The year of the 'Saturn return' and the end of everything
Does it feel like everyone is going through their Saturn return lately?
From Kacey Musgraves to SZA to Ariana Grande, some of our most popular divas seem to be in their Saturn return lately—myself included. The Astrology girls have long touted the importance of a Saturn’s return, attributing it to everything from non-Ozempic weight loss to #GirlBoss job successes. A Saturn return refers to the notion that every 27-30 years the planet circles back to the ecliptic longitude that it occupied at the moment of a person's birth. This represents an opportunity for rebirth, for fresh starts, for change and growth.
Also, I looked it up, an Ecliptic longitude is actually not one of those clunky workout machines at your local YMCA.
The notion of “circling back” has long plagued our society, and perhaps the internet age most especially. It does not go without notice that this trend cycle, of seemingly everyone experiencing their Saturn return at the same time, comes from the fact that the internet is aging together and entering similar life stages at similar times. We are no longer a Club Penguin generation, we are a generation with Student Loans, car payments, existential dread, and millennial grey apartments. Is it any wonder then, that a concept as transformative as the Saturn return has taken hold in the public consciousness for many who feel their life is in a period of turmoil and free fall?
Think of the idea of a throwback post or apps like Timehop, which made their bread and butter off of personal online nostalgia curated to your own particular timelines from the early 2010s. There is a desire in all of us to experience our own pasts and consider a new start. This is the very reason why every January is plagued with resolutions and ins and outs lists.
Ins for 2024
Plain yogurt
Outs for 2024
Men named Tony
One-ply toilet paper
The one-ply toilet paper in Tony’s Bushwick apartment
In a culture that already valorizes self-help, glow-up culture, and the aspirational Clean Girl aesthetic, prepare to experience this January mindset on repeat for the next three years. It seems that everyone is going to be turning over a new leaf—making self-betterment manifold. Self-optimization with no clear end in sight.
But does this current obsession with Saturn return come from the same drive that causes us to reach back out to the long-forgotten ex we should have blocked in 2017? Is it the same drive that causes us to remember the “good ole days?” Is a Saturn return an opportunity at a fresh start, or just the refusal to imagine our future?
Existentiality is nothing new for those entering their dirty thirties. It seems as though the big questions begin popping up right around the time that our bodies cease to produce collagen. Who am I? What do I want? Where do I belong? Is the Dune worm hot actually? Take a 5mg edible and ask yourself any of these questions. I promise you, you will be in for the ride of your life.
It was the great philosopher and part-time shoe addict, Carrie Bradshaw, who once said: “Your twenties are for fun, your thirties are for learning lessons, your forties are for buying drinks.” With most cocktails costing upwards of $20, I doubt that I’ll be buying anyone much of a drink in my forties, but the sentiment still stands. We all think we have everything figured out in our twenties. We have (more than likely) started our first real jobs, moved out, graduated college, began dating seriously and so on. There comes a time in every twenty-something’s life however, when they realize that what they thought they knew, about life, the world, and themselves, amounts to very little in the grand scheme of things. This becomes especially apparent as the tentpoles to which we clung to— affordable living, guaranteed futures, and the promise of companionship become less attainable than ever before.
Perhaps it is the orbital path of the planet that is creating this shift, perhaps it is just a result of having lived for long enough, perhaps it is something else entirely. My money is on whatever they put in Diet Coke.
I think a more generous perception of this concept is that when one reaches a certain age (twenty-seven club be damned) you have lived enough life to have a tangible past, and can truly conceptualize being alive for the first time; and at the same time, you can also conceptualize your own mortality. At roughly 27, you have reached so many of your formative milestones, that the future, though vague, now has less in it than ever before.
I grew up Catholic, and one of the things that struck me as odd was how much the Church front-loaded their Sacraments like Baptism and Communion. After you’ve been married the only Sacrament left truly occurs on your deathbed. To me, it seems there ought to be an awful lot of life between marriage and death deserving of celebration. So why is it seemingly skipped over? Life is like that though, we hype up these early events, your graduations, your first kisses, your first apartments, and besides an occasional birthday, the largest celebration you have left to experience is your wedding and then your funeral. No wonder so much pressure is placed on both.
As the Pinterest boards suggest, my generation is getting married in droves. It really does seem like they are just giving out husbands these days—and if I see one more floral arch or wedding hashtag I might pack it all up and hermit out in Northern Maine. But with that major life-event checked off, the morbidity of success settles in. There is so little to look forward to after marriage for so many. You look around at the top of the mountain and realize it’s all downhill. There is, a diminishing return on milestones when you prescribe this model of living. What is left for us, if we’ve completed our entire checklists in this game of Life?
I find it especially noteworthy that the musicians who are singing about Saturn returns are ones who have recently left relationships or experience dissatisfaction with the current state of romance and love. Likewise, many of these singers have accomplished perhaps all that they have set out to, and now are wondering what is left? Ariana is now dating the king of Bikini bottom, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour is in dusk, Sza wants to “kill-bill” and feels she’s given away all of her “special.” For these women, who live what many would consider aspirational lives, discontent has found its home. Not unlike the lives of the thousands of TikTokkers I see talking about their own Saturn return and their own hope for a life worth striving for. Of course marriage is not some end-all-be-all, but for many, it is one of the last infinity stones to collect in their lifetime—a realization that I believe leaves many naturally dissatisfied and unmoored.
As many of the people in my cohort (yes I consider Ariana Grande a peer) reach this age, this reality washes over us. It is different from a quarter life crisis (which is what I call it every time I run out of quarters for my coin-op laundry) and strikes a more specific— more primal nerve.
You have been wearing in the path on which you currently stand for roughly twenty-seven years, and if you don’t make a change or jump, you may find yourself entirely set in your ways—unable to stray from this path at all. An implication that is both paralyzing and triggering, somehow both fight and flight all at once. This, for a culture that shifts aesthetics and churns over trends near-endlessly, is a frightening and limiting prospect. But how does one even accomplish such a change, how does one uproot their entire life and become the best version of themselves? How do we become who we were meant to be before Saturn begins its next cycle?
Saturn is the planet of death, a fact I know mostly from old episodes of Sailor Moon as well as my very real and very gay period of Greek Mythology obsession. Death, and the end of things is something typically presented as a negative, even for my most die-hard astrology girls and tarot card baddies. But if every end offers a new beginning then maybe it is a good thing for us to all enter our Saturn return at the same time— there is after all, a lot that needs to change.
I think this is why the analogy of standing on a mountain is so fitting. Without a Saturn return, one’s life can be seen as only one snow-capped cliff. An entire life’s work contained in one hike. Whereas a Saturn return offers another option, the idea of a mountain range— of a cyclical rise and fall that spans out in every conceivable direction that never reaches its prescribed peak. The closest we can get to immortality.
saturn in pisces gang rise up
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