Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys. — Emma Bull
It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty. — Milan Kundera
Have you noticed how we bundle together a range of different phenomena and dismiss it all by calling it “coincidence”? Thinking of someone who then calls at that precise moment, meeting someone new and then seeing them everywhere, hearing a word at the exact same time as reading it, dates of key life moments repeating over and over… we label all of these weird events as ‘coincidence’ and leave it at that.
But like the eskimos having ̶h̶u̶n̶d̶r̶e̶d̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ over 50 words for snow so that they can better differentiate things like which snow is good for driving sled, i hypothesize that what we bundle together as ‘coincidence’ is actually a range of distinct types of phenomena that reveal patterns of life (or potential pathways to pursue in life).
For some years now, i have been mapping these different types of coincidence phenomena. Here is an imprecise list of seven types so far identified.
1. Déjà vu
Let’s start with one that a lot of people would call coincidence. Personally, i am not really big on déjà vu as a coincidence phenomena but maybe that’s cos i don’t experience it that often. And The Matrix solved this one anyway: it’s a glitch in the system that shows us that the underlying real reality is being re-written, hence exposing that we are in a fake version of reality.
Maybe i don’t experience this that much because i don’t use Facebook often. Stick with me here: so The Matrix posits that what we perceive as reality is all a massive illusion constructed to keep us enslaved and interested in whatever the Kardashians are doing today. So The Matrix is already happening, or at least, Facebook is helping it get here faster.
Here’s how:
So let’s say reality is that physical world that is happening outside right now. You could go visit it and be a part of it, if you wanted (after finishing this article, i mean). So then one step from reality is the layer of the internet tubing. It is where the hackers send all those script snippets to do Mr Robot type things, where the darkweb lives, the place we used to write all those CompuServe commends like GO WHOLEEARTHCATALOG, all the stuff we don’t see. It’s not physical reality but an attempt to create a programming infrastructure that can represent reality.
Then on top of that there is a layer second-removed from reality, which we can call the internets or the world wide web. It is what we open with a browser and do stuff in. Again, it’s not physical reality but lets us operate on a representation of reality and do things like check out international places, follow what is happening with our rideshare car or mail delivery, and communicate with friends over long and short distances (i once heard of a group of friends sitting round their laptops in silence and every now and then one would chuckle, look up and say “funny” then go back to IMing the friend across from them.)
Now we are already really at a third-layer removed from reality and that is Facebook. It’s not physical reality and it’s not the internet representation of the whole wide world, but it is a closed platform that allows access to that representation through its own light blue (color trademarked) window interface.
Today, you don’t go to the newsagent and buy a copy of the newspaper and feel the ink and paper on your fingers and talk to your neighbors about what you read over a coffee (reality). You don’t file transfer the day’s newspaper through a command line interface from an online database where the newspaper company stores it (first-removed layer), you don’t even visit the newspaper’s website (second-removed layer), now you read it in your newsfeed within Facebook (third-removed layer from reality).
(Without getting too meta, in this example, Facebook could even be considered the fifth-removed layer from reality. If we think of the event that happens in the newspaper as the actual reality, the newspaper reporting it is the first-layer removed, etc, up the line. That’s why i chose to focus on the experience of reading the newspaper as the physical reality but you could really go down a rabbit hole if you want. In fact, there is the event, the people interpreting the event and reporting it to the journalist, then the newspaper, so two more layers removed from reality just in that last sentence.)
So maybe today’s version of déjà vu is when you read something in your Facebook feed and you think maybe you have read it before?
Like when you see this several months apart:
By the way, it is no wonder Facebook bought Oculus Rift: to create VR experiences so that they can continue moving us away from actual reality and further towards The Matrix version of the future-now. (As the Flight of the Conchords sing: It is the distant future, the year 2000.)
But in fact, just a few weeks ago, déjà vu was explained by Akira O’Connor’s research. It turns out it isn’t so much an external glitch in reality as our own internal memory glitches and comes up when our memory is filing something. To be comprehensive, i wanted to include it in the types of coincidence as it is one of those related phenomena which we might call coincidence, and i am wary of trolls writing “what about déjà vu?” as the first comment. (Getting people to comment: i should be so lucky.)
2. Psychic Phone
OK. Here’s an easy one you can relate to. You are thinking of someone and they call you right then. Or you call someone and they sound surprised and say “I was just about to phone you!”
This is Psychic Phone phenomena.
This tends to happen to me most often when i have planned out a list for the day and might have included certain activities where i have to reach out and connect with other people. So maybe it can be explained in the way Jonathan Livingstone’s seagull’s seagull describes:
One of the great cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience. When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we’ve been wishing to lead ourselves. — Richard Bach
I can get a lot more done if i list things out for the day. Not just because it is a good time management and motivational tool, but often because it does the work for me. Right when i am up to it on my list, the people i need to contact often reach out to me via phone or email. I think Goethe has a quote about how if you write down a plan, providence moves with you. So… that.
One of the most fortuitous times Psychic Phone worked for me recently was when i got a new gig writing for VisionMobile. I regularly read the websites VisionMobile and Developer Economics and have heard Andreas Constantinou speak at API Strategy and Practice conferences. But earlier this year, i realized that i only followed VisionMobile’s Twitter account and not DeveloperEconomics, so i started following their sister account. Within seconds of the follow, i received a message from the editor:
By the way, I was actually tempted to call this type of coincidence Strange Phenomena as an ode to the Kate Bush song of that name where she sings:
You bump into a friend you haven’t seen for a long time, Then into another you only thought about last night — Kate Bush
Shall we listen to it real quick?
3. Spotify-Sync
This is my favorite type of coincidence and has occurred to me throughout my whole life. Yes, before Spotify, thanks for pointing that out. The first time i really noticed it happening was in a coffee shop on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst, Sydney. I was about nineteen and used to write zines with serialized short stories. I was working on one where my ragtag band of heroes were getting shepherded off to a containment facility by two burly guys in camouflage. As i wrote the words, i looked up and out onto the street, and there in front of the coffee shop were two muscle bears in camouflage.
I call this type Spotify-Sync because the most frequent example of this occurring for me nowadays is when i am writing something and as i write the words, the song on my Spotify playlist reaches the exact same point so the word i am writing is the same as what i am hearing. There is no way i could intentionally sync it up that precisely , especially since i use a lot of Spotify’s discovery playlists so it is not a case of my subconscious knowing the song and singing along.
I tend to treat these coincidences as a small sign that i am on the right path, doing what i am meant to be doing right now. I was recently, begrudgingly in a meeting in New York and thinking i wasn’t getting much out of it. I had decided to leave after the speaker finished, but during his talk, he said something like “advance” right when my wandering, bored eyes settled on the lettering of a backpack in front of me that had its model name in bright letters: Advance. The backpack was facing away from the speaker so it wasn’t some subconscious use of a word he had seen earlier, and it wasn’t some Keyser Söze set up where the speaker walks away afterwards, his limp slowly improving as he vanishes into the New York City crowd.
A friend of mine says that this is actually happening all the time if we are observant, and actually what i am noticing is that i am in tune with the flow of life and therefore more capable of noticing these connections.
Every single moment is a coincidence. — Douglas Coupland
I’m not sure about that. I think what Coupland is saying is that each moment can hold real meaning for each of us, and if we meditate enough or read enough Pema Chödrön or Byron Katie maybe we will be able to see how the outer world reflects our inner experience. But that is, like, really hard: i have deadlines and i am trying to get to the gym later, and the fridge is empty. Maybe my friend (and Coupland) are right but to me that is a whole ’nother rabbit hole that ends with “what is reality, really?”
Oh, one other example from the other day. I was walking down the street the other day, listening to Spotify, and Sofi Tukker’s Awoo came on, with the lyrics “It came, it went, it conquered quick”. As she sang, a guy was walking towards me in a Rome tourist t-shirt that read “VINI VIDI VICI”. So i was like, oh, its happening in Latin now.
Shall we listen to that track real quick?
4. Happenstance
The happenstance is a common coincidence at the start of a meaningful friendship or relationship. This is the type of coincidence that makes you think there is a destiny element involved. (A lesser form is the constant running into the same person, which i think of as meaning that a message needs to be passed, i’ll come back to that in a sec.)
So recently a friend of mine was invited on a date by a guy who lives in another city. But my friend had a “long distance is the wrong distance, dealbreaker!” attitude to dating.
But this friend also has to travel to another city frequently for work, which also happened to be where the guy who wanted to date my friend normally lives. While the guy was trying to convince my friend to at least try a date, they realized that the following day, they would be on the same plane to the guy’s city, where my friend’s remote office is located. So they went on the date and several months later, they are still dating.
When i first moved out of home and began living in Sydney, i went with some school friends to the Mardi Gras. We ran into a great bunch of girls around our same age and, as is the way for late teens, instant friendships were born. This was before the days of mobile, so it’s not like we were then texting each other every day at first. The following Monday at work, one of the girls that i seemed to connect with the most came up to my work desk: it turned out she worked in the mail department of the company i worked for. A close friendship was born, and while we may not have had mobile, we did have internal extension numbers so we could talk frequently and had lunch dates almost daily.
One of the most recent examples i have of the happenstance was when i went to the Morrissey concert here in Barcelona. I ran into a guy, Andrew, that i had seen dogwalking in my neighborhood a few times. We talked as we filed out of the venue, turns out he would be moving into my neighborhood and was waiting for July — which was then a few months away — to get the keys to his new apartment. We swapped numbers and planned to keep in touch. The next day, i was at a local cafe when a woman with young children asked if her kids could play with my dog. She said they usually played with a friend’s dog, but he wouldn’t be moving into the neighborhood until July. “Oh, you mean Andrew?” I asked, spookily.
These examples of happenstance i think bode well for the start of new relationships and friendships. They tend to happen when we are ready for new partnerships in our lives and are a gentle way of showing us how people come at the right time in our lives often without us having to force it.
I think there are two sort-of adjunct forms of happenstance, one real and one not.
The real one is the lesser form i mentioned earlier. So you see someone you know, maybe even only vaguely know, and then they seem to pop up again and again. The worst time this happened to me was with a guy i had a fairly mediocre one night stand with. I am pretty sure it was an unconscious action, but after that night, whenever he would see me, he would do this kind-of eye roll thing, which, you know, makes it a bazillion times worse to have to run into him and say hello. We live in the same area so okay, we are going to bump into each other a bit. But for awhile i was running into him maybe four or five times a week. He would do his (probably unintentional) eye-roll and we would nod hello. One day i got so sick of it that as we approached each other on the street there was still enough distance so i pretended i hadn’t seen him and crossed over and turned a corner. A few hours later i was in a completely different part of the city and as i walked down the street, guess whose eyes were rolling towards me?
My theory on this minor form of happenstance — or maybe it is a completely different type of coincidence phenomena and i am just as guilty of bundling them together now — is that maybe it is about passing on a message. I always joke to myself that when this happens to me i should go up to the person and ask “what is it? what do you have to tell me?” but maybe it is an internal message we can answer for ourselves. Maybe the guy i had a bad one night stand with was there to remind me that not everyone will like me and i need to just get over being upset with people who don’t want to be my friend.
Or maybe it was just time to say goodbye.
A second type of happenstance that people might consider coincidental occurs when we become attuned to things that had always been there all along. It is like a real life Magic Eye 3D picture (which is what birdwatching is, i think). Suddenly, we are paying attention and something manifests seemingly right before our very eyes. I remember hearing a young guy on a tram in Melbourne saying to his friend “Felafel… what is felafel? Suddenly there are all these shops that are selling felafel now.” The shops had always existed, this dumb punk had only just figured it out. Sometimes, i think when we are learning a new word or a new concept, we are more attuned to it, so it pops up again and again to help us remember it. I’m not sure whether this is something that happens externally to us so we can better understand it, or whether we become more conscious of it and on the look out for it. Certainly, sometimes it does feel coincidental, especially if it is a really weird word or concept we are trying to assimilate.
5. Serendipity
Serendipity is the type of coincidence that occurs when you feel like you are in the right place at the right time. A regular example for me is when i leave my mobile at home to take my dog for a walk. Often, when i get back, someone phones me or texts. There were no missed calls while i was out or unreplied texts: it is like the next right thing couldn’t happen until i had finished the previous activity.
One of the original coincidence stories is a great example of serendipity. Jung shares the story in his book Synchronicity, which was the first study to try to give voice to the idea that coincidences are some sort of phenomena that can be catalogued in the way that i’m doing here. The story goes that he had a particularly obstinate, rational patient who refused to consider her dream life or any aspect of the subconscious as a means to self-inquiry. In yet another skeptical discussion, the patient shared how in her dream she had been given a scarab ring and at the same time, Jung had heard a tapping at the window, which turned out to be a scarab beetle. In a remarkably serendipitous moment, Jung was able to open the window, grab the beetle and as the woman finished recounting her dream episode, Jung said with (i am imagining) an arched eyebrow of the i-told-you-so variety and a dramatic flourish, “…and here’s your scarab.” Apparently that was a breakthrough moment for the patient who then became willing to open up to new ways of thinking.
At the start of summer, a friend of mine was looking for accommodation in Barcelona and within an hour of asking me, another friend told me they were hoping to let out their place while they were away. These little serendipities are a discrete form of coincidence that to my mind is a separate phenomena to say, the feeling of connection and flow i get with Spotify-Sync or from the Psychic Phone.
6. The Repeating Felafel Delivery
So, here’s something. After writing the definition of Serendipity above, i then took my dog for a walk. I have been waiting for a package to be delivered but wasn’t given any time — i just knew it was due today. So i walked Lulu, had coffee with a friend, and then came home. As i climbed the stairs to my place, i could hear my buzzer ringing, and sure enough the delivery was arriving. I asked if they had seen me come in the building and the delivery guy said he had just arrived himself. So, for me, this is kind-of a double whammy coincidence:
a. the package arrival is a serendipity coincidence: the next right thing happened when i completed the previous activity. I was in a flow with time and external events;
b. but maybe because i had just written about naming this phenomena and was in the process of defining it, maybe that gave it the energy needed to manifest again, along the lines of my final point in the happenstance description above: maybe felafel being manifested is just some teenage boy being able to observe a world beyond his bedroom mirror at last, but maybe at other times, when learning a new concept or word, a coincidence phenomena occurs to help you embed and truly understand the new idea.
So in honor of that guy on the tram, i want to call this type of coincidence the Repeating Felafel Delivery. (Wait, okay. That one needs work.) It is where you are trying to learn a new concept or are introduced to something and as you grapple with assimilating it, it seems to repeatedly appear before you. For me, defining the serendipity phenomena was enough for it to manifest again in front of me so i could more clearly say, yes, that’s it.
In Australia, i used to have this shtick where i would be like “Don’t look at me!” when i meant, i’m still getting ready to go out, or i have just woken up, etc. Here in Barcelona, i translated that shtick with a boyfriend and was like “No me miras!” He started singing “No me mires! No me mires! Déjalo ya!” which are the lyrics to an awesome Spanish New Romantic song from the early eighties, Maquillaje (Make-up), by Meccano.
I hadn’t heard of the song before, but it is kind of a cultural touchpoint if you are integrating into a Spanish gay scene culture with other 40-something year olds. The next night, we were watching the Spanish news and a story about a fashion festival came on, and guess what song they were playing as the soundtrack.
Oh, and shall we listen to it real quick?
7. The Patti Smith Club Sandwich
In the book, There Are No Accidents, Robert Hopcke describes a type of synchronicity where across, for example, a woman’s life, she has three best friends and their names are all Debra, and they end up having husbands with the same name as her husband, or one has a son and another has a brother with the same name as her brother, or two of their daughters are born on the same day as her daughter, etc etc.
This type of coincidence i call the Patti Smith Club Sandwich. It comes from the fact that Patti Smith, had two great loves of her life: Robert Mapplethorpe and Fred Smith. Patti met Fred Smith on March 9, 1976. Robert Mapplethorpe died on March 9, 1989. Fred Smith died on 4 November 1994. Robert Mapplethorpe was born on 4 November 1946. As shamanistic as Patti Smith is purported to be, it’s not like she could know that her husband would die on her first lover’s birthday, or that she would meet her husband on the anniversary of Mapplethorpe’s future death. From the little reading i have done on Patti Smith’s tumultuous relationship with these two men, it seems that now their births and deaths are inexplicably and eternally intertwined so that one cannot be in her thoughts without a memory of the other.
More Than 7 Types of Coincidence
I liked the authoritative voice of declaring that there are seven types of coincidence, but now that you have read this far, i can admit that there may be more: Kismet, Synchronicity, Intuited Urge… i can describe a few more ideas from things i have read but i feel like in order to differentiate between fiction and reality, it is best to describe these phenomena patterns when i have personal experience of them. That’s why i don’t go into that much detail about the Patti Smith Club Sandwich, it is the only type of coincidence phenomena mapped here that i don’t really have first hand experience of in an meaningful way.
Harnessing Different Types of Coincidence Phenomena
We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence. — Paul Auster
Two resources in particular have influenced me when deciding to write and share this mapping exercise. The first is, of course, Jung’s treatise on Synchronicity, which no, i have not read fully. I am much more into what Douglas Coupland calls 101-ism (“The tendency to pick apart, often in minute detail, all aspects of life using half-understood pop psychology as a tool”), but from the bits of it i have read, Jung is suggesting that we can pay attention to when our inner world and external reality seemingly coincide (coincidence) in a way that is personally meaningful (synchronicity) and then our aim should be to amplify that experience.
So, for example, when i have a Spotify-Sync moment when writing i feel like i am pursuing the type of subject matter i should be writing about, and i tend to look for more of those writing opportunities. When i have a Psychic Phone moment, i try and keep the conversation going and listen attentively — what message am i meant to be hearing or giving here? Happenstance gives me more reason to trust the new friendships and relationships i am forming.
The second is the book There are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives by Robert H. Hopcke. He says a coincidence, or a synchronicity, as he calls it following in Jung’s work, has four characteristics. He says synchronistic events have these things in common:
- They are acausally connected, not created from a chain of cause and effect of the individual’s own actions
- They have a sense of deep emotional experience
- The content of the event is symbolic in nature
- They occur at important transitions in our life.
So some of what i have been describing here are not synchronistic events, although even little things like seeing that VINI VIDI VICI t-shirt did fill me with an overwhelming sense of joy. But it wasn’t at a key transition moment of my life.
Here, i have tried to start mapping the lesser significant coincidences that may not mark significant life transitions, but are perhaps nodes on a pathway, signalling the way forward, if we are willing to follow.
How Does Technology Impact on Coincidence Phenomena
It is curious that since Jung, there are few studies trying to understand the phenomena of coincidence more, and yet it is an experience i would say all of us have had on multiple occasions in our lives. Maybe it borders too much on the esoteric for it to be considered a valid subject matter for science. Or when it is studied, it is done so in ways like the déjà vu example, in a purely memory and neurological way, which wouldn’t really serve to explore the other types of coincidence defined here. It is also incredibly difficult to design an experiment to map synchronicity, as by its very definition it is unexpected phenomena. But you would think quantum physicists who are into the whole idea of the observer determining whether light is a ray or a line would be into it? And i guess the weather was unexpected phenomena at first, too.
If the problem is that there is no way to know in advance which moments are going to be synchronous, could you enlist big data and quantifiable self apps in a way that could help reveal the patterns of coincidence? Certainly, we are trying to create apps and data models that replace coincidence.
Are we trying to apply noise over serendipity through personalized, contextual machine learning algorithms that in some way wipe out the naturally occurring phenomena of coincidence and instead replaces it with a human-made version? Could this, like Facebook’s separation from reality, lead us further towards a world where our sense of discovery and awe is replaced by a feed created for us to consume, us mistaking that for kismet, happenstance and serendipity, lost from the real marvel of how our lives can be a dance in the rhythm of life? I feel like at the moment, the endgame for technology is to replace synchronous phenomena with a pizza coupon in our chat apps at just the right moment.
With these definitions, now that we have a clearer sense of the magic and joy of life and its interconnections, how can we harness technology to explore and embrace these coincidence phenomena rather than replicate and distract us from it?
Thanks for reading. I am using my Medium site as a place for a more personal type of writing than my business work.
If you have any comments on this piece, i’d love to hear them. I have several more articles in mind following up on this theme, so your comments will help me reflect and flesh out my ideas more. Please follow me to be alerted to future articles.
