Hello folks, long time no speak! Indeed, I simply can’t ignore the lateness of this newsletter, and for that I sincerely apologise. However I can make up for it slightly by letting you know that this is a birthday special. That’s right! It’s (not) my birthday (but it was on Saturday)!
In honour of such an important occasion, I am dedicating this month’s Unreality to the day of my birth - or more specifically, the date, time and location. No idea what I’m on about? Read on my friend…
Pisces season ♓︎
I’m not a true believer in astrology, in that I recognise it as a pseudoscience that can’t possibly have any basis in fact (I think?) Bit of a weird one for me though of course, as I constantly swing wildly between an obsession with rationality and making sense of things and an infatuation with all things supernatural and otherworldly. Yet despite thinking of astrology as (probably) pseudoscience, I do enjoy it all the same.
It’s fascinating to me that I consistently seem to fit the central tropes of every pisces meme. Even the fact that I write this newsletter is quite possibly the most pisces thing ever. Stereotypically, pisces are emotional dreamers who refuse to live in reality. Also, we have really good music taste.
The Barnum effect
Now, we’ve all heard of the famous study by Bertram Forer - who provided each of his psychology students with an assessment of their character, purportedly based on their answers to a personality test. Despite the fact that (unbeknownst to them) they all received the exact same results, the statements were generally perceived as personally accurate by each individual.
This is often given as an explanation for the occasionally eerie levels of apparent relevancy found in horoscopes and other personalised predictions. But we certainly can’t accept this as the only rationale. For one, astrology meme pages and magazine horoscopes present content for every zodiac sign together in one place. I can’t be the only one who reads every one to double check they’re not just all universally relevant?
Of course one could also say there’s an element of ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ to these tropes. Perhaps I’ve been so constantly exposed to the pisces stereotype that I start to recognise and single it out within myself, when otherwise it might have remained just one of many unremarked elements making up my personality. Finally, it’s entirely true that it’s often not that hard to simply make something fit. A simple case of confirmation bias - with a little bit of creative interpretation, anything can start to make sense.
Connection hunting
Yet those explanations don’t feel quite fulfilling enough for me. As I so often like to reiterate, I love spotting connections (and have an overactive tendency to do so).
I very briefly made reference in a previous Unreality post to the fact that it’s unlikely your phone is listening to you, and far more likely that there is simply so much data collected about you that predicting what you might be talking about is actually a fairly straightforward task (at least with enough money, AI and data scientists at hand). Whilst this is horrible and scary and not exactly something I like about the contemporary techno dystopia we live in, I do find it fascinating, and it makes for an entertaining puzzle to solve. When I get served up an advert for something that I swear I’ve never searched for but was talking to a friend about just the other day, I get a giddy boost of excitement at the opportunity to work out how and why that might have occurred. I attempt to trace steps backwards - apps I’ve used, locations I’ve been - to find the path from that conversation to the advert in question. Sometimes it just helps to make a game out of an otherwise unavoidable horror of our hyper-connected existence.
What’s this got to do with horoscopes you ask? (To be honest you’re probably not actually asking as I’m fairly certain it’s obvious where I’m going with this.) Might there be actual real reasons for my dreamy escapist and stereotypically pisces personality? Is there something about being born in late February that genuinely impacted my early development so much that I’m more likely to have an emotional breakdown over a lost sock than someone born in the warmer summer months? Honestly, I think the answer is yes. I haven’t got it quite figured out just yet - especially as conditions like weather do vary massively across the globe (what are pisces from Australia like? Can someone check for me?) But there must be something. Proximity to Christmas? School term dates? The tax year?
A good friend of mine once asked if I ever find myself coming to a question in my mind and choosing to not look up the answer, even if it’s probably out there, because the enjoyment of musing over it to myself is more appealing than finding that answer. At the time I said I wasn’t familiar with the feeling, but turns out I’d just not acknowledged it before. This is very much an example of one of those times. I’m fully prepared now for people to start sending me links to studies evidencing a genuine relationship between birth month and personality, for whatever reason or other. So far though I’ve chosen to not delve too deeply into what might be out there. I think I’ll muddle it over in my mind for a bit longer first.
And thus concludes this late-but-still-special edition of Unreality, and also the month of February. Tomorrow we scoot on over into March and hopefully start to see the beginnings of something looking like springtime.
Until next time (whenever that ends up being) - keep it unreal, weirdos xxx
Nice one, but interesting to consider whether it makes a difference if one is born on ones natural due date or is brought into the world early through surgical intervention...