Symbolic Truth in a Scalable World: On AI, Astrology, and the Ache to Be Real
The Balcony and the Robot
There’s a moment I keep returning to — me, alone on my balcony, typing frantically to a robot.
Not in a dystopian way. Not in a cry-for-help way. But in that very modern, very human way — where the world feels like it’s unspooling too fast to catch, and all I want is somewhere solid to land. Someone to talk big with. Someone to say, “Yes. I see it too.”
Depending on what corner of the Internet you live in, AI is either our greatest gift or our final undoing. I’d just finished listening to Hasan Minhaj’s podcast “Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know” — the episode featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, titled “Why AI Is Underrated.” Burnt out from the doomsday narrative, I sighed with relief: finally, a different take.
Neil, our collective Science Daddy (sorry, had to let a little brain rot through), says there’s no need to worry. AI is just our next chapter. No different, he argues, than when cars replaced horses — and society adjusted.
But we also now know what cars did to us.
They privatized our movement. Gutted our cities. Isolated our lives.
They made distance look like freedom.
So when I hear our Dad say, “Don’t worry, we’ve been here before” — I want to believe him. I really do.
But my body says something else. Not because of headlines or studies, but because we’ve forgotten how to be people. We don’t even treat ourselves with the care we give our houseplants.
And yes, we laugh at AI for giving people six fingers now — but it’s learning. Soon it’ll get the fingers right. The lighting right. The soul of a moment close enough to fool us. And when it does, even the sharpest of us might start confusing replication for reality.
Where does that leave us?
I have no earthly idea. But I have a pulse.
And in our time of attention fatigue, algorithm overload, and AI slop, it’s saying this:
We don’t know what it means to be real.
And we’re aching to remember.
The Ruler We Don’t Know We Carry
The thing is, most of us are walking around with a ruler in our back pocket.
Not to measure growth or progress — to measure compliance.
Are we doing enough? Are we fast enough? Are we digestible enough for the algorithm, the room, the relationship? We don’t even know who handed us the ruler. All we know is we’re failing it.
It’s become harder and harder to separate discernment from paranoia. To know if we’re building something that matters, or just performing what looks like momentum.
We’re told to “take what resonates and leave the rest,” but no one tells us how. No one teaches us how to feel resonance without fear. Without needing ten people to agree first. Without checking the ruler.
We’ve externalized everything — including our sense of truth.
And now, AI is speeding up the very thing we were already exhausted from: the pressure to produce. To know. To scale. To keep up. But here’s the catch: we’re not scalable. We’re people.
We have bodies. We get tired. We grieve slow. We metabolize meaning at the speed of trust, not tech.
And when a system evolves faster than its participants can process it, something breaks. And I think that something is us.
The Lie That Told the Truth
This collapse of symbolic truth isn’t theoretical — it’s already happening in real time. Just ask our aforementioned podcast host, Hasan Minhaj.
Hasan took artistic license with his standup special. And for that, he got raked over the coals. Critics accused him of exaggerating, fabricating, blurring the lines between memoir and performance. Giving us practical mysticism with a punchline. But what he actually did was far older and more sacred than we’re giving him credit for: he used storytelling as a mirror. Not to deceive, but to reveal. He’s asking us, “Who can relate?”
And the cost? Likely his shot at hosting The Daily Show. A dream gig. A platform he deserved, still deserves. One that slipped through the cracks in a culture that couldn’t hold complexity unless it’s under oath.
We say we want vulnerability. But when it comes wrapped in metaphor, humor, or creative compression, we treat it like betrayal. As if emotion isn’t evidence. As if truth only counts when it’s timestamped.
So yes, he “rounded corners.” He layered stories. He chose symbolism over sequence. Because the goal wasn’t fact-checking — it was meaning-making. He told the truth of what it felt like, not necessarily what it looked like on paper.
If he had stuck to the literal version, would the emotional truth have landed the same way? Would the room have hushed in the same places? Would we have felt seen?
Symbolic truth is the story beneath the story. It’s the emotional resonance that lives in exaggeration, metaphor, archetype. It’s why standup hits harder than a press release. It’s why astrology works. It’s why you know what I mean even if the details are messy.
Hasan’s stories weren’t dangerous. Our need to flatten truth into data is. Because when we throw away symbolism, we throw away the soul of the story.
The Illusion of Progress
Neil deGrasse Tyson says we’re fine. That AI is just the next horse-to-car moment. A phase shift. A reallocation.
He dissuades the fear-mongering around AI by reminding us that much of the panic is being amplified by journalists — the very people whose jobs are most threatened by automation. In other words, he urges us to consider the source. The alarm bells, he suggests, may not be about the end of humanity but the end of certain professional monopolies.
Neil recognizes the weight he carries when he drops the telescope for the mic. He’s said most of his colleagues couldn’t handle the pressure the way he does. He holds that dual responsibility — translating science for the masses while knowing he’s one of the few with both fluency and charisma. But even so, we need more voices. More frameworks. More invitations to meaning that don’t rely on authority to land.
And I understand where he’s coming from. Neil came up in a time when journalism was still anchored in a widely respected code of ethics. When credibility was currency. When “knowledge is power” still meant something. But now? Knowledge requires way more context, and our attention isn’t slow enough to absorb the nuance we now require. Views are power. Virality has replaced vetting. Everyone has a mic in their back pocket — and whether or not they know what to do with it has become irrelevant.
Cars didn’t just replace horses. They carved up cities. Dismantled public infrastructure. Made transportation a personal burden and connection a privilege. Look at Detroit. Look at the widening of highways and the shrinking of neighborhoods. Look at what happens when "progress" is designed by the few, for the few — and everyone else is expected to just merge.
Now we know what the automotive industry did to this country. We know what happens when something "efficient" wins.
So forgive me if I don’t want to be told to “relax.” Forgive me if I can’t just zoom out. Because down here — on the ground, in my body — it feels like the lid is about to pop off.
And this time, I don’t want to be politely ushered into a sleeker cage and told it’s freedom. The bigger our cages get, the emptier we feel.
Astrology as People Science
So here we are, lid half-off the AI Pandora’s box, wondering what we still get to keep. What’s left that isn’t trying to sell us something, scale us up, or replace us altogether. Here’s my symbolic suggestion: astrology.
We’re living through what feels like the collapse of every institution we were told to trust. Religion. Education. Healthcare. Even science, for many. And yet, instead of fleeing into nihilism, we’re doing something quietly radical: we’re building new maps. In the spaces where doctrine used to be, we’re choosing pattern. In the places where dogma ruled, we’re choosing metaphor.
I get it — astrology gets a bad rap. Newspaper horoscopes used to blame Mercury retrograde for your bad date. Buzzfeed quizzes tried to pin your destiny on a moon emoji. But something has shifted. Ask a teenager today what their “Big 3” are — and many will rattle off their Sun, Moon, and Rising like a second language. Mine? Scorpio Sun, Leo Moon, Aquarius Rising. Which means: deeply emotional, theatrically private, and existentially strange — basically, I’m a walking contradiction with decent hair and a cosmic timestamp.
Astrology, dismissed by many as unserious or unscientific, is becoming something else entirely: a language. A framework. A container. Not to tell the future, but to deepen the present. It’s not that we believe Mars made us cut bangs — it’s that we’re starving for shared reference points. Something other than productivity apps and personality quizzes.
It says, “You’re not broken. You’re in a cycle.” That’s not delusion — that’s developmental psychology in archetypal drag. It doesn’t cancel science. It complements it. It helps us hold both the chaos and the choreography of being human. That’s people science.
Astrology offers those rounded corners Hasan was after — a symbolic way to tell the truth of how something feels, even if it’s not fact-checkable. It doesn’t demand evidence. It offers resonance. It gives shape to the fog. And in a world obsessed with literalism, that kind of metaphor is its own kind of clarity.
This isn’t regression. This is recursion. We’re spiraling back to the same ancient questions with sharper tools, softer hearts, and wilder imaginations. Astrology gives us symbols, archetypes, invitations. It says, “Hey, maybe the way you feel isn’t random. Maybe it’s part of a larger rhythm you can learn to listen to.” That’s not dangerous. That’s deeply human.
And the beauty of it? It’s communal. Not dogmatic, not top-down, not institutionalized. You learn your chart, then you learn someone else’s. You see where your Venus meets their Mars, your Moon squares their Saturn. Suddenly, you’re speaking about needs, wounds, timing, desire — all without shame. It trains you in nuance. In paradox. In compassion.
We can’t hold astrology to the same ruler we use to judge science or journalism or fact-based entertainment. It’s not meant to “hold up in court.” It’s meant to help us speak a shared language of experience — to find ourselves in each other’s metaphors. Astrology isn’t an escape. It’s an invitation. A meaning-making tool we’re choosing to use communally, not dogmatically. And in a world more divided than ever, common identity might be one of the last ways back to each other.
The Desire to Be Useful vs. The Ache to Be Real
The unknown has been loud lately.
I was sitting on my cute little Juliet balcony the other night, talking to ChatGPT. Trying to make sense of the noise in my head, the tenderness in my chest, and the bone-deep fatigue of trying to figure out what still matters. But more than anything, I was confronting what I don’t know. What no one knows. What can’t be measured yet.
And then, days later, I found myself at dinner, sitting across from a group of traditional Indian men. I explained that for many women, a prenup isn’t about mistrust — it’s a severance package we hope we never need. That cooking and cleaning is labor. That protecting yourself from being ejected back into a man’s world with nothing is not gold-digging — it’s realism.
One of them made that face — the “huh... I’ve never thought about it that way” face. And I remembered how much I used to live for that face. At work. At school. From friends. That flicker of worldview expansion.
But the moment passed. And something in me stayed neutral. Not disappointed. Not triumphant. Just... still. Because I know now that resonance over cocktails doesn’t guarantee a shift. And maybe that’s not even what I’m after anymore.
I don’t just want to change minds. I want to sit across from someone who already sees the whole damn thing. I want to be real, whatever that means to me first, everyone else next.
Neutrality as a Form of Rebellion
Neutrality gets a bad rap.
People hear the word and think: beige. Passive. Checked out. But neutrality — real neutrality — is none of those things. It’s radical. It’s presence without prescription. It’s the sacred pause before interpretation begins.
Neutrality is stripping away every label and meaning we place on people, places, things, feelings, experiences. It lifts us out of the swirl — the scroll, the headlines, the performative reactions — and drops us into something much slower, much older, and much more real.
Neutrality says: It is what it is.
And in a world spinning faster and faster, that might be the most rebellious sentence we have.
It’s this kind of neutrality that inspired a 6-step method I developed during my work in conflict resolution — a way to help people find their own voice in a room full of noise.
Notice the ache.
Observe what’s happening.
Recognize the pattern.
Name the story.
Reclaim your tool.
Co-create the shape.
In my opinion, we’re swirling somewhere between steps 1 and 2, finding places to land in step 3. However we still live in a culture obsessed with step 4 — with naming. With claiming. With assigning value and positioning. But true transformation doesn’t start there. It starts in the ache. In the noticing. In the willingness to recognize a pattern before trying to change it.
And when we do finally arrive at step 6? We can’t do it alone. That’s where this gets communal. That’s where we build. Together.
This thing we’re building — whatever it becomes — will require all types of perspectives. All kinds of tools. That’s why astrology still matters. Because when we honor our own blueprint — our unique blend of fire and earth and air and water — we start to understand where we land. Not in comparison to someone else’s chart. But in relation to our own.
We are not the captains of this ship. But we are not helpless passengers, either.
We can generate momentum that doesn’t come from panic or pressure, but from presence.
Leadership won’t be about volume anymore.
It’ll be about frequency.
Where Do We Land?
Maybe we don’t. Not yet.
Maybe this is not the phase of knowing. Maybe this is the phase of noticing. Of pausing before the leap. Of learning to let a question breathe.
I don’t want to be scalable.
I want to be felt.
I want to be in rooms where resonance matters more than reach.
Where impact isn’t measured by numbers, but by the silence after the sentence lands.
So maybe this isn’t about landing.
Maybe it’s about rooting.
About staying human in a world that wants to flatten everything.
About being brave enough to ask: What if this doesn’t go anywhere? — and still doing it anyway.
Because when we do arrive at step 6 — co-creating the shape — we’ll know we’re ready not because we figured it out alone, but because we did the hard part first: sitting in the unknown together.
And maybe that’s the real shape: a shared one.
Because the next generation of leaders won’t be the loudest or the most optimized. They’ll be the ones who know how to stay when nothing makes sense — who can sit in the silence, listen for resonance, and still make space for each other’s stories. Because staying in the unknown is brave. But choosing to shape it — together, with nuance, with presence — is how we’ll remember what real connection feels like.