Saturn in the sixth house is one of those placements that will support your sense of responsibility. The sixth house is labor and Saturn is the planet that removes all that is unnecessary.

We have to remember that Saturn is a malefic—it will challenge us to do the rigorous task of examination through giving us difficulties. Sometimes, I see Saturn being translated as discipline. That can be true in some scenarios because Saturn likes consistency but we have to keep in mind that Saturn is a slow moving planet that tries to do as little as possible. Does Saturn in the sixth house like work?

No. Saturn in the sixth house dislikes work. If you have Saturn in the sixth house, then you don’t like to work. Saturn shows us something that we don’t like. The sixth house is the house of labor.

Either of the malefics in the house of labor will cause a person to dislike work and to try and actively disrupt it in some way. Marx has Mars in the sixth house. He organized workers but he never had a job himself. The reason why I mention this is because the sixth house is where the lesser malefic rejoices. But what about the greater malefic? What about Saturn?

Saturn is different from Mars because Saturn will force you to do things that you really don’t want to do.

More often than not, I’ve seen Saturn in the sixth house by transit as job losses. You get let go, you quit, you stop working in the way that you’ve always worked. Saturn is not an additive planet but a removing one. It gets rid of things. In the sixth house, it gets rid of work and the routines that one creates around work.

Have you ever lost a job? You get all existential. You start questioning yourself. You start thinking about your skills, trying to look at all of them through different perspectives, and you’re wrestling with a really fundamental question that is the basis for your priorities and life choices: what do I care about?

What do I care about? What do I get enough of a shit about to put actual effort in?

I think that work is really important. I understand that, under capitalism, workers cannot afford our own labor but that doesn’t mean that work stops being important. We need our own labor to feed us. Preparing food, distributing resources, teaching, parenting, cleaning, trimming—all of that is work. Caretaking is an extremely important part of what makes humans human.

What Saturn does when it is in the sixth house is it asks you to think about the existential nature of work by removing excitement as a motivator. When you have Saturn in the sixth house, you’re not excited about work. Excitement simply isn’t good enough as a motivator. Excitement is flimsy and it’s also short lived. You can’t sustain it for that long.

A lot of things motivate us to show up for the things that we care about everyday—excitement and inspiration isn’t always necessary. And Saturn isn’t excited. It’s not inspired either. It’s dedicated.

I always think about that Octavia Butler quote about how inspiration is fickle but habit is not. I think that quote is a great encapsulation of Saturn in the sixth house.

Saturn in the sixth house doesn’t like work and isn’t excited about the things that it cares about. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t care. Oh, it cares. It cares in a way that is more determined than simple excitement. You don’t need to like the things that you care about to actively care. You work because you care about people, because you want to make some kind of impact, because you’re holding something together based on the habits you have accumulated. That’s what it means to show up everyday.

Some people like to find work that they like to do. I don’t think that this is Saturn in the sixth house. Saturn in the sixth house does work, invents work for themselves, that is needed whether they personally like the task or not. They take responsibility.

This brings us to the other part of Saturn in the sixth house. Work isn’t just the jobs that you can get hired for. If you look around the job marketplace, you’ll find that there are a lot of bullshit jobs that are just about wasting time. Does Saturn in the sixth house put up with wasting time in any way at all? No!

Saturn in the sixth house doesn’t settle for the work that is available under the circumstances that are available. Saturn is a very bullheaded planet. It’s also an inventive planet because it believes in eating from your own hand. When Saturn is in the sixth house, it will invent the work that is needed instead of relying on external systems for opportunity.

Saturn in the sixth house might look around and study the systems that are in place to try and figure out what exists and what doesn’t. But it doesn’t rely on those systems that tell it what is possible. When it invents, it makes unexpected things possible. That’s why Saturn in the sixth can make very unexpected choices.

It doesn’t like to be in a funnel. It doesn’t believe in well trodden routes. Saturn in the sixth house knows that work is hard—not the task itself because that’s just practice but actually figuring out what is worthwhile and what to do. No one will tell you what you are good at or what you can do. You have to rely on your own authority and, to do that, you sometimes end up beating yourself up in the head over it all.

No one will tell you what you’re good at. No one will tell you what you are bad at too unless you get in their way. Sometimes, people tell you that you are bad at things that you are actually good at because your skill has gotten in someone’s way.

No one will tell you what you can do or what you can make possible. Sometimes, you end up doing things that no one knew could be possible.

What do you care about? What do you care about enough to use the brutal energy of having to show up every single day to make possible? That’s work.

You don’t like it. You’re not excited about it, that’s for sure. No one encourages you and no one reprimands you. But you care enough to show up every single day. You know that, by showing up every single day, you will make something happen. You don’t control every aspect of work but you seize what you can control and look for any opportunity to seize more control over how you spend your time so that you can practice what you care about.

I find Saturn in the sixth house a really cool placement. I know that it’s not exciting. That’s not its ethos. It’s just practice, habit, and determination. It’s also the existential terror of having to figure out your work in the world. If you have Saturn in the sixth house, you probably have a bit of both.