The Burnout That Sent Me Staring at the Zodiac
I’m gonna be real with you guys. Me, checking my fate using a silly weekly horoscope for career and life choices? It sounds like a joke, right? I used to think the same thing. I was one of those people who scoffed at it, thinking, “Give me data, not destiny.”
But life, man, life slaps you down when you’re not looking. My big practice, the one I’m finally sharing, it came from a very dark place. I was running a massive project for an energy firm. I literally put three years of my life, all my savings, and most of my sanity into this thing. Everyone was telling me it was the next big deal, the one that would set me up for life. I believed them. I ate, slept, and breathed that project.
And then? It blew up. Not a gradual fail. A full, absolute, messy explosion. Regulation changes, funding pulled, key staff walked out overnight. It wasn’t just a professional failure; it wiped me out financially and emotionally. I crashed. I mean, seriously crashed. I had to let go of my apartment, moved back into my brother’s spare room, and spent weeks just staring at the ceiling.
I tried calling my old business partners, the folks I’d been in the trenches with. Radio silence. I’d call their cell phones—they either hung up immediately or, get this, pretended they had the wrong number. I tried emailing the finance guy about the last paycheck I was owed. The email bounced. I checked social media; I was blocked. It was a complete, cold-turkey erasure. It felt just like I had disappeared off the face of the earth to them.
The Practice: From Desperate Click to Daily Track
I was sitting there, desperate, watching my savings circle the drain. I had no direction, no plan, just panic. I needed an anchor, anything. Scrolling on my phone one night, I saw this header: “Find Your Fate Weekly Pisces Horoscope.” Stupid, I know. But I was so low, I thought, “What’s the worst that can happen? I’ll laugh at how ridiculous it is.”
But then, the idea hit me. The real practice wasn’t just reading it. The practice was tracking the vague nonsense to see if it could force me into action. So, I started a journal.
- First, I clicked and read the week’s forecast. Super generic: “A new door opens.” “Watch your funds.”
- Second, I isolated the verbs and nouns. The action items. Instead of “Watch your funds,” I wrote down: “Limit coffee purchases; total spent < $15." Instead of "A new door opens," I wrote: "Send out three unique cold emails to old contacts." I forced specificity onto the vagueness.
- Third, I committed to the action. No matter how stupid the horoscope prompt was, I had to follow the action I derived from it.
For the first six weeks, it was useless. I was just sending emails to people who didn’t reply and saving two bucks a day. I was ready to quit. But then came the week the Pisces forecast read, “Expect a small, stabilizing return on past effort. Do not spend it; invest it in future knowledge.”
I had forgotten about a small $800 retainer fee I was owed from a really old, tiny gig. Literally that afternoon, the money hit my bank account. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to cover the next month’s rent, stabilizing my immediate crisis. I was stunned. A total coincidence? Maybe. But I had committed to the action.
The Realization and the Follow-Through
I had two choices: pay the rent and go back to ramen, or follow the second part: “invest it in future knowledge.”
I took the leap. I went online and used half that money to enroll in a cheap but intensive coding bootcamp focused on a totally new skill. I put the rest toward rent and just hoped I could scrape by with quick freelance work while studying. It was risky, stupid maybe, but I felt like I had to honor the commitment to my own tracking process.
Within three months, that new skill landed me a remote contract job. It wasn’t the millions the old project promised, but it was stable, paid well, and I was working with people who actually replied to my texts. I had found a path when I thought I was permanently blocked.
Here’s the kicker, guys. About six months after that, after I was stable and doing well in the new role, guess who started calling? My old business partners. The ones who ignored me, the ones who blocked me—suddenly they “missed me” and wanted me back on a “revised, higher-paying project.” They were offering me almost triple what I was making now, throwing money at me.
I listened to their pitch, smiled, and then I hung up the phone. I then blocked their numbers. All of them. Just like they did to me. I don’t believe the stars dictated my fate. But I do believe that the practice of forcing myself to find an actionable verb in a time of paralysis is what actually saved me. The silly fish sign was just the catalyst. I made the choice; the weekly forecast just gave me the nerve to stick with it.
The job is still there—my old post—waiting for some poor sap to take it. But my current path? It was chosen by me, using an $800 coincidence and a stupid online horoscope tracker. And I’m not going back.
