I Just Fired Myself Today
How an ancient astrological code predicted the collapse of my multi-million dollar business - and why pulling the plug was the smartest move
A quick note before we begin: This piece is about the end of an era for me. It contains a brief mention of the suicidal thought I struggled with before the business I just closed turned my life around. Please read with care.
It is a strange feeling to fire yourself from a company you built from the ground up.
That is what I did today. I accepted my last order, closed the checkout, made the landing page announcing the site’s closure live, and with that, the ecommerce business that consumed my life for most of the last decade is gone.
It feels weirdly quiet.
The only sound in the room is the low hum of my playlist, where the shuffle function just landed on Pompeii by Bastille - an allegory for stagnation, loss and fear for the future. It feels really relevant to me right now. As I sit here writing this, I find myself ruminating on one specific line:
“Oh, where do we begin? The rubble or our sins?”
I guess, in my case, I can do both at once.
A Brief History of Mine
When I started my business in 2017, I never thought I’d be here today. I had attempted to start 4 different businesses in the preceding 5 years, and had failed at all of them.
By the end of 2016, my savings were nearly gone. I remember thinking if even this business failed, I’d get a job. And if I couldn’t do even that? Well, my apartment windows had no grilles.
In an out of character moment, I responded to a marketing guru’s email about starting an online business. He did not make casual promises that I’d earn $400 an hour working from home doing next to nothing. I’d have to work hard, put in the digital elbow grease, and be prepared to invest money. It felt authentic and different, so I gave it a chance.
In hindsight, I lucked out. How many marketing emails for online courses end up doing what they promised? But this one delivered. Within 3 months, I’d made $15,000, enough to cover the cost of the course, the cost of starting up an online shop and the ads I ran to it.
Things accelerated quickly. By the end of the year, the store had pulled in $700,000 in revenue.
Those first five years were like something out of a dream. I went from having next to nothing to clearing six-figure profits while working maybe two to four hours a day. E-commerce up until the early 2020s was a largely unregulated Wild West. Technical barriers to entry were higher and competition was low on ad platforms. There were hiccups, of course, but nothing that took more than a week or two to resolve (there’s a reason I avoid PayPal to this day).
I remember wondering if I was just incredibly lucky. Surely, money couldn’t be this easy to make? Were the ‘wealth mindset gurus’ actually right?
Looking back through the lens of BaZi, I realize it had nothing to do with ‘mindset.’ I was a disruptive ‘Hurting Officer’ operating in a loosely-regulated environment which the ‘Officers’ (regulators) had yet to notice. It was the absolute perfect ecosystem for my chart to bypass traditional labor and print money.
But ecosystems change - and the potential for both that massive wealth creation and its eventual destruction was already written into my destiny.
In 2017, fresh off the high of suddenly making the most I had in a single month, I paid for a consultation with a master regarded for his technical analysis. The analysis was very positive for that 10 year period. He told me I was not destined for “great wealth”, but I would definitely be able to earn a very good living that decade. The harder I worked, he said, the more I’d earn.
However, he also warned me about losses in 2023, and to prepare for my business collapsing at the end of my 10-Year Luck Cycle. He told me to find secure sources of income before I transited into the next luck pillar in 2026. He ominously described it as likely to be one of the most difficult periods of my life.
Because I wasn’t knowledgeable about BaZi at the time, I saw it as predictive fortune telling. I figured yes, BaZi can provide an idea of what was to come, but since I was aware of the coming pitfalls, I just needed to be careful with spending decisions and work hard. It’d be fine. After all, things were going so well, how bad could it get?
Talk about famous last words.
2023, 2024 and 2025 contained the Wood element mixed with unfavourable elements or combinations with my natal chart. And I was living out the exact textbook definition of a chart under siege.
Wood is my Officer element, and it is the most destructive element for a chart like mine. My natal chart is wired for disruptive entrepreneurship. It contains an auspicious structure where my creative rebellion (Hurting Officer) directly generates my Wealth (伤官生财), while completely bypassing traditional authority (伤官伤尽).
The major drawback to such a chart structure is its sensitivity to the Officer element. This star represents the establishment, the law, and regulatory bodies. The “Hurting Officer” represents creative and critical output that tends to challenge or bypass established rules. When the rebel sees an officer or vice versa, they naturally enter conflict. The dynamic of a heavy Hurting Officer chart meeting Officer elements in the Luck or Annual Pillars is a textbook indicator for lawsuits, platform issues, and trouble with authorities.
2023 came, and the slow, insidious decline began. High on the fumes of a record seven-figure year in 2022, I made decisions based on the rose-tinted assumption that the growth was permanent.
I made the cardinal sin of business: I stopped tracking my numbers closely and assumed higher top-line revenue meant higher bottom-line profit. Thinking I had cash to burn, I burned it. Expensive ad agencies that didn’t deliver. Careless accountants. Premium courses from “gurus” I never finished. Expensive meals for friends and family. I was spending money I hadn't actually made.
Revenue suddenly dropped by half in 2024 after Meta altered its ad algorithm. I added more products and hired agencies to improve my advertising, to no avail. At the same time, my living situation with a former friend turned toxic, entirely draining the mental bandwidth I desperately needed to keep the ship afloat.
Just when I thought I had stabilized the business in 2025, the floor fell out. The De Minimis exception was eliminated, and new tariffs were enacted. Operating costs spiked, and when we finally had to pass those costs onto customers, conversions tanked. To make matters worse, structural mistakes I’d made in 2023 - like opening a foreign subsidiary - came back to bite me with a vengeance. Even as I scrambled to consolidate, the very architecture of the company made it impossible to stop the bleeding.
I received baseless DMCAs on products from competitors with similar designs. A cease and desist letter arrived finding issue with the name of a bestselling product I’d sold for years, and used a fairly common word in the name.
Then a major legal entanglement came looking for me. Of all the issues I had imagined a small ecommerce business would encounter, this was not one of them. It truly brought to mind what the columnist Mary Schmich wrote in her iconic column Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young: “The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.”
My lawyer looked at the case, told me it wasn’t fair and the tactics used were not entirely above board. But, it would cost me more to fight in a foreign court, and she advised me to settle for a relatively small sum. It was small to them, but it wiped out what little profit I had made that year.
Looking back, the astrology was literal. 2025 was an Yi Si (乙巳) year - bringing my Direct Officer star sitting over my Indirect Resource. That combination interacting with my natal chart is a blaring siren for legal entanglements, platform and regulatory issues, and paperwork disputes.
As late as January this year, I had thought the business could survive even with the new Fuyin (伏吟) decade I found myself in. A Fuyin is a duplication of a pillar in your natal chart, and indicates a forced period of introspection and confrontation with the self. It is considered one of the more difficult periods a person can go through in BaZi.
But I’d made it out of the Wood years battered, but alive. The legal case was behind me, and revenue was stabilizing. I knew the decade was not one for capital-intensive, aggressive expansion, but maybe I could consolidate, work on bootstrapping my next idea while keeping the ecommerce business as a small source of income.
Then, the death blow arrived. The Fuyin was demanding its toll.
It’s still too recent for me to talk about it, but getting blindsided by yet another major issue just as I was getting back on my feet was the final straw, even for someone with a chart as stubborn as mine. Having so many unprecedented crises stack up in such a short timeframe - not when I was well-resourced enough to absorb the hit, but exactly when I could least afford it - was a blaring signal to stop.
The universe was punching me in the face with signs that I could not hold onto a business model that was fundamentally misaligned with who I am, and I could no longer ignore them.
The Trap of the “Hustle” Mentality
This is the part of the story where the modern business “hustle culture” gets people killed.
If you listen to LinkedIn influencers and self-proclaimed mentors, the answer to hitting a massive wall of financial losses and legal issues is to push harder. “Grind it out.” “Never surrender.” “Pivot and fight.”
But BaZi forces you to learn the physics of reality. If you are standing in the middle of the equivalent of an astrological Category 5 hurricane, “pushing harder” doesn’t make you a visionary entrepreneur - it makes you a casualty.
When your chart enters a phase where your wealth elements are actively being attacked and your legal risk is at its absolute peak, fighting the current is financial suicide, as my first quarter numbers and unexpected “Rob Wealth” events can attest.
If your luck pillar dictates that your wealth will be drained, something is going to take your money. You only have two choices: let a lawsuit, a bad market, or a competitor bleed you dry, or take control of the narrative and close the tap yourself.
So, I fired myself.
On the advice of my legal and financial teams - and in total alignment with my own reading of my BaZi chart - I initiated the shutdown of the business.
A Forced Reckoning
To say the last 3 years have been among the most difficult of my life is putting it mildly. It is said that a new luck pillar, especially a very favourable or unfavourable one, can be felt during the years transiting into it.
That was certainly the case for me.
As the “hundred disasters” promised in the classical texts unfolded, my professional and personal life became a battlefield. Drama in one sphere influenced the other, endlessly draining my resources and bandwidth.
I didn’t just lose money. I lost friends as it became apparent to me that I was running on fumes dealing with their entitlement, chaos and lack of regulation in addition to my failing business. I went low-contact with family who, I realized, had done nothing but put me down since I was a child, regardless of how hard I tried to win their approval. The ex-friend who rented my spare room exposed fractures in my relationship that neither my partner nor I realized were there, setting off a chain reaction that ultimately forced us to take a break.
My partner pushed me into therapy around the time I discovered how I could use BaZi as a tool for self-discovery, and I was forced to confront how my lifelong lack of boundaries and poor sense of self created the situations I found myself in.
What I ultimately realized is that the Fuyin is not a curse, it is an energetic intervention. The unprecedented events cleared the deck to force me into a place where I could no longer outrun my issues.
I had no idea just how much damage my dysfunctional childhood had done to me. It had affected the way I perceived people, communicated, and set boundaries. I believe there comes a point in adulthood where we have to stop blaming our family and take the wheel. But the truth is, when your foundation is built on trauma, it is not an easy system to rewrite. The untangling takes as long as it takes, and for me, it took until my 40s.
The ecommerce business that saved my life was hastily cobbled together in survival mode. It was a life raft. But a life raft, even an unintentionally well made one, is designed to float down a gentle stream.
It isn’t designed to navigate a Category 5 hurricane, and it certainly isn’t meant to be lived on forever. The universe - through the brutal mechanics of my chart - was systematically stripping away the things I was desperately clinging to. It was forcing me to ask a terrifying question:
Who am I without this business, and what do I actually want to build now that I’m back at the drawing board?
What Happens Now?
Closing a business you ran for nearly a decade is painful. It comes with grief, a bruised ego, and no small amount of anxiety. But it is also incredibly liberating.
I knew I was making the right move when I envisioned shutting down the site and doing something entirely new. Just the act of imagining waking up and not feeling anxious over Meta ad performance, supply chain delays, or sudden platform issues made me feel a peace I hadn’t felt in years.
Conversely, when I found myself spending my spare time decoding BaZi, analyzing complex charts, and discussing the mechanics of human destiny with other practitioners, I was electrified. The idea of sharing what I’ve learned, helping people untangle their own source code, and building a living out of it didn’t feel like a grind - it felt like alignment.
Right now, my chart does not support capital-intensive expansion, physical inventory, or high-overhead traditional businesses. It demands defensive maneuvers regarding traditional wealth. But in BaZi, when the “Wealth” star is under siege, the most strategic pivot you can make is to lean entirely into “Resource” (knowledge and study) and “Output” (writing, creating, and advising).
So, I am not hibernating. I am pivoting to a deeply lean model that relies on my own intellectual capital.
Here is what I am doing now:
1. Closing the Loop
I am legally and financially finalizing the dissolution of the past eight years to ensure no liabilities or energetic dead weight follows me into my next phase.
2. Publishing the Code
I am building a lean research and writing platform focused on translating classical BaZi into a modern, structured framework for understanding timing, personality, business, relationships, and life transitions.
One thing I realized during my own collapse is how inaccessible this knowledge often is. Many people encounter Chinese metaphysics through vague social media content or expensive consultations that leave them more dependent on the practitioner than empowered by the framework itself.
I want to experiment with a different approach.
Instead of treating BaZi as something mystical that only a “master” can interpret, I am exploring ways to turn charts into structured, machine-readable systems that people can continue engaging with on their own - including through AI tools.
Part of what I am building involves:
Translating classical chart mechanics into modern, actionable language.
Creating structured chart datasets and tailored prompts.
Helping people use AI as an ongoing tool for self-reflection and strategic thinking.
The goal is not to replace human judgment, but to make this framework more interactive, transparent, and accessible than the traditional consultation model that only people with hundreds of dollars to spare can afford.
3. Limited Private Client Engagements
While I am building the engine to make this framework universally accessible, I am currently opening my doors to work 1-on-1 with a limited number of clients.
These are not fortune-telling sessions. They are deep-dive strategic engagements where we untangle your source code to map out your structural baseline, timing cycles, and behavioral traps.
But the strategy doesn’t end when the Q&A does. Every client receives a bespoke set of AI prompts tailored to your specific chart structure. You will walk away with the tools to continue interrogating your own destiny, applying the logic to future decisions. You will learn how to use AI as an ongoing sounding board for strategic thinking and shaping the conversation so it doesn’t blow smoke up your ass. This empowers you to navigate your path without needing to rely on a master to interpret every twist and turn.
We will focus on:
Chart structure and elemental baseline: Identifying your unique operating system.
Timing and cycle analysis: Knowing when to push and when to consolidate.
Behavioral patterns: Detecting the “hustle” traps that don’t serve your structure.
Strategic Prompts: Your personal library of inputs to keep working with AI after our session.
I accept a strictly limited number of these engagements per month to ensure deep-dive quality.
If you want a custom BaZi blueprint right now rather than waiting for the broader software release, details are available through the Premium subscription tier on this Substack.
The Long View
Luck pillars are cyclical. I’ve discovered my chart is one of those highly sensitive structures that experiences intense volatility during unfavorable periods. But the key word is “cyclical.”
This hostile phase will eventually give way to a favorable shift. I am not merely waiting for it to pass. By consolidating my resources now, I am preserving my mental and financial capital to lay the foundations for my next phase. I am preparing the ground now, so that when the weather finally clears, I have the capital and the clarity to launch something that isn't just new, but built to last.
You don’t have to win every single year of your life in the exact same way to be successful. Sometimes, the best move you can make is knowing exactly when to fire yourself from the wrong life, so you can finally find the right one.
Are you tired of fighting your life? If you are an entrepreneur or professional feeling the friction of an unfavorable life phase, you don’t have to navigate the hurricane blind.
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Disclaimer: Scripting Destiny explores classical BaZi as a structural framework for personal strategy. The content provided here is strictly for informational and educational purposes, and does not constitute professional financial, medical, or legal advice. You are the SysAdmin of your own life; make your decisions accordingly.