Setting the Stage: Why I Bothered Looking Back at 2020
You know how 2020 was, right? A total mess. Everyone was grasping for anything solid. I’m not usually one for daily astrology—I code, I build things, I deal with facts. But back then, the chaos was so thick you could taste it. I remember scrolling through some predictions, and the 2020 career outlook for Pisces was just absurd. It was so specific, so over-the-top dramatic, I actually screenshotted a few key points just to laugh about them later. I called it my “disaster bingo card.”
I distinctly remember thinking, “There is absolutely no way any of this happens. My career path is set. I’m on a five-year plan. Everything is stable.” That confidence, man, it was misplaced. The predictions I saved weren’t the gentle, vague stuff like “expect positive changes.” They were radical. They were talking about structural collapse, sudden reversals, and income disappearing then reappearing somewhere completely unexpected.
The Practice: Documenting the Absurd Predictions
I found three major shockers in that reading, and I made sure to scribble them down in an old notebook where I usually jot down server logs. I wanted to capture the sheer improbability of the claims. That was the start of the practice—the documentation phase. I titled the page: ‘2020 Career Disaster Scenarios (LOL).’
- Shock #1: The Unannounced Ejection. It claimed I would be forced to exit a long-term professional commitment, not by choice, but because the structure itself failed. It specifically mentioned “a sudden, irreversible break from the primary source of security.”
- Shock #2: The Financial Black Hole. It predicted a complete stop of regular income flow, followed by a six-month period where my earnings would be “scattered and impossible to track,” stabilizing only when I started demanding direct payment for expertise, bypassing institutions.
- Shock #3: The Identity Crisis Project. It warned that the new path would require me to learn a skill that I previously hated or outright refused to touch, forcing a complete professional identity shift.
I tucked that notebook away, forgot all about it, and went back to my very stable job running ops for a mid-sized e-commerce platform. For the first quarter, things were normal. Then, you know, the world went sideways.
The Detailed Process: Tracking the Reality
I never actively checked the list during 2020 or 2021; I was too busy surviving. But looking back now, piece by piece, the timeline of career events from March 2020 to early 2021 maps almost perfectly onto that ridiculous list.
Tracking Shock #1: The ‘Unannounced Ejection.’ The e-commerce platform? It got acquired by a huge venture capital fund in May 2020. They didn’t want the technical debt, so they dismantled the entire operations team—including me. No warning. Just a mandatory meeting, a severance package, and boom, primary source of security gone, exactly as predicted. I was cleaning out my desk faster than I could process it. That stable commitment? Irreversibly broken.
Tracking Shock #2: The ‘Financial Black Hole.’ After the layoff, I spent seven months freelancing. Did I have regular income? Absolutely not. I was doing little consulting gigs, fixing databases for small shops, getting paid via PayPal, Venmo, or sometimes just coffee gift cards. It was scattered payments for my specific tech knowledge, bypassing traditional payroll systems. I finally landed a solid contract only after I realized I needed to charge premium rates just for my specific expertise. The financial situation was a total roller coaster for exactly that six-month window. I look at my bank statements now and it’s a terrifying graph.
Tracking Shock #3: The ‘Identity Crisis Project.’ The new contract? It involved heavy-duty legacy system management, specifically using COBOL. COBOL! I swore I’d never touch mainframes in my life. I always thought it was archaic garbage. But suddenly, my specialized expertise was exactly what they needed, and I had to swallow my pride, learn the framework, and become a legacy systems guy. Complete identity shift. It was maddening, but it paid the bills.
The Big Reveal: Why I Dig Up Old Notes
Now, why am I sharing this totally ridiculous retrospective? You gotta be kidding me, right? It sounds like I’m now a full believer in cosmic alignment. I’m not. But sometimes life throws something at you that just makes you stop and re-evaluate everything, even the weird stuff you dismissed.
I found that old server log notebook last week. I was packing up my office because I’m about to jump continents for a new job—a job I would never have gotten if I hadn’t developed that niche COBOL expertise (the hated skill!). I pulled out the book to check an old configuration snippet, flipped the page, and saw that “2020 Career Disaster Scenarios (LOL)” heading.
I stopped dead. I read the three points and compared them to my actual career trajectory, event by event. The cold shock of seeing my biggest professional disasters—which I considered pure bad luck or corporate cruelty—laid out as ‘surprises’ years before they happened? It was eerie.
I sat there for twenty minutes, running through the timeline in my head, verifying every single step. It made me realize that maybe those chaotic, surprising moments weren’t just random static, but were necessary parts of the larger flow, leading me exactly where I am now. The real surprise wasn’t that the predictions were true; the surprise was that I lived through them and somehow ended up in a far better place than I was in that “stable” job in early 2020. I went back and checked every point off the list. Yes, they were true. And that, my friends, is why I needed to share the evidence trail.
