Mercury Is In Retrograde (So Don’t Launch That Yet)

Every seasoned marketer claims not to believe in astrology.
Every seasoned marketer has a launch that went sideways for reasons no post-mortem could fully explain.

Servers behaved yesterday.
Approvals were final.
Tracking “looked fine.”

And then—today—it didn’t.

Blaming Mercury is a joke. Mostly.
But the joke survives because it points at something real: launches fail less from bad ideas than from bad timing colliding with fragile systems.

Retrograde is just a poetic label for periods when complexity shows itself.

Dependencies surface. Tools miscommunicate. Human beings miss small things that matter a lot. The more “buttoned up” a launch feels, the more spectacularly it can unravel when one assumption slips.

Modern marketing stacks are brittle by design. Too many vendors. Too many permissions. Too many quiet handoffs where responsibility blurs. Launch days concentrate all that risk into a single moment and ask it to behave.

Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.

The value of the retrograde metaphor isn’t superstition—it’s caution. It gives teams permission to ask uncomfortable questions before they commit momentum to the calendar.

Questions like:
Is this launch reversible?
Is failure cheap—or reputational?
Are we prepared for partial success, or only the perfect outcome?

If the answer to any of those is “no,” delaying isn’t cowardice. It’s competence.

The teams that ignore timing usually justify it with confidence. The teams that respect timing usually justify it with experience. They’ve lived through launches where everything was “approved” and nothing was actually ready.

So they build buffers.
They soft-launch.
They pilot in shadows.

They treat big moments like controlled burns, not fireworks.

The cosmic framing gives you cover to do what good operators already know: slow down when systems are noisy, speed up when conditions are calm, and never confuse urgency with importance.

You don’t need Mercury to be in retrograde to delay a launch.
You need honesty about fragility.

If things feel off—comms fuzzy, dependencies unresolved, confidence performative—that’s not the universe talking. That’s your instincts doing pattern recognition.

Listen to them.

The best launches feel boring right up until they work.
The disastrous ones feel exciting until they don’t.

Call it astrology if you want.
The wiser move is simply knowing when not to tempt fate—and waiting one more cycle before you press the button.