Jupiter and Saturn placements should never be interpreted individually. Everyone who is born within two or three years of you has your same Saturn. Everyone born in the same year as you has your same Jupiter. Based on Jupiter and Saturn placements, we can talk about generation trends.

People born in 1996 have it bad. People born in 1996 have Jupiter in Capricorn and Saturn in Aries. Both planets are in the sign of their fall.

Usually, your Jupiter returns are your coming of age years. Those years tend to be years when you learn your political ideology and are also when you look for political hope. They’re action years—teaching moments that make you become aware of power dynamics and institutions. Jupiter return years are the years in which we develop our political ideologies. Jupiter returns happen every twelve years.

People who were born in 1996 had their Jupiter returns once in 2008 and are currently going through another Jupiter return in 2020. That’s right. People born in 1996 don’t just have both Jupiter and Saturn in fall—they also went through their political consciousness building years during the worst years possible. They came to age first during a global recession and then again during a global pandemic and recession.

Again, Jupiter return is when you learn political hope. For the 1996 generation, they are learning political hope when things feel the most hopeless. Of course, this coincides with Jupiter in Capricorn, which is the sign of its fall. Jupiter in Capricorn years, 2008 and 2020, are not exactly hopeful years. Jupiter is pretty depressed when it’s in Capricorn.

We don’t know what Saturn return is like for the 1996 generation yet since they haven’t had their Saturn return yet. However, we do know that this generation’s first Saturn opposition happened in 2011, which coincides with Occupy Wall Street. The first Saturn opposition is when you’re learning your identity, community, and commitments through relationships for the first time. A lot of people fall in love for the first time around the first Saturn opposition because some of our emotional reactions come out through relationships. A lot of people find subcultures that they explore the world with during their first Saturn opposition. For many members of the 1996 generation, their first love experiences and subcultural pleasures would have coincided with the OWS movement.

I like to call this generation the punk generation. I call them this because I’m trying to be polite. Really, I should be calling this generation the trash generation. This is a generation that finds no hope in any of our political or civil institutions. It’s a generation that sees the world as something that has failed.

Planets that are in fall are planets that have very little expectations. Your Moon is in fall in Scorpio? Oh, you really expect people to fail you. Your Sun is in fall in Libra? Damn, you really don’t even really want to be perceived. When both your Jupiter and Saturn are in fall, you pretty much expect nothing from institutions or society. You think that we’re all fucked.

I call this generation the trash generation because trash is matter that is in a condition of degradation. Trash is just stuff that has been degraded. It’s stuff that we don’t want to think about. We don’t want to think about where our trash goes or how it’s dealt with.

However, trash is so, so important. Trash reveals the things that we want to ignore. Trash always comes back. It can’t be ignored. Trash is a measure of health and wealth.

In my client work, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of things that people born in 1996 just don’t give a fuck about. They really don’t care about achievements or institutional validation or the romance of our political system. These guys really just care about survival. This was conditioned into them because they came of age during failures of the state. These guys also really know how to survive. These guys didn’t learn how to socialize by partying. They learned how to socialize by protesting.

I’m really looking forward to watching the 1996 generation get older. If you’re part of this generation and are wondering what it means that your Jupiter and Saturn are both in fall, don’t worry too much about it. It doesn’t mean that you’re uniquely condemned to hopelessness. It means that you have an unique relationship to the hopelessness that we all face when we think about climate change, the rise of fascism, and neoliberal policies. You already know what having Jupiter and Saturn in fall means—it means that you can’t rely on the state or politics to build the movement work that you need. And all of us are moving through this stuff with you.