I’ve never been a fan of 1 January. It’s a day usually spent nursing the hangover from hell and willing the hours to pass until you can call it a night, conditions not exactly conducive to embracing the new year with full enthusiasm. Lunar New Year, which fell on 17 February, seems a far more sensible time to leap into total reinvention. So this year I marked it with my gaggle of woo woo friends, in our annual tradition of vision boarding and setting intentions. The energy was palpable. This, after all, was the Year of the Fire Horse.
“In Eastern culture, the horse represents action, freedom, speed and breakthrough,” Susan Gu, a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner and acupuncturist at the HVN in Knightsbridge, told British . Put simply, the Fire Horse promised rapid change, new opportunities, personal growth and a faster pace of life. And after the Year of the Snake, with all its shedding and rebirth, a little horse-girl energy seemed like it could only be a good thing. So why, nine months in, does the horse in question seem less like a wild, free-spirited stallion and more like a skittish ex-racehorse, crashing its way through the year in a trail of destruction?
The chaos seems to have hit millennials particularly hard. An alarming number of my 30-something friends have ended up in car crashes, literal and metaphorical (disclaimer: they’re all fine). British ’s Daisy Jones is one of them. “The Year of the Horse was in some ways one of the most difficult of my life,” she says. “I had to navigate a debilitating chronic illness. I was in a three-vehicle car crash. I had mild PTSD from both of those things. But there were a few highs, too. I bought a house. I got a book deal. I got a promotion. I mean, for someone who spent so much of 2026 in bed with her eyes closed, so much seemed to happen every time I left the house. Life was just happening at me, nonstop.”
So was 2026 a flop or did we simply misread the signs? Astrologer Neda Farr suggests we might have been a little too quick to interpret the Fire Horse as an invitation to gallop off into the sunset. “I think the biggest misconception is that people expected all this fiery energy to translate into immediate success, excitement and good fortune. But fire doesn’t just create, it destroys what can no longer survive. A year that promises change isn’t necessarily promising that change will be comfortable. I would call 2026 a year of uncomfortable transformation.” She explains, “Movement doesn’t always mean moving forward in the direction you originally planned. Sometimes, it means being forced onto an entirely different path.”
Astrologer Ruth Flanagan, meanwhile, thinks social media might be partly to blame for our misplaced enthusiasm. “I think we’ve perhaps created a collective expectation around the Year of the Fire Horse, associating it with momentum and huge personal breakthroughs,” she says. “But astrology is far more nuanced than a headline or a universal prediction.” As she points out, someone’s year can look vastly different from another person’s, even if they share the same star sign. What signifies expansion and opportunity for one person may represent endings or restructuring for another.”
The bigger problem, Ruth says, is the hype itself, which can leave people feeling that their year is somehow going wrong if it doesn’t match the neat narrative sold to us through cute Instagram graphics back in February. “We’re all living under the same sky, but we’re not all experiencing the same astrology.” Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, Ruth recommends using astrology as a tool for self-understanding, rather than a yardstick against which to measure our lives or their success. Daisy, for her part, has made her peace with the year. “I am a different person now – in many ways for the better,” she says. “In 2027, I just want a nice and easy life.” Peace and tranquillity will be front and centre of the vision board this year.
