Coincidence, Synchronicity, and Such and Such

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You’re standing in your living room, daydreaming. The thought crosses your mind, not for the first time today, that you haven’t heard from or spent time with a particular friend in a while. You think to yourself, ‘I should call her soon.’

Moments later, your phone rings. It’s this friend. You exclaim with delight that you were just thinking about her, and she tells you she just had the sudden urge to reach out and see if you wanted to hang out.

How strange, isn’t it? Incidents like this happen all the time and its enough to seriously wonder if humans share an unconscious connection, as Carl Jung posited. How is it that these serendipitous moments of psychic synchronization happen so often? How can this be coincidence?

Synchronicity

Easily, actually. There’s a term for this sort of meaningful coincidence. It’s called synchronicity. The term was coined, coincidentally, by Carl Jung. He described it as the occurrence of two events that have no apparent cause and effect relation but are nonetheless connected by profound meaning.

**As perhaps a fitting example of synchronicity, mere hours after saving my first draft, an article from CNN posted the day before, came across my Twitter feed.**

In other words, synchronicity is a coincidence with imbued meaning by the participants. I have a problem with this idea.

A coincidence, we can formally define (from the dictionary) as: ‘a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.’ It is synonymous with serendipity and providence on the positive side and other words on the negative side.

A coincidence is already imbued with meaning, often profound.

Coincidences and… not…

Some might disagree with that last sentence and say that we tend to find coincidences merely interesting, but when profound we use lofty words like fate. My point stands. We bother with labels when it’s worth noting, and the divisions are just based on our emotional reaction to the imbued meaning. Fate, destiny, serendipity, synchronicity — these are all various configurations of, and reactions to, coincidence.

We actually have a way of defining coincidences that have no imbued meaning to the participants. We call them, ‘things that happened.’ Alternatively I like to call them, ‘random shit.’ My point is, if I do a thing, and you do a thing, and those things have no amount of gravity or relevance to each other, then we’re just two people who have done… things.

This is true even if the things are related. For example, you make a grocery list and I go buy groceries. Is it a relevant coincidence that we both had groceries on our minds on the same day? Is it still if you made your list on Monday, and I went grocery shopping on Friday? Whoa… we had groceries on our minds in the same week! Are we required to even know each other?

This makes ‘synchronicity’ as a term a bit redundant, or worse, a trivial thing warped in a grab for profundity.

About the ‘and… not…’

I suppose the argument could be made that in a world where there are so many people doing so many things, in a universe where (our perceived) time continues to march on, linearly, there are bound to be coincidences and synchronicities. This is a completely fair thing to note, but I think there’s a simpler point people overlook.

For all the times your friend called you at that moment you happened to be thinking about her, what about the massive number of times you thought about her and she hadn’t called? Or the times she called and you hadn’t been thinking about her? Of all the times you bumped into that one person you really needed to speak with when you went into a random restaurant or whatever, what about the far greater number of times you didn’t?

Humans are big walking talking confirmation bias machines. The one piece of evidence that presents us with the version of reality we favor, tends to outweigh the thousand pieces of evidence that don’t. We will willfully delude ourselves to create meaning where there is none, or doesn’t need to be one. We want to feel connected. There’s no shame in that.

One final thought: if the only way to derive a sense of profundity from an event is by noting how coincidental it is to another event, I’d argue the event isn’t profound at all (probably true of both events). So if you’re standing there thinking this ‘thing’ is a big deal in the middle of a coincidence, or synchronicity, or universal fuzzies, ask yourself if the attendant parts would have been a big deal without the addition of the coincidence. That might be a good way to separate a big deal from a thing… that has happened.

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