Astrology doesn’t predict the future. So why are we using it like it does?

By the Lora Team — June 24, 2026 — 5 min read

As an expert astrologer, I obviously love astrology, but I think we’ve gotten a little lost in how we use it. Too often, we treat transits like predictions instead of invitations. We want astrology to tell us what will happen, when its real gift is helping us understand ourselves more deeply. That’s a much more interesting and useful conversation. So, let’s talk about why astrology works best as a mirror, not a crystal ball.

Thousands of years ago, humans looked up at the sky and created meaning. Clusters of stars were denoted “constellations,” and these constellations represented different seasons of life: Aries as the start of spring, Cancer as the start of summer, Libra as the start of fall, and Capricorn as the start of winter. These ancient humans split the sky into 12 dedicated sections for each zodiac sign, and again for each “house” of life. They mapped the signs, the houses, the planets, and their movement as a way to understand their own lives here on Earth.

The ingredients of a Birth Chart — planets, signs, and houses — are archetypal. They are entities with symbolic meaning that we (astrologers, cosmic humans, spiritual girlies) interpret to glean a deeper understanding of patterns, themes, and energies shaping a person, relationship, or moment in time.

Archetypes are metaphors for specific prototypes of characters, personality types, or behavior patterns, and have many ways they can manifest in a person’s actual life.

For example, the Moon represents the Mother archetype- the moon doesn’t just represent your actual mother (which it does), but it also represents your childhood, your sense of safety, how you experience your emotions, and how you nurture others. We can be “mothering” many things: children, pets, projects, and creations.

The planets, signs, and houses don’t run our lives. We live life, making our own decisions and choices, with the sky acting as a mirror for the archetypes coming alive at every moment.

The transits, aka the current sky, still give us a fantastic framework for the energy we are existing through, but it’s up to us to work with that energy. For example, let’s say Mars is moving through your 7th house of relationships. The archetype of Mars is the Warrior/the god of war, so you might jump to a conclusion: uh oh, my partner and I are going to break up, or at the very least have a really hard few weeks with lots of fighting.

While that scenario could happen, this transit could also be a mirror for the below:

You utilize the energetic/motivational aspect of Mars to be more intentional in dating, pursuing people instead of waiting to be chosen.
You cut ties with a business partner who has been taking advantage of you.
You feel extra passion (Mars=heat) in your relationship and have a heightened romantic desire.
You decide to take up boxing (Mars=Martial Arts) with a friend, and that becomes your “thing.”
You are super motivated to network and make a ton of new professional connections with coffee chats and informational calls.

So you might be thinking, wait, so if this transit can mean all these different things, can astrology even be accurate at all?

The answer is yes, but with one caveat: astrology requires context.

The thing that popular astrology apps are missing is context into YOUR life: how the archetypes of your birth chart actually manifest in your life, the things that you are focusing on at the moment, and your relationship to the archetypal energy at work.

After all, where our focus goes, the energy flows. Mars may be going through your 7th house, but the context in your life matters greatly on what you actually do with that transit. Without this information about you & your life, how could any algorithm or even person help you make sense of the cosmic moment- past, present, or future?

As an astrologer, my biggest problem with astrology apps is that they feel like generalized fortune cookies without any personal context, making the content entertaining, yet totally inactionable. I often get frantic texts from friends about what astrology apps say will happen to them- an actual example is when my best friend was in tears because she got a push notification from a popular astrology app that will not be named telling them to “wear green today,” and they were wearing a red sweater, and their long-distance boyfriend just called them and dumped them. “Would this not have happened if I wore green instead?” I mean… huh?!

So when I heard there was an opportunity to bring in this missing piece — life context — into this new astrology app called Lora, I knew that there was hope for integrating the ancient art of astrology into your increasingly technological world. With Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus in Gemini, everything is increasingly algorithm-ed and built to get our attention, for better or for worse. But in the spirit of archetypes, we can also use these transits to bring accurate astrology into the technology age and learn to communicate astrology differently. At Lora, we’re using the energy of these transits to build something that actually works.

I joined the team at Lora back in January, and we’ve been heads down building the future of astrology with context. We have a beta version, and we are ready to open it up to a small group of people for testing. If you’re like me and are looking for a better astrology product that actually works with you, sign up to be a beta tester so you can work with your astrology in a new way. <3