Why do I read my horoscope if I don’t even believe in it?

Let me be very clear about something before we start: I do not believe in astrology.

I am a rational adult. I understand that a planet millions of kilometres away has no opinion about my weekends. I know that the position of Mercury on the day I was born doesn’t decide whether I’ll text my ex.

And yet.

Every single morning, before I’ve checked the news, before I’ve checked the weather, sometimes before I’ve fully opened my eyes, I check my horoscope. And if it says something good, like “a surprise opportunity is coming your way”, I walk around all day secretly waiting for it. If it says something bad, like “be careful with communication today”, I immediately decide it’s nonsense and close the app.

That’s not belief. That’s a very toxic relationship with an app.

And I’m not alone. Ask anyone at a dinner party their sign and watch what happens. Even the people who roll their eyes know their sign. They know their rising sign. They have opinions about Virgos. Everyone has opinions about Virgos.

So what is going on? Why do so many of us, smart, sceptical, educated people, keep reading something we don’t believe in?

Okay, so the first answer comes from a psychology professor called Bertram Forer, and it’s honestly hilarious.

In 1948, Forer gave his students a personality test. A week later, he handed each of them their “personal” results, a little paragraph describing who they were, and asked them to rate how accurate it was, from 0 to 5.

They loved it. The average score was over 4. They felt totally seen.

Plot twist: every single student had got the exact same paragraph.

And Forer had pulled most of it from a horoscope book he’d found at a newsstand.

Lines like:

“You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.”
“You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.”
“At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.”

I mean. Come on. That’s everyone. That’s me, you, your mum, the barista, and probably the Pope.

Psychologists now call this the Barnum effect, after the circus guy P. T. Barnum, whose whole trick was having “a little something for everybody.” Write something vague enough and flattering enough, and every person who reads it will think, oh my God, that’s literally me.

And that’s horoscopes in a nutshell. “Someone close to you may surprise you this week.” Yes. Obviously. I know people. People are surprising. So, mystery solved? We read our horoscopes because they’re written to fit everybody, and our brains go “wow, so accurate.”

Except that doesn’t fully explain it. Because I know about the Barnum effect now. I’ve literally just explained it to you. And I’m still going to check mine tomorrow morning.

Which made me wonder if even the smartest people in history did the same. And it turns out that the man who basically figured out how the planets actually move was also writing horoscopes. For money.

His name was Johannes Kepler, and if you’ve ever learnt that planets move in ellipses rather than perfect circles, that’s him. He worked out the laws of how planets actually orbit the Sun. He’s one of the founders of modern astronomy. Real science. The good stuff.

And to pay the bills, he wrote horoscopes.

Not as a hobby. As a job. Early in his career in Austria, part of his work was producing a yearly calendar full of predictions. In his very first one he predicted a brutally cold winter and an invasion from the Ottoman Empire. And then both actually happened. Overnight, he was famous. Not for his maths. For his predictions.

Later he became the official mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor, a job that, awkwardly, also included doing astrology for very powerful people who really wanted to know what the stars said about their wars. He even drew up a horoscope for one of the most famous generals of the time.

So imagine this guy. A genius figuring out the actual mechanics of the solar system by day, and by night telling an emperor whether Thursday is a good day to invade somewhere.

And he knew how ridiculous it was. He has this line I love, where he calls astrology the “foolish little daughter” of astronomy, and says that if she didn’t earn her own living, her wise mother would starve.

Basically: astrology is silly, but astrology pays the rent.

I find that so comforting. Because it means even one of the smartest people in history lived in exactly the same contradiction as me. He didn’t fully believe it. He also couldn’t completely let it go. And interestingly, he never totally dismissed the idea that the sky might have some connection to our lives. He just thought most horoscopes were nonsense.

Which, honestly, is my exact position. Most of it is nonsense. And I’m still reading it.

And I think Kepler shows why. For most of human history, astronomy and astrology were the same thing. People looked up at the sky for two reasons: to understand how it worked, and to find out what it meant for them. One of those turned into science. The other one turned into an app on my phone. But the second urge never went away. We don’t just want to know how the universe works.

We want to know if it’s talking to us.

Which brings me to the last question. Why do we want that so badly? Why do we want the universe to have a message for us at all?

And for that we need a Swiss psychiatrist who, a bit unexpectedly, actually did an astrology experiment. On married couples.

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who started out as Freud’s golden boy, fell out with him spectacularly, and went off to invent half the words we now use about personality. Introvert. Extrovert. Archetypes. If you’ve ever taken a personality quiz, Jung is somewhere in its family tree.

He was also obsessed with coincidences. Not normal ones. Meaningful ones. He even made up a word for them: synchronicity.

His favourite story goes like this. A patient was telling him about a dream in which she’d been given a golden scarab beetle. And while she was talking, something started tapping on the window behind him. He opened it, and in flew a beetle. A real one, gold-green, the closest thing to a scarab you’d find in Switzerland. He caught it and handed it to her: “Here is your scarab.”

Okay, so either the universe was sending a message, or a beetle was just being a beetle at the most dramatic possible moment. Jung leaned heavily towards the first option. Obviously.

And then, being Jung, he actually tested astrology. He collected the birth charts of several hundred married couples to see whether certain star alignments, the ones astrologers said predicted marriage, showed up more often than chance. At first the numbers looked exciting. But once he had all the data, it basically came out as chance. And the strangest part? The results seemed to bend towards whatever the researchers were hoping to find.

Which is, honestly, the most horoscope thing that’s ever happened.

But here’s what I find interesting. Jung didn’t really conclude “astrology is true” or “astrology is fake.” His point was more that humans are meaning-making machines. We’re desperate for our lives to feel connected to something bigger. A beetle at the window. A planet in retrograde. A sentence in an app that says someone from your past may reappear.

It’s not that the universe is talking. It’s that we’re always listening.

So. Why do I read my horoscope if I don’t even believe in it?

Here’s where I’ve landed. Forer explains why it feels so accurate: horoscopes are written to fit everyone, and our brains love feeling seen. Kepler shows that even the smartest people in history lived in this exact contradiction, half sceptical, half hooked, because looking at the sky for meaning is about as old as being human. And Jung says that’s not stupidity. It’s who we are. We want our lives to mean something, and sometimes a little paragraph on a phone is the easiest place to look.

And honestly, I’ve decided that’s fine. I’m not going to make big life decisions based on Saturn. I’m not quitting my job because Mercury said so. But I’ve realised that when I read my horoscope, I’m not really reading about the stars. I’m reading about myself. “You might need to have a difficult conversation this week.” And something in me goes: oh, yeah. I do. With that person.

It’s not a map. It’s a mirror.

A thirty-second, slightly unhinged, cosmic therapy session before breakfast.

So I’ll keep reading it. Not because I believe it. But because, for some reason, it keeps asking me the right questions.

Today’s, by the way, says I’m going to have “a creative breakthrough.”

So, you know. You’re welcome.

“It’s not a map. It’s a mirror.”