracking.” I laughed, but I kept logging the data.
Then came the real test. The forecast had warned about “unexpected financial restructuring causing short-term anxiety.” I remember thinking, “Sure, whatever.” My personal situation at the time, however, was about to get intensely real, much like how things blew up for me a few years ago when I got sidelined during the whole quarantine chaos. This wasn’t a layoff—it was worse.
The Real Instability Hits Hard
It was late 2020. Not directly 2019, but the seeds planted then were definitely blooming. My wife had just landed a fantastic new contract, so we decided it was the perfect time to finalize the purchase of our first house. We signed the papers, and I was feeling great. Three days later, my biggest client at the firm—the one who accounted for maybe 40% of my team’s revenue—suddenly pulled their entire contract. Just vanished.
My manager immediately pulled me into a closed-door meeting. Not to fire me, but to fundamentally alter my role. I went from being a product lead to managing the outsourced data entry team—a move designed to keep me employed but push me to quit. It was humiliating. I opened my dusty logbook and saw the entry from the 2020 Q1 forecast: “You may find yourself navigating unfamiliar territory, requiring you to utilize skills you didn’t know you possessed.” I wasn’t using new skills; I was copying spreadsheets for minimum wage contractors. It felt like a total mockery of the prediction.
I was furious. I spent two weeks stewing, looking at this massive mortgage commitment, thinking the “instability” the stars promised was just going to ruin me and my family. The immediate anxiety was overwhelming. I looked at the old company, the one I had tried to “purge” the bad processes from—they were still drowning in bureaucracy, oblivious to the external market shift that had killed my client contract.
The Forced Pivot and the Unexpected Alignment
Just like my buddy who got screwed by his employer during the pandemic and had to scramble into an entirely new field—finding stability in an unexpected place—I realized I couldn’t stay where I was. I pulled out every contact I had ignored during my comfortable years. I rewrote my entire resume, focusing not on my old title, but on the project management and process cleanup work I had voluntarily done back in 2019, trying to fix the “old structures.”
This led to a ridiculously strange interview. It was for a small, fully remote consulting firm that specialized in rescuing projects others had abandoned. They weren’t looking for a tech wizard; they were looking for a clean-up artist—someone who had experience going in and fixing a hot mess. That entire interview focused on the actions I had taken in late 2019, challenging the status quo, trying to dismantle those slow processes.
I landed the job within a month. Better pay, better hours, zero office politics, and I was doing exactly what I enjoyed: fixing things that were broken. Looking back at the whole three-year process—from logging the original 2019 prediction to now—did the horoscope predict my life? No. But it provided a vague framework that I used as a prompt to take action when I otherwise would have just sat still.
- I chose to push change (the “purge”) months before the real crisis hit.
- When the instability came (loss of client/role demotion), I was already mentally prepared for a fight because I had been tracking the idea of “embracing instability.”
- The result was long-term gain—a better job, better work-life balance—but only because I forced the pivot myself, using the original prediction as a silly, secret motivator.
The prediction didn’t happen to me; I used the prediction as an excuse to make it happen. The funniest part? I heard from an old colleague last month. They are still using the same terrible deployment system I tried to eliminate back in 2019. The system still works, barely, but they are absolutely miserable. My old company is stuck in 2019, and because I got paranoid about a silly forecast, I ended up forcing myself into 2024 a few years early. Sometimes, you just need a weird, external nudge to start fixing the things you know are broken.
