this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Astrology is just a compendium of story tropes than can help people find advice for themselves in a fun and engaging way. That's how I see it, and that's how I use it. Truth and reality aren't as easy to define and you might think they are.
I agree that truth and reality aren't easy to define, and I think astrology is fairly harmless, despite being untrue.
But on the other hand we can't just ignore reality and pretend that anything could be true. The whole course of human history has been a slow and painful journey towards a more accurate understanding of the universe. That's how we've been able to invent and discover all of the things that make our lives so much easier (in theory), by trying to figure out what reality is and how it works.
To discount the importance of truth is to embrace nihilism, and that doesn't seem like it benefits anyone imho.
In the specific context of this thread, reading made up stories on social media has been proven to cause people to become severely detached from reality. This is one of the major reasons why millions of people refused to get vaccinated against Covid and subsequently died from Covid. So I think it is important to call out made up stories when we see them, because it's hard to know the downstream effects of what will happen when people's perceptions of reality get warped by reading things on the internet.
Of course it's impossible to prevent entirely, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to seek the truth when possible as a general principle of being a responsible adult and cultivating an online environment that values truth and quashes misinformation.
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