From paralysis to purpose: this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Or why we need to use the next 19 years very wisely.
Anyone who knows me personally knows that I’ve got a complicated relationship with astrology. Please don’t instantly unsubscribe - bear with me on this one.
On the one hand, my logical, rational and Westernly-educated brain thinks that it’s all nonsense, and that it’s embarrasing to give it the time of day.
Then there’s the part of me that thinks that it might well be nonsense but if it can help you to reflect on your life, choices and relationships then maybe there’s a place for it (presuming you don’t let it dictate all of your decisions).
Then there’s the part of me, a part which has only emerged relatively recently, that says: ultimately humans are just a bunch of atoms thrown together for a period of time. We think we understand where these atoms came from but we’re not really sure and maybe, just maybe, there’s more in heaven and earth than we can possibly understand. I’m not religious so I’m using heaven as a bit of a catch-all here but the point stands: I guess we’ll never really know.
So maybe, if we’ll never really know, we could entertain for a moment that there might be something in this whole ‘Age of Aquarius’ shebang.
For those whose social media algorithms aren’t feeding you this information already (and I imagine that’s most of you who aren’t white queer women): last Thursday, Pluto moved into Aquarius for the first time in over 200 years. To understand what this means, I took to reddit, where someone helpfully explained that the Zodiac signs (i.e Aquarius in this case) are like the wallpaper of the sky, so all this means is that Pluto has moved to a new part of the wallpaper.
Supposedly, Pluto is a planet of metamorphosis and change as well as of power and truth. Aquarius is about paradigm shifts and breakthroughs and embodies communal and societal progress through a process of individual truth seeking. So when you put them together you get a powerful vision of collective liberation through the mechanism of examining our own personal relationships to what currently exists within us and around us. And questioning all of it.
Whether or not you believe in astrological ages, I think that sounds pretty fun.
And last time this happened, we had the French and American revolutions and the beginning of the Industrial revolution, so go figure (and no, I’m not going to get into all the less than ideal things that came from those events, or at least not right now).
So, whether this incoming era is defined by the stars or by our rapidly collapsing systems, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: we have about two decades to fundamentally reshape how we live on this earth.
We’re in real trouble
I often say to my family, friends, acquaintances, and, let’s be real, to almost anyone I meet, that I don’t think most people realise quite how much trouble we are actually in (yes, I have been a real hoot at parties this year).
Sure, we like to throw around terms like “climate crisis”, “societal collapse” and one I heard on a podcast last week: “late-stage capitalist hellhole”, but I don’t think that most of us, myself included, have truly grasped what these terms mean. Which is probably fair enough because it’s quite difficult for the human brain to comprehend and when we do try, it’s deeply painful and overwhelming.
And yet, we do have a responsibility to try. Because until we do, we won’t make the necessary changes to ourselves and our societies to mitigate the worst of the oncoming collapse. Sadly, I do now think we’re at a stage where collapse is inevitable and what we need to work towards is doing all we can to minimise harm to existing and future inhabitants of the planet. Some may disagree with me on this and that’s great, I’d love to be shown alternative visions of the future. But for now I think we need to embrace and understand the urgency of the situation with our eyes open.
We look set to enter into catastrophic environmental collapse within the next 20-25 years according to the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organisation you should definitely know about if you don’t already), if we don’t rapidly adapt or overhaul our existing systems.
Relatedly, in something that should have been front page news across the world, scientists have claimed that we have now breached 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries that are essential to sustain human life on earth.
We have also just witnessed the election of an authoritarian populist septuagenarian to one of the most powerful positions in the world, as well as a recent legal amendment from Russia that makes it much easier for it to deploy its nuclear weapons.
Yikes.
If we truly understood what this meant for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren I believe we’d be completely unable to continue with business as usual.
I think we might be tearing down the physical manifestations of overconsumption and rampant exploitation with our bare hands.
And yet we continue in our cognitive dissonance of consuming images of the Atacama desert filled with fast fashion outcasts whilst simultaneously buying ourselves new clothes, because surely a few new coats and dresses here and there can’t really hurt.
Which brings me to my real point, which is that there is so much possibility for change if we can just start to imagine and then live beyond the system that we’ve grown up in. But this is going to take work: it’s not enough to sit there wringing our hands saying that it’s all too late. There are real people and real beings that are going to bear the cost of the decisions we’re all making today and it’s not looking pretty for them. Or, indeed, for us: if you’re alive today and under the age of about 50, it’s likely that you’re going to look back in 30 years and think “god I wish I could go back 30 years and do things differently”.
The pivotal moment for me was when my first nephew was born, 3 years ago now.
Let me be clear - I have infinite respect for parents today who are juggling the immense challenges of raising children within our current system. They're already doing the hardest job there is. This isn't about judgment or shame - it's about all of us, in whatever way we can, trying to create a better world for these children we love.
And for me personally, I just couldn’t imagine looking my nephew in the eye in 20 years and saying “yes, I knew how bad it was but I didn’t really want to know because it made me sad. So I carried on taking flights for weekend getaways multiple times a year, buying things I didn’t need and sticking my fingers in my ears pretending that someone else was going to come along and fix things.”
What I want to be able to say to him is, “I knew. And I really truly tried.”
Trying does matter
In no way am I saying that I am doing a great job of trying: I am a hypocrite in many ways. I do things imperfectly. I spend a lot of days not doing many things at all. And I know that 99.99% of the world does not have the time, space and privilege that I do to try and forge a new path and imagine things differently.
However.
Given this, frankly alarming, timeline, what if more of us decided to just stop playing by ‘the rules’? If you knew, for sure, that you were not going to be able to buy your dream house; that the job you’re currently in won’t even exist in 10 years; that more and more of your friends will stop jokingly talking about living in communes and will actually start doing it: what would you do differently now?
You’d probably want to start strengthening your local communities and not waiting for national governments to do it. You’d be establishing mutual aid societies and building community-led infrastructure. You might be worrying a little bit less about that email sitting in your inbox that you don’t want to reply to.
Maybe you’d want to start learning some key skills that might become necessary: how to grow food; how to maintain and repair what we already own; how to heal ourselves and each other by understanding and reconnecting with nature.
As I’ve said before, I'm not suggesting everyone needs to quit their job tomorrow or move to an eco-commune. The changes we need will look different for everyone based on circumstances, responsibilities, and resources. What I am suggesting is that we all need to start somewhere: maybe it's learning one new skill, joining one local group, or just beginning to question the assumptions we've built our lives around. The key is to start moving in a different direction, however small those first steps might be.
And to take those steps right now.
And the great news is that there are thousands and thousands, if not millions, of people all over the world who are already doing all sorts of incredible and inspiring things. We just need to amplify their voices, their projects and their knowledge so that more of us can get involved.
Look at Re-Action Collective and their mission to challenge the status quo with community-based circular solutions for the outdoor industry. For the second year running they’re getting #citizenfriday trending as an antidote to the consumerist nightmare of ‘Black Friday’, where instead of buying things at a fake discount, they want us all to: share, repair and get out in the fresh air.
Or take the wonderful humans who created Trust the People, who offer an incredible course (that I’ve just completed) to teach and empower community builders committed to building a real democracy from the grassroots up.
Examples like these mean that my social media and LinkedIn feeds are now full to the brim with people working for a fairer, greener and more conscious and connected world.
As well as just a teeny bit of astrology.
What story do you want to tell?
So I’m choosing to buy into the Age of Aquarius. Whether you’d rather be guided by stars or science, or both, we're being called to examine our individual relationships with truth and power, while simultaneously working towards collective liberation. And by the estimates I’ve seen, we have about 19 years to do it.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be exploring:
How we lost our ability to imagine futures beyond our current conception of global capitalism (and how we might get it back)
The cognitive dissonance that keeps us trapped in harmful patterns
How different philosophical traditions might help us think beyond the Western frameworks that got us here
The relationship between personal and collective healing as we try to exist in these transformative times
Because if Pluto in Aquarius really does herald an era of radical change - just as it did with the American, French, and Industrial revolutions - then this time we better make damn sure we're steering that change in the right direction.
For now though, I invite you to sit with these questions:
What would you do differently if you knew for certain that everything was going to change beyond recognition within two decades?
What skills and relationships would you want to build?
What would truly matter to you?
And what story do you want to be able to tell that grown up baby boy when he looks at you and says: “what did you do?”
This post was edited thanks to an excellent suggestion from my mother that it would be useful to actually include some examples of people doing cool things. I’ve included a couple here but it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.
My mother, may she Rest in Peace, was a lifelong adherent of astrology. During my life, anyway. So I've been open to it as a frame for making sense of the world, while not lending it a great deal of credence in my daily decision making.
But the more I think about it, the more accepting of its potential validity I become, based on two thoughts. One is its age and history. Watching "modern" humans bungle our way through time, with our self perceived superiority and faith in science, gives me greater appreciation of how little we know. And that maybe, just maybe, our sensitivity to the Universe may have been sharper when we weren't so agog and overwhelmed with our own technical achievements. And that this sensitivity, after many centuries of refinement and use, may have provided reliable information. So there's that.
My other thought relates to what you said that we just don't know how the Universe is stitched together. It strikes me as very possible that our spatial relationship to stars' positions may have particular effects on our natures and perceptions. Stars are unimaginably powerful sources of energy, and each are unique in their atomic composition and the resulting energy they radiate - which, lets admit, we can sense with our instruments but have very little depth of understanding about what energy is (how does it travel through the galaxy???).
I think of our own neighborhood star, the Sun, and how it influences our daily lives. It's laughable really, because it IS life. It is the source of all energy that creates life. Beyond that though, consider the difference between night and day. They are two very different worlds. Yet what defines them? Nothing more than the location we each occupy on this dusty spinning rock we inhabit. My night is half the world's day. Why should the power of countless stars not also exert their influence? Our position on Earth will either shade their energy or expose us to them.
I like to think of the crystalline structure of energy relationships, between individuals and celestial bodies also. Who's to say how influence travels?
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Peace.
Thank you for this🙏🙏🙏🙏