Since Jupiter is finished out its most recent transit through the sign of its exaltation, a lot of people have been wondering why things haven't improved in the world.

Jupiter has a certain reputation in astrology. It's often called the planet of luck. The word luck plays a crucial role here because a lot of people who search up Jupiter transits on Google and spot the word luck never think about whether Jupiter may be the planet of good or bad luck. It's assumed that Jupiter brings good luck and that Lady Luck will make you a winner one of these days if you keep hoping.

Aside from luck, Jupiter is often called the planet of blessings and abundance. It's the greater benefic and its favorite house is the one that we call the House of Good Spirit. Because of all of these names, Jupiter is sometimes thought of as The Planet That Will Solve All Your Problems.

Jupiter is not The Planet That Will Solve All Your Problems. The reason why Jupiter is considered the greater benefic, the good spirit, and the jovial planet is really because it's the planet of education. Education is what helps you create opportunities that you couldn't see before not because you couldn't find them but because they didn't exist before. Learning, with imagination, is the only thing that can really change your fate because learning is something that helps you meet people and exposes you to ways of making relationships that you didn't know how to do before.

Jupiter is a big planet. It likes big ideas because beginner learners usually have to start big. Once you learn something well and have some experience, then you can see the little details. But, when you're just starting out, you can only see the big and general ideas. So, you have to be willing to think big if you're going to learn anything new.

Education is not the same as luck. Knowledge isn't something that will just fall into your lap without you doing anything to seek it out. In fact, learning isn't even something that you can really seek out. You can't buy knowledge the way you can buy a diploma or a credential. Learning is just what happens when you put effort into your life and remain observant to what's happening around you.

Jupiter has a cost. Education is freely abundant because you can learn from anything but, for whatever reason, you often find yourself paying Jupiter's cost when it comes to the big life lessons.

Learning only has value when you understand it's value. My partner's family has a saying: you've paid tuition. Whenever someone loses money to a scam, a bad plan, or fucks up somehow they just say, "You just paid tuition. Don't pay tuition again for the same lesson because you already learned it." Most of the time, the tuition that you pay to the school of life will turn out to be surprisingly low when you compare to what the same lesson might cost you at a four year college.

That's Jupiter's so called blessing. If you have a strong or prominent Jupiter, you learn a lot of lessons. You might pay a lot of tuition but you learn a lot of lessons.

The best part of having a strong Jupiter is that, because you surf the waters of big ideas freely, because you look for what is meaningful in every single little thing that you do or see, you tend to learn pretty fast. Jupiter types are intellectual. They read super fast, learn super fast, and just absorb ideas quickly.

I'm here to tell you—Jupiter has a dark side. You'll know exactly what Jupiter's dark side is if you are a Sagittarius, a Pisces, or if Jupiter is particularly strong or angular in your natal chart.

Jupiter's dark side is this: Jupiter is really paranoid.

You see this a lot in Sagittarius, Pisces, or people with strong Jupiters. These people get really hung up on the meanings of small events.

You'll see a Sagittarius who really, truly thinks that today is not their day, that they'll flunk the job interview, that the person who they like is not for them just because they picked the three of swords during the morning tarot draw or because they saw a leaf shake in the breeze when they looked up and prayed for a sign of what's to come.

You'll also see this with Pisces who reads a little too much into the random, little pause that you made mid-conversation because your chewing gum got caught in your throat right when you were talking about going over to your mom's place this coming weekend. Pisces assumes that the small pause was significant, that you were getting choked up and about to cry. They were getting ready to soothe you while you were trying to hack out the gum like a hairball.

People with strong Jupiters, Jupiter chart rulers, or Jupiter ruling their Sun sign often read a lot into small incidents, coincidences, or words.

Yeah, strong Jupiter types are mightily fast learners. These are people who look for meaning in everything. They find every single person out there fascinating because they want to "pick your brain" no matter who you are. They find teachers in random strangers and lessons in every single accident because they think that everything that happens in life has something to teach.

And Jupiter's dark side is that, because it looks for meaning in every single little thing, it tends to have a strong tendency towards paranoia. Being too intellectual is its own type of suffering. If you look for meaning in every single thing that a stranger says, in every single accident or coincidence, in every single song lyric or tarot card pull—then you'll trip yourself out. You'll start believing all kinds of bullshit. You feel suffocated from your own mind because the world is saturated with meaning and you can't escape the weight of everything feeling too important to not consider in depth.

People with strong or prominent Jupiters do suffer from paranoia. Their minds are working at this constantly fast pace to decipher what things mean under the surface but, surprisingly, all of that paranoia doesn't actually translate into a keen sense of caution.

When you are possessed by Jupiter, you tend to pay a lot of tuition towards the school of life and learn a lot of lessons too. Some astrologers would call that Jupiter's recklessness but it's more than that. Jupiterian people just want to learn and they'll learn from anything. That's why they'll do all kinds of things that other people would call reckless. Jupiterian types think anything will be a thrilling experience or a cool story that they can tell to their grandkids when they're old.

If you think like a Jupiterian, then you're grateful when the tuition that the school of life asks of you is something that you can afford and you figure out how to make it work when you can't. You're grateful when you pay tuition once for a lesson well learned instead of again and again because you didn't learn the first time.

Yeah, Jupiter was pretty strong all last year. What does Jupiter's dark side tell us about Jupiter transiting the sign of its exaltation this last year? It tells us that Jupiter is willing to teach big lessons at big costs. I hope you learned something and that you didn't pay too much tuition for it. Maybe you got a discount: a cost that you can afford and paid just once.