Fran

The Year of the Horse, The Saturn Return, 9-year loops: A timeline of generational tension 

This year truly started with so much energy in a way that felt… synchronized. Back in February I saw someone on Instagram say it had been a very lustful winter and it immediately resonated with me. Lust in a very definitve sense, too. Like a thirst, not that far from yearning. Lust, to me, is equal parts desire and dreaming. Lust lives in the breath of a memory, giving air to the idea that you can be in that moment again. 

In this sense, I see lust as a part of the feelings and flavors under the umbrella of Love. But there’s something interesting to me when many of us are feeling this way at once, when we all begin to yearn for similar things.

I think this sentiment, on a surface level, is very evident in a lot of the big moments in media this year. I’d go as far as to say that romance — specifically yearning — is in style. the endless articles about how smoking is back in style (which, to me, is romantic); the radio dominance of “Stateside” ((Zara Larsson remix ofc)) (a song literally about the thrill of international romance). ;H**** R******, Wuthering Heights, even Obsession…lust, wanting, deserving, dreaming, I just feel like I’m seeing all of that everywhere. 

I’m seeing this come up at my day job too. An anesthesiologist recently mailed me a copy of A General Theory of Love, a book about the neurological processes that physically bind us to  one another and how that process is completely written out of our healthcare system. The neuroscience of love, basically. In my most un-romantic of daily work tasks — searching the internet for healthcare financial news — I saw that a huge media-focused private equity company made a splashy $400 million investment in Entangled Publishing,  a major publisher of romance novels. And if journalism has taught me anything, it’s to follow the money. 

Of course, politically, things always seem like they’re reaching a new level of gut-wrenchingly horrific. Especially in Chicago over the last year, need I say more. At a first glance it might appear that this trend towards romance is perhaps in reaction to all of the horrific headlines I’m sure come to mind when I say “the state of the world today” and could definitely be a Hollywood psyop to keep us distracted from the atrocities that are playing out right in of us. And that is probably always true, to some extent. But something has just felt different for some reason!! 

In 2026 we have also to acknowledge the transformative power of the algorithm, so even now as I’m working through these thoughts I keep questioning whether or not this observation is nothing more than a curated feed (plus, it wouldn’t take that advanced of an algorithm to figure out I am, in general, always kind of always romanticizing my life). But I know what good data looks like. Even in some of the most mainstream cultural moments of the last six months, love and nostalgia and lust and romance and yearning have been part of the central message:

Like this moment. Now obviously Bad Bunny preaching love over hate is not radical or new. He’s still at the literal Superbowl, gettiing rich off this shit, sure sure sure. But I also don’t think I’m alone in saying there was a powerful energy in that performance, tangible enough that you could feel it through the TV. The politics, the music, the celebrity, the excitement and iconography of that moment felt, like so many other things recently, so on the nose in this damn-near inexplicable way (I’ve been working on this essay for months). 

But for some reason what I was also thinking about was how he’s not that much older than me? He’s on the outer edges of what I would consider to be loosely my age group (I just looked it up and he’s 32)), performing the first ever all Spanish halftime show in this current political moment which, is…, very intense, to say the least.  What has stuck with me about this performance (and also a lot of his music) for months now is the balance of modernity and nostalgia. Every element of the set design and the storytelling of each song is entirely personal to him, yet expressed in a way that brings us in, offering us little pathways into our own memories of simpler times. Nostalgia is the great equalizer, the anchor to our heartstrings.

Nostalgia goes hand in hand with yearning. I think we saw this in the 2016-throwback trend, which was a year that saw both political and cultural changes that are still ricocheting through life today. I’m sure we can all think of a million examples of the ways that American life has never been the same. 

And now, I think things are shifting again. The same people who turned 18 that year — whose early years of adulthood have been bracketed by Trump 1 and the pandemic and advent of AI — are getting older. We’re entering new grown up rooms, and I think our unique perspective is changing the energy in those rooms. 

I don’t think this flair of cultural romanticism is about escapism — I think that many of us have an idea of what the world could actually be like if we could get our shit together and are genuinely asking – “What’s stopping us?” 

I think the powers that be would love to write us off as jaded and entitled, but I’d argue we have instead become more audacious.

There’s another world of data supporting this theory of mine. February 17 also rang in the Year of the Fire Horse. I am not an expert in astrology, let alone Chinese astrology, but I have found myself returning to this again and again as I have mentally mapped the ebbs and flows of energy in the world around me. 

“In Eastern culture, the horse represents action, freedom, speed and breakthrough,” Susan Gu, a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner and acupuncturist at the HVN in London, explained in a Vogue article published earlier this year. “It reflects a stage of life that moves boldly forward without the fear of obstacles, placing emphasis on being in motion rather than standing still.”
In simple terms, think: rapid change, fresh opportunities, personal growth, and a faster pace of life.

I learned that each year in the Chinese zodiac is connected to an element, which brings another dimension of prediction and analysis for the year to come. 

As for what it means, think energy and dynamism. “Fire brings intensity, urgency, and passion, which can feel motivating but also demanding,” Ada Ooi, an integrative Chinese medicine clinician and the founder of 001 London, told Vogue. “This combination often creates a faster pace of life and a stronger drive to achieve, making it especially important to stay attuned to the body’s limits and energy reserves.”

I had never heard of the elemental factor in Chinese zodiac before this year. Which made it all the more uncanny when I came upon this Reddit post while poking around for this piece: 

Like… do we all feel that? The intensity? The pulse? The energy? 

Not to keep going with the astrology, but I will. Because frankly I’ve been enamored with the fire horse thing this entire year. My belief about astrology — especially in this context — is basically just…. If the shoe fits! You can look at it as selection bias, or just some wuwu shit, but to me it’s just another set of language and vocabulary and perspective. It’s not so much that I think the alignment of the stars at any given point is dictating the future, but that it’s a historical record available to us as a tool in the big box of things we look for when we need to make sense of what’s going on around us. And in this specific scenario, I really think we’re onto something. 

Because we’ve also got the Saturn Return going on, at least for me personally and probably for many of you (and many of the people at the center of the cultural zeitgeist today).

I’ll take a crack at this one – the Saturn Return is the point in one’s life when Saturn completes a full rotation through all 12 zodiac signs, which takes about 29 years. I’m gonna lean on another Vogue article here (writing this blog is the first time I’ve read anything in Vogue about astrology and I’m really fucking with it):

Saturnian themes that are brought up around your late 20s have to do with taking on greater responsibilities, putting in a lot of hard work, finding greater structure in your life, and laying stronger foundations for your future. Whatever new life direction is revealed around the Saturn Return will continue to be developed over the next several decades. 

The Saturn Return is also a period where you’re getting clear on who you want to be as an individual. Saturn will have you realizing the ways you haven’t been living true to yourself, and you will want to break free from any self-imposed limitations. Saturn is a planet that is all about time and honoring your commitments, so anything or anyone who isn’t meant to be with you for the long haul may fall away during your Saturn Return. 

This is a classic chicken-and-egg astrology scenario because, of course it makes sense that one would be experiencing this in the run-up to turning 30. We as a society have such a mythology around your 20s, around settling down after that, “figuring your life out.” 

I had heard about the Saturn Return loosely before, but really got to know her when I listened to RuPaul’s audiobook. I was trying to find an excerpt from Ru’s book The House of Hidden Meanings, for this blog, and found this instead:

I shit you not — I found this Tweet on April 10, 2026. Which is also my papa’s birthday. He just entered his last Saturn Return, which presumably begins when you turn 80. April 10 is also exactly 1 year since I last saw my Gigi before she died in January — just days after her own birthday. 

27 was my golden birthday (September 27 ayyy) and that shit hit hard. My therapist — who worked as a chaplain at Northwestern Memoria Hospital for many years and is very well-read in all religions and belief systems — told me one day that 27 is also a “9-Year.” Now, I had never heard of this, but she explained that it is more or less an astrology-adjacent belief that life moves in 9-year cycles, making ages that are multiples of 9 have significance similar to the Saturn Return. Pulling from a random website that came up when I googled “What is a 9-year,” but this process really never lets me down: 

Where you stand today is the result of where you have been. But before you can progress, you must release yourself emotionally, mentally, or physically, from those aspects which no longer serve a purpose and are chaining you to a point in time that no longer exists. It is time to integrate your past with the present, so that the potential of your future can be seen and felt. This is achieved by accepting the past exactly as it was, and by feeling everything about it that you have been unable to feel.

The 9 Year brings significant transformation – alterations and improvements – to all areas of your life, even though you may not immediately see the positive merits of certain situations. When the old buried emotion that is weighing you down is released, life suddenly becomes a lighter experience, and is more easily understood and enjoyed.

If you feel a sense of numbness or stagnation, it is because you are so close to accepting your full reality but are holding the emotions involved in, instead of expressing them out

Okay, that last part —- holding the emotions in, instead of expressing them out. That’s what I’m talking about with whole lust thing. With the tension, the excitement, the fear that has been building in my chest for months, maybe even years? and I really do not think I’m making it up when I say I think y’all might feel it too. Or at least you see it in the world. 

It’s not selection bias. I think our generation is about to have a serious moment—we’re all about to, or are already, crossing the threshold into a brave, bold era of our lives. We are about to be the grownups in the room. And we’re bringing with us a very specific, very powerful perspective—one I plan to continue exploring in my writing.  

And by “our generation,” I mean something sort of specific. A rough age range would be people born from maybe… 1994-2000? We were born in a moment where the world sat on the cusp of digital and analog. For so many of us, our earliest memories of this life are tinted with the patina of the pre-iPhone era. The political bookends of our life have been 9/11, 2008, The Obama era into Trump 1, COVID and now…. The constant, muddled, completely overwhelming and mind-numbing onslaught of violence, targeted ads, exorbitant celebrity and wealth, corruption, cover-ups and privilege. We have witnessed the deterioration of truth firsthand. We have watched as “the adults” pull the strings on the world with the same tools and platforms that are like a second language to us — they think they can outsmart us with our own technological bilingualism. 

Earlier I said that stuff about lust and memory. We are unique. We hold memories of the world before we had it all at our finger tips, and we are more familiar with the vastness of that power than perhaps even the people who wield it today. 

When I look back on my childhood, the world seemed so much smaller, naturally. But coming of age in the time that I, that we did, seems genuinely vortex-like in how much the world changed, over the course of…10 years? It became vastly more expansive and connected, yet somehow shrank to the size of something held in our palms. I don’t know how you can measure that kind of thing—it feels like something that should be able to be explained in a formula. The nostalgia paradox, the rate of bittersweetness. 

We came just long enough after the true digital pioneers on Myspace to really hit the ground running, but had gained enough knowledge of the analog world that engaging with technology always felt like a choice, an adventure, a tool. It hadn’t become the entire world just yet. 

I think we’re probably the only age group that can truly experience tech nostalgia. I’ve heard multiple people say that they wish technology could have stopped around 2008, and I’ve always felt the same way. You have the utility, exploration and connection of the internet without the total commodification of online space, the digital manipulation of memory. Pre-FOMO. You would go online, not mindlessly scroll. The difference suggests that we used to transport ourselves when we engaged with digital technology. Now, these worlds are fused together. 

The internet wasn’t just about being fast. It was about finding things, about letting curiosity take you somewhere new. Connecting with people and ideas online was more like a true extension, expansion and expression of the things we knew and loved in analog life, where we still had real privacy.

I think about how almost all of the images that exist of me before age 10 are physical photographs tucked away in boxes at my mom’s house, but by the time I was 16 I was editing high-res pictures of myself on VSCO. My dad got his first computer at 58. My great grandmother (who passed at 98) was born in 1917 and lived the vast majority of her life without the internet. Many of you probably have similar stories. Being born at the turn of the millenium gave us access to a world of memories and oral history that are unfathomable to anyone born after 2010. The rapid development of technology, in turn, reshapes the kinds of stories told between generations and the lessons they learn from them.

And to think that even now—barely 10 years after 2016, we are once again looking for ways to consolidate, curate and ultimately capitalize on knowledge, communication, art, and data. AI is fucking everywhere. There are plenty of successful organizing efforts resisting AI centers, absolutely — which is also to my point. We’ve seen the Gen Z boiling point in recent headlines — there is a thirst for resistance. 

This microgeneration I’m talking about is rounding 30, if they haven’t already. And what does the world start to look like when our generation — whether you want to call us jaded or enlightened — step into seats of power? New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani is only 34 years old y’all. And how do you think he won that election? Sure, his ideas, vision and platform. But a campaign like that comes from striking the balance between real and virtual that, once again, is something native to us as a generation that is constantly walking the line between the world you can touch and the world you can load. We’ve watched our lives be scanned into a digital world more and more each year. We know how fast things can change, and I think we are nearing a time where… maybe we can make it happen.

Audio I first heard in a Vox podcast about Mamdani’s first 100 days in office — Vox is kind of on their pussy/neolib shit but this was a great episode (here!)

We also know that things can be different. We have memories of a time that was simpler, and the wisdom to understand that things were never really “simpler” — just hidden from view. We were truly social media’s guinea pigs, coming into ourselves at the exact moment the phone and the internet merged into one. We fumbled our way blindly through cyberspace as we aged— making up the rules as we went along, for better or worse. 

For us, nothing is surprising, but everything is possible. And I’m so curious about what a world run by us will look like. I’m very aware of how overly idealistic this could all sound as our country and the systems we perpetuate continue to drive the entire world closer to the brink of collapse. I understand how easy it is for me to sit in my safe, comfortable home and put these words to paper. But hey, if hope is a discipline, we all have to find some way to practice.

I don’t really have a conclusion here – I just really believe in us. I think there’s a lot going for us, both on the ground and maybe even in the cosmos. If you feel like you’re destined to “make it” or to “make a difference,” I don’t think it’s your main character syndrome talking. Or maybe it is, and you should start listening. Either way, keep going.