Welcome to your new normal, by which I mean that Neptune is in Aries: "reality" has changed. Gone are the days of overwhelming malaise and a deep sense of inertia. Gone is the ability for people to have empathy for others who don't deserve it (you'll have to use your natal energy for this if you want to do it). Gone is the ability to tolerate shit that you could easily do something about. Neptune in Aries (at least right now) is us collectively waking up with amnesia in an abandoned warehouse with a bleeding lip, possibly handcuffed to something: your first order of business is getting oriented before you set about doing anything drastic. Assume you have a concussion, metaphorically, at least.
Okay so the key difference is Neptune in Pisces was reality of "I can't do anything about this." Neptune in Aries is "I want to do everything I can think of, immediately, about this." It's a stark difference, but Neptune is a subtle energy. You might not be feeling this strongly at the moment, and I wouldn't blame you, but you'll see that people around you start to be way more willing to throw everything and the kitchen sink at a problem. Bye-bye complacency (good riddance).
Here's the thing: Saturn's presence with Neptune right now means that there's urgency to DO SOMETHING but the something to do is unclear and there's a much higher chance of breaking things you don't need to break right now, a chance which doesn't exist as much (or as urgently) when Saturn clears Neptune (which is mid-year in a soft sense and next year in reality). So your best bet if you find yourself in a bad situation is to start to move slowly: do not go scorched earth, as tempting as it is.
No.
Neptune was in Aries last summer, and of course I woke up back then to a bunch of shit I needed to fix, a lot of which I was already aware of, but some of which I wasn't. There were a couple of situations where I could have gone supernova on someone, but instead, I went supernova by myself in the privacy of my own home and then I stopped doing everything I was doing to enable that other person (Pisces-style), abruptly. I said nothing, and in fact, given the situations, I was eerily fucking polite. Neptune in Pisces had meant I was unwittingly enabling bad behavior, and with Neptune in Aries, all I needed to do was stop. So I stopped. The temptation was to stop and go for the jugular while screeching My Truth, but since I moved so slowly and weirdly politely, I could see the hurt feelings plainly, which were a holdover of Neptune in Pisces: "what do you mean you are no longer willing to prostrate yourself purely for my benefit?"
I share this not because I am proud of it (#1 best martyr over here), but because it is textbook. So when Neptune retrograded back into Pisces in October, I made a deal with myself: "I don't care what you do, but do not go back to that self-sacrificing bullshit. Literally you can do anything else but that." So I spent the 100 days making various messes that I am now cleaning up, but I did succeed in not going back to the self-negating activities, no matter how much empathy I felt. My own empathy had been leveraged against me, not by the people involved, but by the nature of Neptune in Pisces, which was an hourly buffet of reasons to feel bad about something without any boundaries whatsoever.
But as someone with Neptune in a fire sign on the south node, I have a lot of experience with Neptune in a fire sign, so I will give you my helpful hints of things not to do (since Aries is a fire sign), having learned the hard way:
If you find out a nugget of information, get pissed off, and declare "we ride at dawn!", there is a better-than-decent chance you are missing the entire story and that you will regret precipitous action. Instead, bide your time, collect all the facts, implement a strategy, and then ride at dawn.
There will always be more to the story than you are initially aware of.
After spending over a decade feeling powerless to change things, and suddenly feeling empowered to change a bunch of things, the impulse is to overcorrect. If it's just you living with the consequences, you'll learn your lesson pretty easily, no harm, no foul. (This is coming from the person who threw out all her offending and busted furniture when Neptune hit Aries the first time and then lived for multiple months with almost nothing to sit on. No regrets because I hated most of that shit, but it was silly.)
Try to avoid crusades, and don't take hostages. Like, if you're on a diet, it doesn't mean the entire family and everyone you know is, too. They will cheat and not tell you and you will fight when you figure it out. Your problem is not everyone's problem, and your enlightenment is not everyone's enlightenment. Admit that you're on a personal crusade for your own reasons but that your chosen solution is for YOU. (Aries is independent, but fire signs take hostages and proselytize.)
Don't bring a knife to a gun fight and vice versa.
Your identity is not whatever it is you are currently doing. Don't get them mixed up or you'll have one of those fun crisis thingies.
You don't win when you knee-jerk react (most of the time).
Look, I'll level with you, the subcurrent is now a Mortal Kombat-style "FINISH HIM!!" and I am all about it. After over a decade of feeling weak and confused, I'm happy to have some fucking fire to apply to situations that piss me off. But during Pisces hell, I had a lot of lessons in restraint—all of them against my will—that taught me to move slowly to make sure that whatever action I took was informed by facts (Saturn: Neptune's enemy) and stuck with the impact and intention I meant it to (Saturn still). It feels like we are blindly fighting right now (because we are) but the true challenge is learning to be tactical rather than reactive.
Yes.
