I swear, back in late 2016, I was absolutely lost career-wise. I felt like I was completely spinning my wheels, stuck in some thick mud. I desperately needed a change, but every direction I looked felt blocked off. Then, I kept hearing all these folks—mostly online, on forums and such—talking about star signs and how 2017 was supposed to be a massive pivot year for people born under Pisces, especially concerning their work life and money. Now, understand this: I’m usually the last guy on earth to check my horoscope—I always figured it was just vague rubbish meant to sell papers or get clicks—but my professional life was so depressing I was desperate enough to try anything that promised a roadmap.
Kicking Off the Experiment: How I Began to Map the Stars Against My Paycheck
I didn’t just read one article and shrug. If I was going to bother with this mystical nonsense, I was going to treat it like a real, honest-to-goodness project—my own personal, slightly embarrassing data collection effort. My goal was simple: debunk it or prove it right. I pulled up every major astrology and spiritual website I could find that posted detailed monthly career forecasts specifically for Pisces for the entirety of 2017. I wasn’t interested in the daily fluff like “wear blue today.” I focused hard on the big, overarching, measurable themes—things like “major promotion opportunities in spring,” “significant financial strain near year-end,” or “unavoidable conflicts with superiors in Q3.” I wanted solid, testable predictions.
Once I had all those predictions harvested, I set up a rudimentary spreadsheet. This wasn’t some fancy SQL database; it was just three columns in Excel. Column A: The Astrological Prediction (Date/Key Theme). Column B: The Actual Career Event (What Literally Happened at Work). Column C: Match or Mismatch (A simple Yes/No/Maybe). I committed myself to checking that sheet every single week. When a predicted date approached, I made a note of my mental state and specific office events. When the time passed, I logged the actual outcome. It felt ridiculous, sure, but I was determined to follow through.
Deep Diving into 2017: Mapping Crisis and Chaos
The predictions for late winter, around February/March 2017, were heavy on restructuring, forced changes, and deep dives into existing skills. It was supposed to be a confusing, but ultimately preparatory phase. What actually went down? That was the exact period my company decided to reorganize the entire development department, slashing several teams and merging others. My manager suddenly quit without warning, and I was immediately thrown into managing a critical, bug-ridden legacy project that nobody else wanted, all with zero preparation or training. It was pure, unadulterated chaos. But hey, it definitely fit the “restructuring” and “forced deep dive” themes, didn’t it? I logged it as a tentative “Yes, Match.”
- The Spring Surprise that Wasn’t: Astrologers predicted a major financial breakthrough or an opportunity to sign a valuable new contract around May/June. I chased down a few external leads, even interviewing for a higher-paying job because the reorganization chaos sucked the life out of me. Nothing materialized contract-wise. Total Mismatch on the ‘financial breakthrough’ part. What I did get was a massive project deadline suddenly moved forward by six weeks, forcing 80-hour weeks of pure exhaustion.
- The Summer Grind: July and August were flagged as periods of necessary isolation, focused grunt work, and mental exhaustion. That, unfortunately, was brutally accurate. I practically lived inside my dark cubicle trying to debug that awful legacy code. I barely talked to anyone outside of the core team. My life was fueled by cheap coffee, takeout, and endless technical errors.
- The Fall Conflict: This is the moment that truly made me stop and raise an eyebrow. The charts explicitly warned about a significant power struggle or a nasty disagreement with a high-ranking senior figure in October. I remember scoffing at that particular prediction, thinking, ‘Yeah, right, like a movie villain will suddenly appear.’ But sure enough, my new Senior Vice President swept in after the reorg and started aggressively questioning every single decision made on my critical project. He was demanding impossible changes. We had a huge, ugly, screaming match in the main conference room in front of several witnesses. He was technically wrong, but he was senior, and I nearly walked out and quit right there. I marked that down immediately as a stone-cold, confirmed “Match.” Not a positive match, but a terrifyingly accurate event match.
Pulling the Data Together: The Unexpected Truth I Realized
When the dumpster fire of 2017 finally wrapped up, I sat down and stared hard at my spreadsheet. I had logged about 35 significant career predictions throughout the year. The total score was truly shocking, not because the matching percentage was high, but because of the quality of the matches. I only had eight clear, undisputed ‘Match’ entries—where a specific, testable outcome (positive or negative) actually occurred.
However, I had sixteen entries logged as ‘Kind Of’ matches. These were predictions so loose—things like “You will face challenges regarding communication” or “A decision may require extra thought”—that they could apply to literally any job, any single day of the year. If you are breathing and working, you face challenges. That’s just life, not astrology.
The true, key insight, the one I realized years later as I revisited the notes, was not about the stars being right or wrong. It was purely about my own psychological state and behavior. The predictions didn’t actually make the events happen; they made me hyper-aware and emotionally primed for events that already were happening due to business realities. When the charts said “expect conflict,” I walked into the office every day expecting to fight. When the SVP challenged me, I didn’t back down; I met the prediction head-on with aggression. The forecast, in that sense, became a bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy of heightened awareness, not destiny.
So, was my 2017 career successful? Yes, eventually. I survived the internal chaos, I grew my skills exponentially under relentless pressure, and I finally negotiated a significant raise the following quarter because I was the only person who knew how to maintain that awful legacy system. But did the Pisces chart cause that success? Absolutely not.
What I ultimately walked away with was this: checking those silly charts maybe helped me prep my mental game for the unavoidable mess of 2017. It gave me a strange, external framework to categorize massive amounts of professional stress and upheaval. I don’t check my horoscope anymore, but I keep the old spreadsheet archived. It’s a good, solid reminder that sometimes, just naming the beast—whether you call it Jupiter in retrograde or just plain bad corporate management—is truly half the battle in surviving it.
