To My Millenial Brothers and Sisters

TO MY MILLENNIAL BROTHERS AND SISTERS

Now, if astrology isn't your thing, stay with me. You don't have to believe the planets personally programmed an entire generation for this to get interesting.

Because I came across something last night that made me look at Millennials differently.

And considering I'm one of them, that's saying something.

Apparently, we aren't difficult.

It's Pluto.

Which is frankly wonderful news, because Millennials have spent years being blamed for everything from the housing market to department stores, marriage and whatever else wasn't performing particularly well that quarter.

Apparently we killed cereal too, and having since investigated what passes for breakfast in some of those boxes, I'm not prepared to apologise for that one.

You're welcome.

Anyway.

Most Millennials share something interesting astrologically.

Pluto in Scorpio.

Pluto is associated with transformation, power, destruction and rebirth. It's the planet astrologers associate with the unconscious, the hidden, the things buried beneath the surface.

And Scorpio isn't exactly renowned for looking at something suspicious and saying, "Seems fine. No further questions."

Scorpio wants underneath.

Secrets. Psychology. Sex. Death. Trauma. Power. Taboo. The shadow. All the things everybody knows exist but previous generations weren't necessarily encouraged to discuss over Sunday lunch.

And now I'm looking at us differently.

Because what have Millennials spent adulthood doing?

Talking about all the things nobody talked about.

We talk about childhood trauma and mental health. Therapy and toxic relationships. Family dynamics and generational patterns. Sex, religion, spirituality, addiction, abuse, boundaries and parenting.

We didn't invent any of these things, we inherited them and we seem to have developed an overwhelming urge to name them.

There are things our grandparents survived and never spoke about. Things our parents perhaps accepted because "that's just how things were." Then further along the line, an entire generation started asking:

But why?

Why don't we talk about that? Why should I stay in a relationship that makes me miserable? Why should being family automatically give someone unlimited access to me? Why does becoming a parent mean repeating how I was parented? Why should I believe something simply because I was taught it? Why does authority automatically deserve respect?

Why are we pretending this is fine when quite clearly it isn't?

And suddenly Pluto in Scorpio starts looking interesting.

When you lay the symbolism over the behaviour of our generation, the pattern is bloody interesting.

And then there's Uranus.

Because our rebellion came in different flavours.

Older Millennials were largely born with Uranus in Sagittarius. Uranus represents disruption, rebellion, freedom and breaking convention, while Sagittarius is associated with belief, philosophy, religion, knowledge, travel and expanding our worldview.

So there's a generation carrying the symbolism of questioning belief itself.

What else is out there? Why should I believe what I was taught? What happens if I travel, explore, learn, experience other cultures and decide for myself what I think is true?

Then Uranus moved into Capricorn for many younger Millennials.

Same rebellious planet. Very different target.

Capricorn is associated with structure, hierarchy, institutions, authority, career and the systems society builds.

So now the questions become:

Who built this? Who benefits from it? Why are we doing it this way? And why exactly should I trust you?

Which would be interesting enough...

Except then the universe decided the astrology needed props.

Because many of those Millennials came of age around the 2008 financial crisis.

We were raised on the promise that if you worked hard, got a good job, saved your money and behaved responsibly, you could buy a house, build a career and create a secure life.

The system works if you work hard enough.

And then arriving at adulthood just in time to watch the system cough, make an alarming noise and partially fall through the floor.

Welcome to adulthood, Millennials.

Here's your student debt.

The housing market is over there.

Please don't touch it.

But I don't think astrology can take all the credit for what happened to us, because there's another enormous part of the Millennial story.

We grew up across two worlds.

We're the analogue-to-digital generation.

We remember childhood before everybody carried the internet around in their pocket.

We remember landlines. Knocking on someone's door to see if they were coming out. Dial-up screaming from the family computer while somebody shouted that they needed to use the phone.

We remember when being online was somewhere you went.

And then we watched the internet swallow the world.

That's a peculiar place in human history to have grown up.

Because the internet didn't just change technology.

It changed information.

Before it, most of what we knew came down through fairly established channels. Parents, teachers, schools, newspapers, television, religious institutions, governments, doctors, experts.

Of course people questioned those things before us. Humans didn't suddenly develop critical thinking in 1996.

But when the internet arrived, ordinary people could compare notes with practically the entire planet.

Wait. Your family does that too?

Wait. That's not actually normal?

Wait. Other cultures think completely differently about this?

Wait. There's a name for what I've been experiencing?

Wait. There are other people who think like me?

And perhaps most dangerously of all:

Wait. Who decided this was the way things had to be?

Astrology said: dig.

History handed us the world's largest shovel.

And perhaps that ability to move between two completely different worlds taught us something else too.

Adaptability.

Because when I look back at the Millennial timeline, it's actually quite extraordinary how often the world changed around us.

Many of us had childhoods that still felt relatively small and local. Then the internet connected the planet.

We watched 9/11 happen and the language of terrorism enter everyday life. Wars followed us through adolescence and adulthood. Climate change moved from something we vaguely heard about to something playing out in increasingly visible ways around the world.

Then came the 2008 financial crash.

Smartphones transformed how humans interacted with each other.

Social media changed communication, relationships, dating, news, politics and eventually our understanding of reality itself.

Then, just as we'd apparently got the hang of being adults, a global pandemic shut the planet down.

And somewhere between all of that came recessions, political upheaval, more wars, rapidly changing technology and now artificial intelligence casually wandering into our workplaces asking if we'd like some help.

We've barely had time to become accustomed to one version of the world before somebody releases the next update.

Maybe that's part of why Millennials can sometimes appear unfazed by things.

Something enormous happens and we're collectively standing there going:

Right.

So this is what we're doing now.

Because we've been adapting our entire lives.

We learned how to exist without the internet and then with it. Without mobile phones and then with smartphones. Before social media and after it. Before everything was instantly available and after we could summon almost anything from a rectangle in our hand.

We've repeatedly had to learn new rules for being human.

And maybe that's why so many Millennials don't seem to have aged in quite the way expected either.

I don't mean I've discovered an astrological anti-ageing treatment. Please don't start rubbing Pluto on your face.

But there is something wonderful about a generation approaching and entering middle age while still feeling culturally about 27.

Perhaps our bodies simply forgot to age because they were too busy installing updates.

Or maybe it's our personalities that stayed young because rigidity was never really an option.

We had to keep learning. Keep adjusting. Keep questioning. Keep becoming.

Is it possible adaptability kept a little bit of youth alive in us?

And when I put that beside Pluto in Scorpio, it adds another layer.

Transformation wasn't something that happened once.

Transformation was the backdrop.

Maybe that's why Millennials sometimes look exhausting from the outside.

We don't seem particularly good at leaving things unquestioned.

We inherited systems and started pulling at the loose threads. We inherited family patterns and took them to therapy. We inherited religion and wandered into spirituality, atheism, philosophy, astrology, quantum physics and whatever rabbit hole happened to be open at 1am.

We inherited traditional career structures and started asking why spending most of our waking lives miserable was considered responsible adulthood.

We inherited parenting styles and started wondering whether children might actually deserve explanations, apologies and emotional autonomy.

We inherited silence.

And we started talking.

Not always elegantly.

Good God, no.

We also invented Facebook statuses clearly aimed at one specific person, posted song lyrics on MSN and communicated emotional devastation through cryptic song choices.

Evolution has transitional stages.

But we talked.

And I think that's what I love about looking at Millennials through this astrological lens.

It doesn't mean every Millennial is a healer. It doesn't mean everyone with Pluto in Scorpio is wandering around excavating generational trauma between cups of coffee.

It's the overlap that fascinates me.

A generation stereotyped as overthinking, oversharing, therapy-going, authority-questioning, system-distrusting and perpetually asking "why" was born under planetary placements astrologers associate with digging beneath the surface, challenging inherited beliefs and disrupting established structures.

And then history gave us the internet and said:

Here. You might need this.

Maybe it's astrology.

That certainly tracks.

And it appears to be what happens when a generation grows up straddling one of the largest cultural and technological shifts humanity has ever experienced.

But to my Millennial brothers and sisters, who have spent years being told we're too sensitive, too difficult, too entitled, too questioning, too unwilling to simply accept things as they are...

I don't think we were supposed to simply accept them.

I believe our particular place in the generational relay race was to turn around, look at everything we'd inherited and ask:

Does this still make sense?

And where the answer was no, start challenging it.

If anything, I think we're the generation that became increasingly comfortable saying:

I don't know.

Let's look.

Which feels very Pluto in Scorpio to me.

We were handed the torch and the spade and sent into the basement.

And, unfortunately for everyone upstairs...

We found things.

But perhaps that's not where the story ends.

Because behind us came another generation carrying Pluto somewhere entirely different.

Sagittarius.

And if Scorpio's instinct is to uncover what's hidden, Sagittarius wants to know what it means.

Truth. Belief. Philosophy. Religion. Knowledge. Freedom. Culture. The stories humans use to explain the world.

Which makes the handover rather interesting.

Maybe our job was to dig up what wasn't working.

Family patterns. Silence. Trauma. Institutions. Relationships. Ideas about work, parenting, success and what a life is supposed to look like.

We dragged it all upstairs and spread it across the table.

And now Pluto in Sagittarius gets to look at it and ask:

What do we actually believe?

Whose truth have we inherited?

Which stories still belong to us?

What happens when completely different cultures, beliefs and worldviews exist beside each other in a world where information has no borders?

And what might be true that nobody taught us?

They've inherited a very different world from the one we did.

We grew up watching information become available.

They grew up drowning in it.

Perhaps their challenge won't be finding information.

It will be discerning truth within it.

And suddenly the generational relay starts to look rather beautiful.

Scorpio goes underground.

Sagittarius looks towards the horizon.

We uncover.

They explore.

We ask:

What's really going on here?

Perhaps they're the generation that gets to ask:

Now that we know, what do we believe?

I don't think we were ever meant to be the finished product.

We're the excavation crew.

Which, frankly, feels appropriate.

To the Pluto in Sagittarius generation:

We've left quite a lot on the table for you.

Sorry about the mess.

The torch is yours.

With love,

A very proud Millennial x

P.S.

Gen Z, Gen Alpha... you're up!