On horoscopes, AI, & the desperate lil human need to be told that everything will be all right.
There are days when you don’t want advice.
You don’t want a five-step plan, a reality check, or a reminder that life is unpredictable. You don’t want someone telling you to update your CV, review your finances, or be realistic about the housing market.
You know all that already.
But then there are those days when you just want someone to tell you that things are going to work out.
Which is why I did what any reasonably modern, mildly desperate adult might do. I asked AI for my horoscope.
I had questions. Important ones.
Would I earn more money? Would I finally get lucky with a house? Was the rest of 2026 going to bring me something to look forward to?
I wasn’t asking for the winning lottery numbers. I wasn’t planning to quit my job because Mercury was going into retrograde or doing something mysterious in the sky.
I just wanted a little hope.
A little cosmic reassurance that perhaps, after all the worrying and waiting and working, life might have a pleasant surprise in store.
And then AI gave me a cautionary tale.
October, it said, was for reviewing my worth.
November was intended for pursuing opportunities.
December was for consolidating my gains.
In other words, the planets had apparently outsourced my horoscope to HR. There was talk of professional development, financial planning and keeping my expectations realistic. The house might happen, but it might not. Money might improve, but there were no guarantees.
Thank you, artificial intelligence. I was hoping for a call from Jupiter. You gave me a performance review.
And the annoying thing was that it wasn’t even wrong.
AI cannot promise me a pay rise. It cannot guarantee that the right house will appear at the right price. It cannot look at a collection of stars and confidently tell me that December will be the month everything falls into place.
Neither, for that matter, can a horoscope.
But I hadn’t come looking for a legally binding financial forecast. I had come looking for a feeling.
The feeling that perhaps things were about to get easier.
The feeling that all the things I wanted weren’t unreasonable, that I hadn’t missed my chance, that life hadn’t quietly decided to give everyone else their breakthrough while asking me to wait a little longer.
And isn’t that what we sometimes want from horoscopes?
Not necessarily the truth about the future, but permission to feel good about it.
We want to read that money is coming, that love is growing, that a long-awaited opportunity is on its way. We want to find a sentence that feels as though it was written specifically for us, on a day when we particularly need to hear it.
We might laugh about it with friends. We might pretend we don’t take it seriously. But somewhere between reading about a lucky planetary alignment and checking whether our star sign is finally having a good month, we allow ourselves to imagine a different outcome.
For a few minutes, the future feels less like a list of things that could go wrong and more like a door that might actually open.
I want the universe to tell me that my time has come.
And truth be told, there is nothing terribly foolish about that.
We live in a world that is very good at explaining why things might not happen. The economy is uncertain. Property is expensive. Careers don’t always progress as planned. Hard work doesn’t guarantee recognition. Being a good person doesn’t exempt you from disappointment.
We hear the caveats constantly.
Sometimes, we don’t need another reminder that life comes without guarantees. We need somewhere to put our hope while we figure out what to do next.
So what’s wrong with turning to AI, which promises to make life easier supposedly to also read my stars and instead of giving me glorifying rainbows, it responded like a sensible friend who didn’t want to get my hopes up.
It’s one thing to be let down by the stars, but it’s a whole another low to be let down by an AI algorithm which clearly exists to please our intellectual needs.
So much for “AI is the future”, when it can’t even predict mine; but it did make me wonder: if even AI won’t tell me the future I want to hear, what am I supposed to do with the future I have?
I had questions.
Will I earn more money?
Will I buy a house?
Will I travel to many places, preferably in business class?
Is there any chance of a little luck before this year packs its bags and disappears?
Just a hint. A nudge. A tiny celestial wink.
Something along the lines of, Divya, darling, brace yourself. Things are about to get interesting.
A little you’ve-been-through-enough-already-and-something-good-is-coming.
I asked for the future. It gave me a disclaimer.
I wanted a prophecy. It gave me a performance review.
I wanted to know whether I was going to get lucky with a house. It suggested I review my affordability and recommended a financial planning seminar.
Thank you. I hadn’t considered that the house-buying process might involve money.
We can ask AI to create an imaginary world in which we are wealthy, glamorous and permanently well-rested. But ask it whether we will actually become wealthy, and suddenly it develops the personality of a cautious accountant.
Even our machines have boundaries.
How disappointing.
And how very human that I was annoyed by this.
But it also helped me realize, what am I really looking for in my horoscope anyway?
Because if we’re honest, most of us don’t approach the future looking for a balanced assessment of the available evidence.
We approach it hoping for a spoiler.
Tell me the ending. Tell me it works out. Tell me the struggle has a purpose and that there is a scene coming in which I finally get what I’ve been waiting for.
I don’t want the entire plot. Just a trailer.
Preferably one with uplifting background music and a montage of me opening the front door of my new house.
And that’s exactly why horoscopes are so irresistible.
They take the vast, messy, thoroughly inconvenient uncertainty of being alive and divide it into neat little paragraphs.
Love is coming.
Money is coming.
Change is coming.
An old friend may return.
A new opportunity awaits.
Honestly, even the weather forecast doesn’t get away with this much vagueness.
“Something may happen near water.”
Well, I live in England. That’s half the country covered.
“Be careful of an unexpected expense.”
Now THAT is a prediction I can believe in.
“You are experiencing difficulties because Mercury is in retrograde”
A train cancellation and you turn around thinking this is a sign! Mercury, you slippery little planet. Come here and explain yourself.
“Love is in the air. Pack your boots you will meet a new man”
Tell us Venus is bringing romance, and we’re looking suspiciously at our husbands to see whether they’ve been replaced by an upgraded model.
But here’s the embarrassing part.
I can make fun of every single one of these things and still want to read tomorrow’s horoscope. I can explain confirmation bias and still remember the one time a prediction came true.
And if it’s not horoscope, then our moon sign.
Then our Chinese zodiac.
Then some random website tells us our birth number is associated with prosperity, and we’re back in business.
I can tell myself that the universe isn’t running a personalised rewards programme and still wonder whether my birth chart has something encouraging to say about the next few months.
We are ridiculous creatures.
We know the magician has a trick up his sleeve, but we still want to know what he’s going to pull out of the hat.
Sometimes, it’s a rabbit.
Sometimes, it’s a mortgage application.
Sometimes, it’s a reminder that hard work doesn’t guarantee anything and that life doesn’t owe us a happy ending on our preferred timetable.
And that last one is precisely the sort of thing I do NOT want my horoscope to tell me.
I can get that from real life, thank you very much.
If the stars don’t answer, we start bargaining with God.
What if I fast? Will this work?
What if I pray to this god? Will this work?
What if I light a lamp, say the right words, visit the temple, make a promise, give something up, ask someone holier than me to pray on my behalf and then wait very quietly for the universe to notice that I am trying?
Will that work?
And if it doesn’t, what am I doing wrong?
That is the question that quietly follows us everywhere.
Suddenly, even hope comes with performance targets.
Fasting correctly.
Pray correctly.
Believe correctly.
Wait patiently.
Do not complain while waiting.
We say we want faith, but sometimes what we really want is a guarantee with incense around it.
It is exhausting.
We want life to operate like a vending machine. Insert prayer. Add fasting. Press the button. Receive house keys.
Instead, the machine makes a noise, flashes an error message and keeps our money.
And then some random wise person tells us to trust the process.
Which process?
The process of waiting?
The process of learning?
The process of becoming stronger?
I am sure all of those processes are very meaningful. But could one of them perhaps include a small financial breakthrough?
Because I have been patient. I have reflected. I have prayed. I have fasted. I have tried to be positive. I have tried to be realistic. I have tried not to ask the universe for too much.
At this point, we do almost nothing and something wonderful happens to someone else, which feels personally offensive even when we know it isn’t.
Because if there is no cosmic reason, no spiritual mistake and no planetary blockage, then we are left with the most irritating possibility of all:
Sometimes, things take time.
Sometimes, things are difficult.
Sometimes, we do everything we can and still do not get the result we wanted.
AI, I thought, would surely be different.
It has access to more information than my entire family WhatsApp group combined.
So, we bargain.
We have already tried asking our friends, family, astrologers, religious leaders and strangers on the internet, whether there is one more thing we could try.
Not because we are stupid.
Because uncertainty is unbearable, and action feels better than helplessness.
So I asked ChatGPT to try again, but this time make it sound more positive?
I probably could have tried saying “Interpret my horoscope as if you genuinely believe I am about to have the best three months of my life!” or even asked “Tell me what I am doing right, because I am becoming suspicious that I am doing everything wrong.” All in the hopes that it would tell me what I wanted to hear.
But by that time, ChatGPT says I have exceeded the limit and prompts me to start a fresh chat conversation to clear the per-chat context window.
Sigh…
Alexa… are you there? Can you tell me my horoscope?
