Astrology is a drug!

Effects of abundant fortune telling at tap.

Man is the only creature on this planet who lives in the future. Only man has this beautiful madness and curse of projecting himself into a time that doesn't exist yet.

I was fifteen when my mother gave me the strangest gift: the power to choose my own name. Not a username or stage name - my actual legal name.

This sounds like freedom, but it was the opposite. My mother, who had been studying astrology, handed me a numerology book and told me to pick a name whose letters added up to 32. She was convinced that my ex-name wasn’t aiding my success. The next day, I had to announce to my 10th-grade class that I was now "Dharmesh Ba." They class gave me a standing ovation. I still don't know why.

When I passed my board examinations brilliantly, my mother attributed it to the cosmic forces now aligned in my favor. Every success thereafter-college admission, first job, first home-became evidence not of my effort, but of planetary intervention.

Here's what I learned: when you give someone else credit for your wins, you also give them power over your losses.

The effect of outsourced thinking

My mother didn't intend to make me dependent on astrology. She thought she was helping. But good intentions and good outcomes are different things, and the gap between them often widens over time.

Every time she attributed my success to cosmic forces, she subtly eroded my confidence in my own abilities. When things went wrong, she'd say it wasn't my fault-the timing was just bad, and I should wait a few months before trying anything new.

This created a feedback loop: the more I relied on astrological guidance, the less I trusted my own judgment. The less I trusted my judgment, the more I needed external validation. It's the same psychology that keeps people checking their phones every few minutes-each external input becomes a substitute for internal confidence.

The compound effect was profound. By my twenties, I couldn't make significant decisions without consulting the stars. I had accidentally trained myself to be helpless.

Tech makes astrology a daily affair

Traditional astrology had built-in friction. You consulted astrologers for major life decisions - marriage, career changes, health crises. The process was cumbersome: astrologer appointments, travel, waiting rooms. This friction kept astrology rare and significant.

Modern astrology apps have eliminated this friction entirely. They've taken something designed for life's biggest moments and turned it into a solution for daily anxieties.

The most popular query on these platforms isn't about career decisions or marriage prospects. It's variations of: "My boyfriend blocked me on Instagram. Will he come back?"

We've transformed a tool for major crossroads into a coping mechanism for minor inconveniences. The result is predictable: when every small problem becomes a cosmic question, you lose the ability to develop resilience for small problems.

The economics of addiction

Astrology apps have discovered something powerful: the most profitable customers are the least empowered ones.

Their business model is elegant in its simplicity. Offer a free first chat. By the time users are emotionally invested, introduce a paywall. Astrologers are incentivized to extend conversations and sell additional services. Users return whenever they face uncertainty - which, for humans, is roughly every day.

This creates what economists call a "negative externality" - the transaction benefits both parties in the short term while creating long-term costs that neither fully accounts for. The app gets subscription revenue, the user gets temporary comfort, but society gradually accumulates people who can't make decisions without celestial permission.

The parallel to other industries is obvious. Tobacco companies profit from addiction while creating long-term health costs. Social media companies profit from engagement while creating long-term attention problems. Astrology apps profit from dependency while creating long-term decision-making problems.

The incentive problem

My mother eventually realized what she'd done. In her late fourties, she actively discouraged me from seeking astrological guidance. She feared she'd raised a son who couldn't navigate life independently.

This moment of clarity reveals the core issue: astrology apps will never have this realization because their incentives prevent it. They profit most when users feel least capable of making their own decisions.

The AI acceleration

ChatGPT and similar apps will supercharge this trend. When astrological advice becomes instantly available, infinitely patient, and eerily personalized, the last barriers to dependency disappear.

AI will be sophisticated enough to provide genuine psychological insights (because it excels at pattern recognition in human behavior) while being fundamentally wrong about causation (because correlation isn't causation, even when delivered by neural networks).

We're approaching a world where an entire generation grows up outsourcing decision-making to algorithmic fortune tellers.

What actually compounds

The most expensive advice often costs nothing upfront but everything eventually.

The irony is profound: in seeking to control uncertainty through prediction, people become more vulnerable to uncertainty by abandoning the very skills that help navigate an unpredictable world.

The greatest prediction is the one we make with our own life.