AI-generated image using the following prompt: "Can you make me an image in the style of a velvet painting of dogs playing poker, except it is depicting depressed, poor dogs chained to slot machines that are spinning social media channels while their pockets are being picked by wealthy dogs?"
December is an opportunity to look back on recent events, and gear up for the fight ahead. There will be a fight. And that will be a good thing! The underrated thing about being in open conflict is that it’s turning toward a person or a problem instead of turning away. Everything about our culture is built around increasing our ability to turn away. Algorithm life, social media echo chambers, wireless earbuds, the relentless personal demands capitalism places on us to make everything work ourselves… increasingly we stick with affirming what we already know and surrounding ourselves with like-minded people. It is no surprise that this is showing up as increasing geographic stratification, or as divorce and going no contact over increasingly extreme political stances. All of this turning away has a real impact on our agency. People are social, and power is expressed collectively. So I want you to ask yourself some tough questions, ideally in an open, loving way:
In what ways, big and small, are you unwilling to deal with challenges, or are just denying something that’s perfectly real, but not the reality you want?
Who benefits from all this turning away? At a more political or social level, who wants us to be divided, and why?
At a more personal level, where is your power being drained away, because you are turning away from something you could be facing?
December, and the first few months of 2025, are an opportunity to turn toward things that challenge us, and slowly make progress toward relating to them in a way that doesn’t sap our strength. The month features two retrogrades, and because I come to astrology by way of nonprofit leadership, I always think of retrogrades as good times for strategic planning. Strategic planning is a lot like planning to go to war. It’s about turning toward the problems, and taking the time to consider how they’ve been addressed in the past and whether or not that worked, so you can do better moving forward. Good strategic planning includes zooming out and getting some context; getting grounded both in what you believe and what you want to accomplish; opening yourself up to external feedback; doing the indirect back and forth dance of collaboration; and holding stakeholders who would rather do whatever it takes to get this process over with expediently in a state of discomfort, so that a different way forward might emerge. All of this is a great use of the upcoming Mercury and Mars retrogrades, followed closely in early 2025 by a Venus retrograde. All these retrogrades on top of one another mean that you’re going to be uncomfortably rehashing something anyway… might as well harness this restless, backward-looking energy instead of waste it on doomscrolling. These three retrogrades are all somewhat fiery, so they are about agency and prompt action. And they all feature planets in places they don’t like, so they are about what’s not working.
From now until the end of the first quarter of 2025, I advise sitting with what isn’t working and what you don’t like, figuring out where your agency lies, and working on your response.
I mean this practically. If you’re a US citizen, it’s a good month to get ready to file your taxes as soon as you can, make sure your passport and other federal business is in good shape, put the numbers of your representatives in your phone, and make those big purchases you were planning anyway before mass deportations and tariffs mess up the economy. It’s also a good month to ask yourself how much of your data, thoughts, attention, and pictures of your kids you want to give to the AI harvest. I also mean this more broadly. It’s a good month to get clear about which parts of your life are genuinely spent held in community, and which parts are spent fundamentally alone, even though you are technically interacting with others. It’s time to get into the conflicts that you’re bottling up, because they keep you feeling alone even when you are in a crowded room.
Is your workflow yours, or are you toggling between that thing you want to be doing and three social media platforms?
Are you leading when you are the best leader for the job, or are you following some knucklehead because you refuse to stand up?
Is there an area of life where you need to admit that things aren’t working and try something different?
Are you compromising yourself at work, or in a key relationship, or with your family?
Are you isolated?
Are you ready to live your values in 2025?
This one bears repeating: Are you ready to live your values in 2025?
I am asking this question because if you’re living your values, it’s way easier to make hard decisions. The only problem is that living your values is harder than doing what everybody else is doing. It’s incremental, rigorous practice, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the instant gratification we have all grown so accustomed to. It means choosing a thousand times or more every single day whether to do the easy thing everybody else is doing, or cut a new path that has more integrity, is healthier, or feels more right. Whether you are looking to be a better parent, a more engaged citizen, a more devoted student, or a more effective professional, I am not talking about normal measures like making some new year’s resolutions or buying some plastic boxes from the Container Store, or taking a supplement that some instagram influencer says will fix everything for you. Instead, imagine this moment as the beginning of a long, protracted fight for your agency, in ways large and small. My advice is to take back your agency, one small step at a time. Introduce yourself to your neighbors. Say the difficult thing. Stick your neck out. Let someone be upset or angry. Put your hat in the ring. Close the Bluesky or Threads or, ugh, Twitter, window, and take a walk with a friend. And know that you will have to do this again and again and again because you have been trained to confuse social media with pleasure. Put the phone in another room. Stop making everybody else around you do the work of making you feel comfortable, and instead, go be uncomfortable with people!
And whatever you do, don’t do all of these things all at once! Instead, pick one action, big or small, that really matters to you. Then make all the tiny, hard decisions that it takes to make that new action the way you do things every day.
While we all live under one sky, very natal chart is different! Want help putting this forecast into action? I offer one-time consultations, horary questions, and ongoing coaching relationships
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