Aquarians are archetypal outcasts. This doesn’t mean they’re loners. In fact, they thrive in large groups—charming you with their peculiar senses of humor, intriguing you with fun facts about the history of disposable straws, or convincing you to join their reading groups. The alienation they feel is often self-imposed—a result of their knee-jerk contrarianism, rather than a lack of social intelligence. They try to be weird. Aquarians hang grapefruit rinds from the wall and call it art, they pretend to actually like noise music, they saturate their internal monologues with SAT words.

Intelligence, to them, means the ability to formulate the most unpopular opinion possible. If they were white sheep, they’d dye their wool black just to prove a point. They are destined to live their lives in direct opposition to the current world. In fact, they are world-builders. An entire universe exists in their heads, and this universe adheres to its own set of logic that doesn’t map onto reality. They aren't anarchists. They are utopians. They are not cold. They are rational. To them, emotions are just holes in their idealistic vessels. Why succumb to sensitivity when there is so much knowledge to acquire, so many problems to be solved, worlds to invent?

They sometimes ask, “Why can’t I be normal?” but in reality, they find normalcy boring. They want to be unknowable. Aquarians want to evade definition. Definitions are binding little rules that other people use to restrict their movement, and they must resist anything that infringes on their freedom to drift. Between definitions, between the individual and the common, between themselves and humanity. The ultimate Aquarian struggle is resolving the tension between their need for community, and their need for complete detachment.

Aquarians are always running little tests. They live their lives as one big science experiment, using the element of surprise to collect reactions and construct theories about the intricacies of human nature. They are walking abstract art pieces, shattering traditional perspectives with their complete disregard for convention. They are martyrs to the cause of humanity. Freedom is their only demand.

Aquarians make very good acquaintances. They are friendly people, but their enigmatic nature makes them difficult to get close to. You can know an Aquarius for years and still feel like you don’t know anything about their personal lives. When you ask them about themselves, they talk about the impending environmental catastrophe, or repeat facts from the last documentary they watched.

Aquarians want to be helpful, but this attentiveness is frequently directed at the people they know the least. They may borrow your sweater without asking, then pass it on to a stranger on the train who looked cold. It’s as if their duty to humanity trumps any sense of responsibility they might feel towards the people closest to them. They think it’s selfishly biased to prioritize close friendships over everyone else in the world, so they stroke their humanistic ego by projecting themselves as the selfless giver.

Aquarians are personality collectors. They tend to surround themselves with a curated cast of strange characters, but never get to know them beneath their surface-level attributes. Deep connections based on shared sensibilities are not necessarily the most interesting ones. Aquarians want to learn from people who are as different from them as possible. They’re terrified of falling into the complacent herd mentality of a single friend group.

Aquarians aren’t necessarily the friends you seek out when you’re in a crisis. They want to support you, but their problem-solving mind short-circuits trying to come up with the objectively right thing to say. Turn to them when you’re hungry for a strange adventure that will turn into an entertaining story to tell at parties—or if you want someone to explain what ontology means.

There are two main sources of Aquarian anger. The first one is the world not operating according to their idealistic standards: social injustice or an inefficiently designed grocery store. When their boss tells them to do something that doesn’t make sense. To this they respond with irritation, and righteous disbelief, completely unafraid of the consequences.

The second is when someone blames Aquarians for being wrong in some way: acting immorally, hurting someone’s feelings, being a hypocrite. Accusations of this sort rattles Aquarians to their core, though you might not see evidence of that until till months later.

When Aquarians get angry, it comes as a total surprise. The root cause is usually that they feel misunderstood, unjustly blamed, or that their actions have been misconstrued in some way—anything that tarnishes their idealistic self-image. It is hard for Aquarians to express their anger, because even though they take everything personally they are constantly afraid of being considered illogical. They are experts at maintaining the upper hand, and are more likely to deal with upset feelings through sarcasm, condescension, or defensive deflections. So at first, they’ll push their own anger out of view. It’ll eat away at them. Next time they’re triggered it all comes bubbling up to the surface in a mass-eruption of convoluted explanations.

An Aquarian who has learned to get in touch with their emotions can be quite forthright when they are angry. It’s almost like, the angrier they get the more logically they approach it. This doesn’t mean they won’t get emotional. But when they resent you or feel hurt, instead of shutting down they’ll tell you to your face.