👨🏻: My computer just froze and my last hour of hard work is gone!!
👩🏻: My phone has been working properly, but it suddenly lost connection to the internet!
👨🏻👩🏻: Nothing seems to be going right, and it's all because of Mercury Retrograde!
We are probably used to hearing people complaining about how everything goes haywire in their lives during Mercury Retrograde. Being notorious for bringing bad luck, Mercury itself is worst hit by Mercury Retrograde as the planet never goes backward in its orbit physically and it's all a misunderstanding.

Try to think of the planets in our Solar System as the athletes on the track-and-field court running at different paces. The athlete in the inner lane can complete the lap sooner and laps the others in the outer lanes. From the faster runner's perspective, the slower athletes will appear to go backward, even if they are all going in the same direction. That's an illusion caused by the change of position.

While the location of stars relative to the Earth is fixed, the planets appear to move west-to-east among the stars every night. This is referred to as prograde motion. On the other hand, the planets appear to travel backward (east-to-west, retrograde) when their relative position with the Earth changes. In fact, Mercury and Earth revolve around the Sun in the same direction but at varying speeds. The former completes its orbit in only 88 Earth days, and the latter takes 365 days to go round the Sun. As a result, when viewed on Earth, Mercury catches up with our planet about every threeish months and retrograde illusion happens. After Mercury distances itself from Earth, it turns prograde again. Although all planets in the Solar System can move backward relative to us, we seldom blame the others for screwing things up as the frequency is lower to take the blame for our hiccups which happen every so often.

To conclude, Mercury Retrograde is only a common astronomical phenomenon, and it does not mean bad luck in itself. But if you wish to have ease and cope with the anxiety during the retrograde cycle, just read more books and visit the Space Museum, stop being too superstitious and get the most out of everyday 😆😆