Sun in Capricorn

The characteristic instrument here is time. Such a person selects an objective, calculates roughly what it will require, and then simply pays that price over twenty years without much complaint. Progress is rarely dramatic and almost never reversed. Authority is assumed young, often because nobody else in the family would take it, and the early habit of being the reliable one hardens into the adult structure. Rules are respected as long as they function; where they do not, they are worked around quietly rather than denounced.

In an office this is the figure whose competence is unarguable and whose manner is dry. Humour is present but understated, delivered flatly, and funnier for it. Praise is received with visible discomfort and converted immediately into a remark about the work remaining. There is a real severity about wasted effort, and a low opinion of enthusiasm unaccompanied by follow-through. Subordinates find such a person demanding and fair, and discover years afterwards how much was arranged on their behalf without announcement.

The cost is pleasure, and rest, and the standing suspicion that the self is only as good as its last useful act. Feeling is not absent but is filed under matters to be attended to later, and later has a way of not arriving until the fifties. Many with this placement lighten noticeably in the second half of life, having finally reached the position they were climbing toward and found that the world did not, in fact, require quite so much holding up.