Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/31/25

Elder millennials and the balsamic phases of outer planet cycles

Weekend Entertainment Guide now has over 500 subscribers! Thank you all for being here. To those who may be newer to astrology, a key topic this summer is that Saturn and Neptune will be close together in the sign of Aries. Though they will not make an exact conjunction until February 2026, their energies are already blending.

Weekend Entertainment Guide typically runs on Fridays. This one’s coming out at the very beginning of Saturday because, starting at 12 a.m. Pacific on Saturday, May 31, Booby Prize: An Astrological Novel will be on a Kindle Countdown deal through June 6. The promotion is active on both amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. The discount is deeper the sooner you buy!

I have had a lot of personal drama surrounding the publication of Booby Prize, but at least the drama has been “astrology good,” in terms of the events being very illustrative of the associated astrological transits.

The latest twist: I realized that many elder millennials with Saturn in late Scorpio or Saturn in Sagittarius, people currently in their late thirties or early forties, were born in the balsamic phase of the Saturn-Neptune cycle — and that this may have been a factor in their painful experiences graduating from college directly into the Great Recession. I would like to call this cohort Generation Our Princess Is in Another Castle.

Thoughts on emotional triggers

A reader recently sent me this Instagram reel describing the critical tendencies of Earth signs.

_thecosmicyogi

A post shared by @_thecosmicyogi

This gave me perspective on the story in Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/25/25 where I freaked out over being called an underachiever. If a Capricorn told me with flat affect, “You’re an underachiever,” and ended the sentence there, I actually might not take it that hard. Maybe such an approach would leave another Capricorn feeling wildly triggered, but my personal hot buttons are different. I don’t have a lot of Earth energy in my chart, so Earth tactics read as foreign to me.

What triggers me is Water energy gone wrong, where you can see the tears forming in their big, anxious puppy eyes as they blubber on and on about how sad it makes them that you’re an underachiever. The situation that upset me was more in this territory. While an Earth type might simply laugh off the theatrics, I with a Cancer Midheaven that’s opposed by Neptune and ruled by a tensely aspected Scorpio Moon can get completely whipped up into a tempest by those sorts of emotional displays. It hurts my feelings that I hurt their feelings.

I have never liked the saying "You're responsible for your own feelings" because I don't think it is that simple. I think there is such a thing as words that cause pain. I also don’t like sayings along the lines of “Your pain is self-created” or “You’re choosing to be upset about this” because I don’t think they help.

Especially for Water types, comments like “Snap out of it” or “Don’t be upset about that” just don’t work. They only make the upset person dig in their heels and become all the more upset. Such a dynamic may be a factor in some cancel culture incidents, so it’s important to avoid fueling the conflict in this way.

Perhaps I am so obsessed with whatever the cancel culture people are getting up to because I have some of their emotional tendencies myself. My fear of their uncontrolled emotions is just as out of control as they are.

Over the next few months, this issue has the potential to expand far beyond whatever is going on with me personally. Saturn and Neptune moving close together in Aries is likely to result in an emotionally heavy vibe. If that were the only astrological item of interest going on, we might just keep to ourselves and sulk. However, Jupiter, the planet of making things bigger, will move into Cancer, a sign with emotions that are big to begin with, on June 9. Jupiter will then square Saturn on June 15 and square Neptune on June 18. Jupiter in Cancer square Saturn and Neptune will probably push any hard feelings to be openly and passionately expressed!

What might help someone like me with problematic Water energy would be the open collective acknowledgment and acceptance that emotional upset is not always preventable — that sometimes one person's needs/desires conflict with another person's needs/desires to a point that words that cause pain are necessary. The whole drama around frantically trying to avoid pain and failing to avoid pain and feeling bad that you failed to avoid pain is often more painful than the pain itself. If we admitted that this sort of pain is an unavoidable part of life, then we could potentially move on to learning how to survive it.

Do you know your natal Saturn-Neptune phase?

Many people are familiar with the phases of the Sun and Moon: the first quarter (Moon square Sun, waxing), the Full Moon (Moon opposite Sun), the third quarter (Moon square Sun, waning), and the New Moon (Moon conjunct Sun). Each pair of planets has a cycle with the same sort of phases, which is called a synodic cycle.

In Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/25/25, I said we entered the balsamic phase of the Saturn-Neptune cycle on January 20, 2021, and will remain there until the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in February 2026.

The balsamic phase of a synodic cycle starts halfway between the third quarter and the conjunction that begins a new cycle, when the faster-moving object is 45° or less away from the slower-moving object that it is approaching. The balsamic phase of a cycle is a time when whatever structure has defined that cycle passes away in preparation for being replaced by something new when the next cycle begins. In the case of Saturn and Neptune, the balsamic phase could be associated with events where structures (Saturn) based on ideals (Neptune) no longer function in a predictable or reliable way.

I went on in Weekend Entertainment Guide 5/25/25 to describe the drama surrounding the publication of Booby Prize: An Astrological Novel at the end of 2022: I found myself in a situation where I had made a sincere and good faith effort to follow society’s rules as I understood them, and then the rules turned out to be the exact opposite of what I thought. I feel bad that I hurt someone in this situation, but I also feel completely betrayed by the situation itself. If I could live the situation over knowing everything I know now, I would handle it very differently, but there was no way I could have gotten it right given the information I had available to me at the time.

Here's the chart for uploading Booby Prize to Kindle Direct Publishing. Note that it shows Saturn 30° before a conjunction with Neptune, with Saturn at 22° Aquarius and Neptune at 22° Pisces.

When else was Saturn 30° before a conjunction with Neptune? The last time prior to 2022 would have been when I was born in 1986 with Saturn at 3° Sagittarius and Neptune at 3° Capricorn.

Given that I was born during the balsamic phase of a Saturn-Neptune cycle, perhaps it makes sense that the balsamic phase of a subsequent Saturn-Neptune cycle would be a significant time for me.

I have long observed that the millennials born before the triple conjunction of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in Capricorn — especially those with Saturn and Uranus in Sagittarius like me — were more derailed by the Great Recession than those born at or after the triple conjunction. On a practical level, the millennials with Saturn and Uranus in Sagittarius often graduated from college into the terrible job market of the Great Recession, while their younger siblings with Saturn and Uranus in Capricorn were still in school and able to shift their plans based on what they saw happening to people just a little older than they were. Perhaps those born at the triple conjunction were also intrinsically different than those born before, with their Capricorn placements making them more practical than the Sagittarian older millennials.

I see now that there’s more to it. The millennials born before the triple conjunction were born during the low energy balsamic phases of the Saturn-Uranus, Saturn-Neptune, and Uranus-Neptune cycles, while the younger millennials were born in the high energy phases of new cycles starting out.

For millennials born with Pluto in Scorpio, the conjunctions that mark the cut-off dates dividing balsamic versus new phases of the outer planet cycles are as follows (of course, check your chart if you’re close to one of the dates):

• Saturn conjunct Uranus: February 12, 1988

• Saturn conjunct Neptune: March 3, 1989

• Uranus conjunct Neptune: February 2, 1993

Saturn was no longer in Capricorn by the time Uranus finally officially conjoined Neptune, so I see Saturn conjunct Uranus and Saturn conjunct Neptune as more significant divisions than Uranus conjunct Neptune in terms of the particular problem I’m talking about. Anecdotally, I’m informed by having a lot of cousins close in age on both sides of my family. Saturn and Uranus in Capricorn found themselves as adults more quickly than Saturn and Uranus in Sagittarius did, but anyone born in 1993 or later missed a lot of the bonding that the main cluster of cousins had around the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

The 1985 NES game Super Mario Bros. has the prototypical chart of an elder millennial. Saturn is still in Scorpio, but it’s less than 45° before a conjunction with Neptune. The Saturn-Uranus, Saturn-Neptune, and Uranus-Neptune cycles are all definitely in their balsamic phases.

Super Mario Bros. is divided into groups of levels called Worlds. At the end of each World, Mario apparently defeats Bowser, the villain — only to then be told, "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!" He finally gets the real Bowser on the eighth try and saves the princess after that, ending the game.

“Our princess is in another castle” is an accurate description of how I felt graduating from college into the Great Recession. I had been led to believe that being good at school — getting high grades and participating in lots of extracurricular activities — would guarantee me similar success in my adult life upon graduation. That was simply not what wound up happening. I did graduate from the University of Oregon with a job offer to teach English in Japan, but the offer was withdrawn shortly before I was supposed to go there because the company went bankrupt. This change at least left me with more time to pursue my interest in fiction writing, but that obviously did not lead to rapid success either. I bumbled into medical office work, initially part-time, and then got stuck there for a decade as the position grew.

What was the novel Booby Prize even about before it became a pawn fought over in a bizarre drama that stretched out for years and years? It was simply the story of a young woman going from the high of being good at school to the deep disillusionment of graduating into the Great Recession.

A lot of what I said above about publishing Booby Prize at the end of 2022 could be said word for word about my experience graduating into the Great Recession in 2007: I found myself in a situation where I had made a sincere and good faith effort to follow society’s rules as I understood them, and then the rules turned out to be the exact opposite of what I thought. I feel completely betrayed by the situation itself. If I could live the situation over knowing everything I know now, I would handle it very differently, but there was no way I could have gotten it right given the information I had available to me at the time.

It’s probably reasonable to say that the conflict of 2022 dug up the earlier wound of 2007 for me. For those of us born in the balsamic phase of the Saturn-Neptune cycle, whether in the 1980s or in the last few years, this has the potential to be a lifelong struggle. Whenever we think we have a grasp on the rules, somehow they’ll manage to slip away from us.

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