The Astrology Market

Astrology is settling into its proper place in my life as “thing I’ve always wanted to master in order to deal with the loud singing of the solar system in my brain” and not “side hustle working for people I don’t know.” There’s some social pressure to approach it as the latter.

Of course, a primary driving force for this pressure is how expensive it is to learn. One wants to pay oneself back. The social part of the pressure comes from seeing how quickly people quit spending and start selling and feeling like a fool for not doing so.

My feeling about this arrangement is that the barriers to entry are still stacked on the wrong side. It costs X hundred dollars of reading material and X hundred dollars of face-to-face transmission with working practitioners, and the capacity of the latter is constrained.

I believe it’ll work out okay. The written tradition will be liberated from the tyranny of intellectual property as the translators are eventually compensated and their legacies are cemented. More practitioners will be able to arise.

As capacity opens up, less of the face-to-face learning will be in the form of one-to-many classes to learn professional astrology — which is horribly inefficient in terms of student skill right now — and more in terms of direct 1-1 work with an astrologer to see how it’s done.