Last year reporter for the Atlantic explored the connection between millennials and astrology:
Many people I spoke to for this piece said they had a sense that the stigma attached to astrology, while it still exists, had receded as the practice has grabbed a foothold in online culture, especially for young people.
“Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much geared toward a Millennial and young Gen X quotient,” says Lucie Greene, the worldwide director of J. Walter Thompson’s innovation group, which tracks and predicts cultural trends.
Callie Beusman, a senior editor at Broadly, says traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown really exponentially.” Stella Bugbee, the president and editor-in-chief of The Cut, says a typical horoscope post on the site got 150 percent more traffic in 2017 than the year before.
In some ways, astrology is perfectly suited for the internet age. There’s a low barrier to entry, and nearly endless depths to plumb if you feel like falling down a Google research hole. The availability of more in-depth information online has given this cultural wave of astrology a certain erudition—more jokes about Saturn returns, fewer “Hey baby, what’s your sign?” pickup lines.
Before the Internet, the only form of astrology available to the masses was sun sign “horoscopes” in newspapers, a very watered-down form of astrology that is more poetry and creative writing than actual astrology. I started this blog in 2005, at the very beginning of the spread of astrological wisdom over the Internet, as a way to help to spread the word about the ways in which astrology can be seen at work in the real world.
This article takes an interesting stance in that the author begins to demonstrate the effectiveness of understanding astrological cycles, and then steps back and says something like “something doesn’t have to be real to feel true. Don’t we find truth in fiction?”
Broadly speaking, millennials are the Pluto in Scorpio generation – those born between 1982 and 1995. The sign that Pluto falls in describes the motivation and purpose of a generation, and this group seeks more than anything to understand the absolute Truth of life – to strip away any veneer of falsehood and superficiality in order to discover Life’s true Meaning (yes, I did mean to use all those capital letters!). Understanding the astrological symbolism does help us to make sense of what would otherwise seem like a meaningless universe.
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