> is very intelligent but she's really into this stuff.
I was working on an astrology widget for a portal site, and read every advice in it every sign for months at lengths.
None of the advice were ever highly impacting, nor seemed to have a chance to bring problematic results. At best it felt like a nice way to get some variety into someone's life ("wear something green today to improve your luck")
In that light, I feel caring about astrology could be just another hobby, it's pretty innocuous.
The whole point of public astrology is to make statements that are general and harmless. Genericity means people patternmatch the advice to their daily experience often enough to feel the advice was indeed meant to them.
”Your week starts you being stressed, but come Friday things will look out better. Weekend will energize you. Remember to care for yourself. Coming months will offer you a happy surprise.”
Personal astrology then has similar aspects as tarot and geneal counseling. As any roleplaying game enthusiast knows, mapping life to fixed ruleset is great fun. What makes this pathological is if people actually believe this stuff. But in the non-pathological case I suppose it works similarly as therapy for non-clinical stuff - people helped to identify their issues and are coached to work through them. People are really blind to aspects of their own life (speaking from experience) and need things pointed out to them in a safe setting.
Personally I feel it’s infuriating bs, but recognize it’s mostly harmless and may actually help some people work out some issues.
The problem is they often make statements that A should be careful around B and avoid serious decisions this week. They can literally model the behavior of a significant amount of population for a week. It may sound funny until you realize that B is you and A is HR who loves that shit.
You're right in that this could be problematic to emit such an advice, but I am optimistic in that the writers tend to avoid such a direct framing. It will be more around "pay special attention to the serious decisions comming this week".
> You get some weird news early on that leaves you feeling kind of funky for most of the day, but it's not all bad! You know deep down that things are right where they're supposed to be.
You won't get anything that leads to direct action from these tidbits of non-comited vagueness.
The funny thing is that most of these "advice" or "insights" can be swapped around, it don't matter which sign you put next to them. Mostly the texts are so vague and generic that people can fit at least parts of it to their current situation.
I was working on an astrology widget for a portal site, and read every advice in it every sign for months at lengths.
None of the advice were ever highly impacting, nor seemed to have a chance to bring problematic results. At best it felt like a nice way to get some variety into someone's life ("wear something green today to improve your luck")
In that light, I feel caring about astrology could be just another hobby, it's pretty innocuous.