My best friend has a degree in Data Science from the London School of Economics. She is a woman of a scientific temperament who scoffed at horoscopes. But one heartbreak was all it took to make a sceptic like her turn to the stars for answers that her rational mind couldn’t afford. Turns out, she isn’t alone. When life spirals out of control, the rational mind does a surprising thing: it outsources the questions it can’t answer on its own—will the man who broke my heart ever come back?— to a stranger on the internet who reads planetary transits for a living, charges ₹500 a session and has never even met the man.
In 1969 Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave us the five stages of grief in her seminal book, On Death and Dying. She outlined them as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But there exists a sixth stage—stargazing —one that you encounter, especially as you lay on your bathroom floor, analysing your ex’s natal chart. It is in this moment where you stop trying to understand the chaos yourself and start hoping that the cosmos holds solutions you cannot conjure on your own.
Besides her riveting charisma and striking good looks, relying on astrology as emotional infrastructure is a virtue my best friend shares with Dua Lipa. In an episode on The Dish podcast, Lipa casually confessed, “I don’t have a therapist, but I have an astrologer.” A woman who sells out stadiums, negotiates her own deal, and is a bona fide star also needs someone to tell her which way is up in a mid-Saturn return.
So does everyone—or at least it seems that way. The difference between therapy and astrology is that the former asks you to make peace with the unknown while the latter blames an out-of-sync planet. The promotion that went to someone else, the improbable engagement ring, the dread that your life has turned out differently than you imagined. Astrology has an answer for all of it: it’s almost always Saturn, most likely temporary, and hopefully will pass by March.
Psychologists call it the external locus of control—the belief that life’s outcomes are governed by forces beyond oneself, which intensifies sharply under acute stress. An excruciatingly academic way of saying: when life renders you powerless, you go looking for the power somewhere else. “It is a very common human response to seek answers, clarity and comfort during intense emotional pain,” says behavioural scientist Rashi Khera. “We want to understand the why and when conventional reasoning fails us, we move toward systems that offer narrative.” Everyone I know is currently either newly single, jobless, or hopeless, convinced that their life was supposed to look different by now. Astrology offers exactly what they’re asking for: a set of coordinates to a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.
There is a scene in episode four of Fleabag’s second season—the show’s protagonist, drunk on whiskey, is crying in a church confessional, addressing the priest that she is hopelessly in love with “I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong,” she says it with the distinct desperation of someone who is feeling lost in life. This has lodged itself somewhere into my consciousness. The thought that somebody out there might have answers to this seemingly random, uncertain life is enticing.
It comes down to this—the priest, the astrologer, the therapist that none of us can afford—everyone we outsource our problems to is really selling the same fantasy: that there is some reason behind all the unreasonable things that happen to us. We are mere beings inhabiting a rock that is floating in the universe, trying to make sense of everything—one life-altering event at a time. My best friend, the LSE graduate, who didn’t believe in astrology, realised that blaming her stars was easier than accepting that he does not love her, and that he’s not coming back. We have sent people to the moon, mapped the human genome, built intelligence that thinks for itself, and still, when tragedy strikes, sometimes all our brains can do is look to the stars for answers. Not because we are foolish but because meaning is a luxury very few can afford.