If I look at some general internet news site which collects dozens of news stories on the same web page, I often see something like ``Mercury is in retrograde, that's why your life has suddenly turned shitty!" Whenever I see something like this, I do indeed despair for humanity... having been given just one more reason why there is no hope for us. Actually, ``retrograde" motion of planets is a natural phenomenon which was well known to ancient astronomers, and made some of them think planets moved in bizarre cycles, epicycles and epiepicycles of loops.

Here we see combined photos of the position of planet Mars in the sky, over several months, with the starry background held fixed (note the famous Pleiades in the upper left corner).  But we are viewing Mars from earth, and both Mars and earth are in solar orbit, with earth moving faster along its orbit than Mars does.  So at some times of the year the earth is overtaking, and then passing Mars (and all other outer planets). 

This clearly has nothing to do with you, or anything that happens to you during the day. It has to do with the fact that the earth is just one of many planets and smaller bodies all orbiting the same star, our reliable old sun. But it is a very, very sad indictment of our civilization that such a large fraction of the human race (50% in the USA, often a much larger fraction in other countries) still lives inside the narrow culture of 2000 to 3000 years ago, when planets were just glowing manifestations of gods, and their every apparent change meant bad things to the miserable little creatures inhabiting the flat earth.  Scholars often say the Dark Ages have never ended for most of the human race, even today... but in fact it's much worse than that.  Back in the Dark Ages, essentially no one had ever heard of astrology... but today, when such an incredible amount has been learned about our universe, and how it works, at both the smallest and the largest scales, a dismaying fraction of the human race still lives with the superstition-based world-view of people living thousands of years before...they have never even made it up to the Dark Ages!