Written by Your flight gets cancelled. Your ex texts you out of nowhere. Your laptop dies in the middle of something important. Your words come out wrong in a meeting you had been dreading, and then your phone autocorrects a message to your boss in a way that requires three follow-up messages to clarify.
Someone in your life says: Mercury must be in retrograde.
And you either nod knowingly, or you roll your eyes, or – if you are like a lot of people, you do both simultaneously, because you are not entirely sure what it means but you have noticed that things do seem to go sideways in a particular way at particular times, and the phrase has become the closest shorthand we have for that particular quality of wrongness.
This post is going to be honest about Mercury retrograde. Honest about what it actually is, where the idea came from, what the evidence says, and what, if anything, you can actually do with it beyond blaming your technology.
What Mercury Retrograde Actually Is: The Astronomy
Mercury retrograde is a real astronomical phenomenon. That part is not in dispute.