From star-gazing to navel-gazing: How astrology captured Gen Z

Gen Z has become starry-eyed, but their fixation with astrology isn’t as woo woo as you might think, writes Anna Moloney

In Sri Lanka, the date on which the New Year is celebrated is determined by when the sun moves from the house of Pisces to the house of Aries, in accordance with the traditions of the island’s Buddhist and Hindu communities. Generally, this falls around the 13th or 14th April, but it is subject to debate among the country’s 42-member panel of government-backed astrologists – who are currently in turmoil.

This year, for the first time ever, the panel is split, forcing the country to come to a decision by majority rather than unanimously and spelling trouble for Sri Lanka’s auspicious unity. Indeed, dissenting soothsayer Roshan Chanaka has warned that the time chosen will lead to disaster, prophesying that Sri Lanka will “go up in flames” if it goes ahead with the current date next month.

Here in Britain we may scoff; our national decision-making is, if not perfect, at least free from quarrelling seers. But, in truth, we are constantly making important decisions based on attempts to predict the unknowable, and if our economic forecasts over the last two years have been anything to go by, the Bank of England’s rate-setters might as well have been looking into a crystal ball.

And indeed, amid the “unprecedented” era that has characterised the last four years, the appeal of astrology has grown rapidly, particularly among millennials and Gen Z, for whom the future appears increasingly precarious. Co-Star, a social networking astrological app that provides users with daily horoscopes, was reported to have 30m registered users as of last July, a quadrupling of its 2020 numbers. Meanwhile, a recent survey found Gen Z were far more likely to be interested in applying astrology to their lives than religion.

But Gen Z are not entirely irrational and, crucially, though they may be more likely to take an interest in astrology, this is not predicated on a genuine belief in the guiding power of the stars. On the contrary, many of astrology’s most enthusiastic followers do not believe in its spiritualism at all. Polls in the US found that while one in four Americans believed in astrology “to a degree”, over half read horoscopes. Likewise social theorist Theodor Adorno, who examined the modern appetite for astrology based off of the the Los Angeles Times’s popular horoscope column from the 1950s, noted that “many followers of astrology do not seem quite to believe but rather take an indulgent, semi-ironical attitude towards their own conviction”.

This tenet marks a crucial distinction between the modern western interest in astrology and that of Sri Lanka and other more traditional proponents. The latter’s use of astromancy is rooted in ‘mundane astrology’, the practice’s oldest school, which is concerned with the matters of governments and nations. Gen Z’s horoscope fixation, on the contrary, is concerned explicitly with the self, in accordance with ‘natal astrology’, the branch concerned with individual birth charts, first developed in the 6th century and now having its second heyday in the year of our lord 2024.

From star-gazing to navel-gazing then, a cynic might say, but is it really so different from the corporate obsession with Myers-Briggs tests? From INFPs to ESTJs, Myers-Briggs claims to be rooted in evidence-based psychological theories to separate out the mediators from the executives. But as most who have taken the quiz more than once can attest to, one’s ‘personality type’ often seems to hinge just as much on the time of the day and the slant of the sun as one’s star sign. Perhaps what’s really going on here is a kind of pseudoscientific soul searching; a yearning for an easily definable identity as other markers – race, gender, religion – become more complex.

As eco-anxiety grips the young, believing in a kind of predetermination can also offer a liberating and comforting escape. This ties into the concurrent traction gained by ‘optimistic nihilism’, a worldview which offers proponents a way to forge their own meanings onto their lives, based on an acceptance that the universe is ultimately a place of meaninglessness. In the same way, as Adorno put it, modern astrology and horoscopes offer their adherents “a way to articulate meaningful narratives about the world and their place in it”.

The notorious slipperiness of the kind of language used in horoscopes, which can be bent to apply to almost any circumstance, naturally lends itself well to this kind of personal myth-making. It may also be the reason why astrology has been able to appeal to such a range of followers (Gen Z may not be pleased to find out that astrology has also enjoyed a surprising popularity among fascists).

Similarly, it’s astrology’s malleable quality that has allowed it to variably become both a form of empowerment and submission. “As above, so below” is a slogan often attached to astrology, the belief that the terrestrial world is a reflection of the celestial one. For some, this can validate complacency: why bother if the stars have already decided? Yet its mirror – “so below, as above” – can inspire an opposite sense of aggrandisement. A horoscope can “promise a cosmos in which the individual human life has literally cosmic significance,” as Adorno put it.

So, perhaps before we roll our eyes at horoscope-obsessed millennials and spatting Sri Lankan seers, it is worth thinking about the many ways we all so often look to the stars.