Look, I’m a Pisces. Don’t judge. We’ve all done stupid stuff. A few months back, I was just cleaning out an old junk drawer, you know, the one where cables go to die and receipts multiply? I stumbled upon a notebook. Not a fancy one, just a spiral-bound thing from maybe 2017.
I flipped it open, and there it was—a handwritten list of key events from 2016. That year. Man, 2016 was a wreck. It was the year I walked away from the biggest gig I’d ever landed, the one that everyone said was my ‘big break.’ I threw it all in the bin because the environment was toxic, and I just couldn’t take the constant backstabbing. I left town and then, there was the whole moving fiasco, getting ripped off by a shady landlord in a lease I shouldn’t have signed. It was one disaster after another.
Reading that list got me thinking. I’ve always been one of those people who, when things get messy, glances at the horoscope. Just for a laugh, right? But 2016 was so utterly chaotic, I wondered, did the stars see that coming? Did I actually read the warnings back then and just breeze right past them like they were junk mail?
The Digging Project: Hunting Down Ghost Predictions
So, the practice began. The stupid idea that took over my week. I decided to hunt down every single weekly Pisces forecast I could find for the entirety of 2016. Not just one site, but a few, to get a range of predictions. This was the hard part, the real grunt work. If you think the internet archives everything, you are dead wrong, pal.
I started with the usual suspects, the big astrology sites I used to read. You know how it is. You try to find something six or seven years old, and half the content is gone. The site designs have changed three times. They only archive the general year-ahead forecasts, not the weekly ones that actually get specific about the next seven days. I felt like a digital archaeologist, digging through broken links and outdated interfaces. I kept hitting dead ends.
I had to get creative. I recalled an old trick—using the Internet Archive’s snapshot tool, the Wayback Machine, if you know what I mean. I fed it the old homepage links I could remember from 2015/2016, and slowly, week by week, the old pages started popping up. It was tedious, like trying to patch up a busted pipeline with just chewing gum and duct tape, only the pipeline was 52 separate web pages.
I spent hours, literally, copying and pasting snippets from different sites’ Pisces sections. I created a massive text file, separating each week’s forecast. I organized it all in a rough spreadsheet I threw together. For each week, I logged two things:
- The ‘Vibe Check’: The general theme, like “Money is tight” or “Focus on romance.”
- The ‘Specific Shot’: Any concrete, verifiable prediction, like “You’ll meet a new contact who is key” or “An unexpected check arrives.”
By the time I finished gathering the raw data, I had a document that was just shy of twenty thousand words. Just random mystical advice ready for the test of time. I was ready to settle the score, for good.
The Grand Comparison: Reality Meets the Cosmos
Now, the real fun started: comparing the 2016 reality list from my old notebook with the cosmic advice I had just unearthed. I pulled out the notebook again. I read through my reality list, which, let’s be honest, was mostly just a chronicle of pain and questionable decisions, and read the corresponding forecast for that exact week.
I used a simple color code for my notes. Green for ‘Nailed It,’ Yellow for ‘Close Enough, you can spin it,’ and Red for ‘Complete Miss.’
What I discovered was fascinating, but not in the way a starry-eyed true believer would hope. The “Green” entries? They were things like, “A small financial gain comes your way mid-month.” And yeah, I remembered getting a small utility deposit refund check then. Nailed it. Or, “You might feel a need to pull back and recharge.” Yeah, well, I’m a Pisces, I feel that way every Tuesday, so that’s a freebie. Close Enough.
But here’s the kicker, the big events—the absolute dumpster fires of the year, the things that changed the whole trajectory of my life—were missed. The major job split? I literally walked out of the biggest project of my life. The forecast for that week was about “finding renewed passion in a creative project.” Total Red. The shady landlord situation that cost me months of effort and money? The forecast said, “Look for clarity in domestic matters.” I lost half my security deposit in the ensuing legal fight and had a nervous breakdown on the drive out of the city. That ain’t clarity. Big Red Flag.
What I Walked Away With
It took me days to fully process the whole thing and log everything. I started this whole ridiculous project thinking I was going to find proof that I had been blind, that I should have paid attention to the weekly warnings. I thought I’d end up saying, “See! It was all there in black and white! I messed up!”
Instead, what this whole messy exercise in digital archaeology taught me was that the human memory, especially when looking backward, is just wired to find patterns. If a prediction is vague enough—and most weekly horoscopes are—we will absolutely force the reality to fit the forecast. Our brains are basically pattern-seeking missiles, even if the patterns are meaningless.
The practice wasn’t about the stars. It was about my own head. I closed the massive spreadsheet file, put the old notebook back, and realized that the biggest things in life, the real pivot points, usually don’t arrive with a cosmic warning. They just happen, and you deal with them. And honestly? Knowing that I managed to survive and pivot after 2016 without some detailed celestial playbook felt a lot better than finding out I just ignored clear instructions.
It felt like closing a very old, very weird chapter. I kept the spreadsheet though, just in case 2016 comes knocking again, or if I get another stupid idea next year.
