Sorrow-scopes is the perfect Twitter astrologer if you want to get roasted

Most horoscopes are vaguely encouraging, or at least thematically veiled enough to make it seem like your life will, at minimum, be relatively OK. But if the popularity of astrology Twitter account Sorrow-scopes is any indication, sometimes we just want our astrology content to wreck us.

Luckily, Sorrow-scopes will probably make you laugh, too. The account, which has over 80,000 followers, features comically pessimistic, insulting horoscopes with a heavy focus on doom. As in: Your bad personality traits are not fixable. The universe is not interested in taking care of you. The world is ending. The future will be bad. The account's bio: "Things are terrible."

Here's my horoscope for this week: "The first step is admitting you have a problem. Sadly, that's also the last step. You are incapable of growth." (I'm a Leo.) Virgo's horoscope, on the other hand, is straight up about death: "We can see how, in certain lighting, it might look like a pale horse." 

And the one for Aries, while technically presented as a positive, is still framed incredibly cynically: "You will dance on your enemy's grave this week, finishing third in the grave-dancing contest." The image is equal parts macabre and absurd, like a nursery rhyme you chant as a kid, then find out later is about murder. This brand of humor is part of Sorrow-scopes's appeal: It's absurd and fatalistic — the adjectives of our time — without sacrificing the sense of mysterious insight that makes astrology so attractive.

The account's creator, who uses the pseudonym Viktor Winetrout, started the account after finding that he liked making astrology jokes on his personal account. "I enjoyed the idea of making them funnier and darker than conventional horoscopes," he said in an interview. "Early on, our scopes tended to be strange and macabre, but we quickly discovered that our followers really liked the scopes that insulted them. Now we try to do a mixture of dark stuff and ridicule."

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Winetrout said more than 100 contributors have written for the account (it follows all of them, if you want to see the full list, and are also shouted out specifically in tweets) and that around 20-25 people contribute regularly. A new batch of horoscopes is released weekly. To include as many shades of cynicism as possible, Winetrout tries to use 12 writers for each set.

"When we first started the account, we were able to get some of my favorite writers from Twitter on board," he said. "Since then, it's been a combination of word of mouth and periodically reaching out to new people. We've been lucky to have gotten so many talented writers to contribute."

But why would anyone — much less 80,000 people — want to read a bunch of fake horoscopes designed to make you feel bad, written by people who, for the most part, aren't even astrologers? Because that's what we're all about right now. Sorrow-scopes is the astrology account for 2019; the Twitter equivalent of an advice column that simply says "shoot yourself into the sun." It's in the same extended family, rhetorically, as begging Ariana Grande to run you over with a tractor: exaggerated, fatalistic, and reflective of our collective powerlessness in the face of what seems to be surefire global doom. If Co –Star drags you, Sorrow-scopes drags you and reminds you that in the next few decades, many of the world's glaciers will recede beyond view. 

It doesn't mock astrology, per se, as much as it mocks the fact that we believe anything at all. But that's comforting, somehow — in this age, believing in things can seem a little silly.

We also just love to be roasted. (The subreddit r/RoastMe, where people request to be insulted, has over 1.5 million members.) After all, it's a sign that you're seen — you need to understand the truth about someone if you're going to roast them well. Sorrow-scopes acknowledges the stress of this era in a way that resonates with people, but it also acknowledges them personally: Things are bad, and here's how they are specifically bad for you, you dipshit Scorpio.

Winetrout affirmed that the response to Sorrow-scopes has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly because the account plays to Twitter's uniquely dark, nihilistic sense of humor. "A lot of them are fans of astrology, but they know we’re not playing it straight," he said. 

I love astrology (and take it more seriously than I'm usually comfortable admitting), and when I compare my Sorrow-scopes to other horoscopes around the internet, I see what Winetrout's talking about. The New York Post says my "enthusiasm for something unlikely to bring me material reward" is a good thing, but what am I supposed to do with that? Co– Star informed me today that I should "become spacious" so that other people's aggression can't hurt me, but that feels like a lot of work. Sometimes, I don't want good advice or spiritual guidance. All I want is acknowledgment that the bad things in the world — including the ones inside me — feel immovable. 

And so this harrowing Sorrow-scope from a few weeks ago was nice to read: "You’re standing on the edge of greatness," it begins. "No, hold on ... something’s coming through ... *holds finger on earpiece* Disaster. The edge of disaster, that’s it." 

Did I take that at face value? Not really, no. I think everything's going to be OK. But god, I'm glad someone said it.

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