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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

At this point I assume all articles saying “young people are doing X” to be total bollocks. Like the articles we’ve seen here about paper maps making a comeback for young people (a small handful of people were using them as art) or the “young people trading their smartphones for dumb phones” which had a tiny sample size and sounded like bullshit.

Nowadays you find 1-2 tweets (or similar), call it a trend, and move on to then next shovel-blog article.

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In principle I would agree, but trust me, they're onto something. I know such women around 30 who are passionate with this shit. Hell, a new word in Polish was coined for them, "zodiakara".

> Hell, a new word in Polish was coined for them, "zodiakara".

Sounds like a sub-genre of madka

That is indeed total bollocks as you say but there's something going on regarding astrology in this half-year. Some two months ago after finishing configuring my first Android phone I'm seeing this weird banner at the bottom of Play Store [1] saying "What does your horoscope says about your gaming preferences? The best game for your zodiac sign". Then, there's this well-known Polish newspaper service gazeta.pl, which in its RSS channels publishes daily horoscope for about 3 or 4 months now. And about 4 days ago I'm seeing an ad on tv (mum jumps between live tv and netflix) regarding again, astrology and best around horoscope predictions in some magazine I never heard about.

The question is, does there is indeed some high interest in this stuff that happen naturally. Or some manager in this half-year spotted a spike of interest and decided this is the new big thing for younger generations and now we're seeing the outcome: people being aggressively flood with astrology stuff all around. Or this is some well-thought campaign to condition younger people to drive further away from whatever values they barely hold on into this fringe territory of predicting one's future from star and planets positions.

[1] - https://thumbsnap.com/i/aXG64SP8.jpg

"Young People Sceptical of Articles Claiming New Trends in Young People"

They said 70 million Americans check their horoscope

I’d like to see that broken down by age group, but if 20% of your population is doing something, that’s not the same as saying "I saw two people tweet about it" or whatever.

Is checking your horoscope considered believing in astrology? I ask because I check mine, but mostly for morning reminders and put my head on straight.

Today mine starts with "The universe may deliver an ego bruise or two today, dear Virgo, as brooding Pluto squares off with the Nodes of Fate" and while I don't believe they're predicting a specific event it's nice to have that in the back of my mind today.

Coincidentally, I have an email I'm expecting to be in my work inbox this morning that could be a bit of an ego bruiser. I've been dreading it all weekend and I was thinking about how to approach it last night and decided I was not going react and reply to the email today. After reading my horoscope this morning I had the idea that skipping the email today and not even reading it might be a good thing to do. It's not going to be urgent or require a reply so why not ignore it today if I think it's going to ruin my day? It damn near ruined my weekend and I don't even know if it's in my inbox.

For me, my horoscope is no different from reading a random motivational quote every morning.

> Is checking your horoscope considered believing in astrology?

I don't think this is something that I can answer, but at the very least it says that you're neutral enough toward it to allow it to speak into your life.

That's why I think of it as more of reading a motivational quote that will inspire me to do something that day. I try not to take it too seriously, but my conflict with astrology is that I don't want to believe it, but I can't shake the fact that the moon affects the tides on Earth from my brain.

That makes me question if the moon can affect humans. The whole personality prediction and things like that I'm not a believer at all, but the moon affecting our mood? I can buy it.

We are made up of a lot of water, especially our brains, and I'm not confident enough to say it's impossible the moon can affect us. Mars and Venus are a lot more kooky, because even though we don't know how gravity works we're pretty certain it doesn't have a strong effect for small masses over long distances.

I will admit I'm more willing to say astrology is a "maybe, who knows" compared to the existence of God. For me the existence of God is a firm no and I'm pretty confident in that.

There's a lot more evidence for God than astrology.

As a non-believer I wouldn't go as far as to say there's evidence for God, but I definitely agree with the spirit of your comment. Evidence against astrology is abundant, trivially easy to replicate, and the alleged narrative behind how astrology works is obviously incompatible with our knowledge of the Universe to the point that an educated middle schooler could explain why. None of that could be said about God.

If I read it, then I usually read all 12 of them and try to decide how many of them fit better than my own one. Not sure that counts as believing, more being easily amused.

I always swap the subject with "a dozen people on twitter".

We could only be so lucky if “a dozen people” was the bar that “journalists” held themselves to. I’ve seen articles written on a single post/comment from Reddit, it’s absurd.

That said, I’m absolutely going to start rewriting titles in my head like that, good idea.

In general I would agree, but I would like to add I have had two conversations in the last month or so with strangers who were both women in their late 20s to early 30s that involved their asking of my zodiac sign, and a quick rundown of what that meant

Most likely explanation and headline would be “Journalists TikTok feed showed 5 videos of young people doing X”

100 %, articles like this are the bane of the modern world.

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