To ask if you believe in coincidence?

[OneAzureDeer]

Sometimes I wonder if things really are random or if we’re just taught to think they are. Have you ever had something happen that felt too aligned, too timely, or too strange to be “just a coincidence?”

Would love to hear others’ takes - are coincidences real or is there always more to it ?

Interesting topic I have had some things happen that felt like too much of a coincidence recently.

My ex fiance was pressuring me to use my name to buy an almost 80k car promising he would make the payments. A few days later I became aware he was active in a dating site and dropped his bumble for multiple women.

I really don’t think there’s any significance to synchronicities. It’s like a lucky run at cards… it just happens sometimes.
starting to attribute significance is a path to delusion so I personally don’t indulge.

Yes I do believe in coincidence, in that I believe it’s a lot more prevalent than any of us realise and there is nothing woo about it.

Have you ever heard of the birthday paradox? It is the number of people that you can have in a room before there is an over 50% chance that 2 will share a birthday.

Care to guess how many it is????

23!

If you think back to your primary school class it is very likely that there will be two people with the same birthday.

Coincidences are usually things that seem surprising but when you look at the maths it it not that surprising at all.

In my entire life I have only ever known of one single person to share my date of birth, and even then it was just the month and day, not the year.

Ahh - but it is not just about you….

The birthday paradox works because as well as the chances of you having the same birthday as Dave, Sue or Trixie there is the chance of Dave having the same birthday as Sue or the same birthday as Trixie and the chance of Sue and Trixie having the same birthday. And then when you bring Greg in then he could share a birthday with any one of you.

I know a few people with the same birthday as me. The day after mine seems really common though - know loads of them. In my (small) team at work there are 3 of us with birthdays on 3 consecutive days.

Coincidences are just coincidences. I don't think there's any kind of occult dimension or Fate driving them,

I mean, I met DH at a cancelled workshop. For some reason I had missed the notices saying it was cancelled that everyone else had seen (pre-internet), and was the only one to show up at an empty room in an obscure corner of the university campus. For some reason, DH, who was one of the organisers, had an attack of conscience and decided to check the room in case anyone had shown up.

If we hadn't bumped into one another at this one event (which was something highly uncharacteristic of me to be interested in), we were unlikely to have met, as he was about to go abroad to live, and we would both have married other people.

But I don't think we were fated to meet. It was pure chance.

One of my beloved nephew’s died suddenly and unexpectedly 18 months ago, last Wednesday I got up the courage to visit a jeweller to have a piece of jewellery made which incorporates a small quantity of his ashes inside.
On the way home, my car suddenly lost power in a horrible spot (on a roundabout between 2 very busy dual carriageways just before rush hour, with no verge), I put out 2 triangles and they both got smashed to bits in minutes - it was a fairly stressful situation.
I had to call a recovery truck to take me to my garage……the truck pulls up, the name on the side is the same as my nephew’s.

If by “coincidence” you mean probability, then yes, there are many things that happen that feel to be so far out of the expected that we call them coincidence but if you apply probability theory they are really not unexpected.

I met my, lives in the next street, neighbour at the Castle in Monaco.

I read a book about coincidence years ago. Cannot remember author etc. But it was freaky!!

Randomness includes the possibility of coincidence though. Originally Apple had properly randomised track order on their music iPods shuffle setting, which actually means that you might get the same track twice consecutively, or you might get the same two tracks in the same order twice. When this happened to iPod users, some of then complained that the track selection wasn’t truly random, even though it was. So Apple changed the shuffle algorithm to make listeners feel it was more random, even though in reality it was less so.

OP when you say ‘do you believe in coincidence’ you really mean, ‘do you think coincidences have a deeper meaning’ don’t you. Humans are programmed to find patterns. It doesn’t mean there are always patterns, however. Look up confirmation bias.

Carl Jung wrote a lot about synchronicities. I don't see why they would be any more strange than our very strange existence.

My very silly one was when I bought a birthday card with a painting of six sausage dogs in a pram. I stepped out of the gift shop and straight in front of me was a sausage dog in a pram. Hadn't seen one before in town and haven't seen once since.

It’s birthday not date of birth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

That isn't even a coincidence, just two things that happened.

That's what I thought. What's coincidental about it?

It’s an interesting idea isn’t it…

DH and I met at Uni, each hundreds of miles away from our respective childhood homes (in opposite directions). At the end of DH’s first visit, he asked if he could be dropped off at a relatives which happened to be close to my home. I stopped in shock when a long-forgotten teacher of a rather niche childhood hobby walked in and said hello to me before any introduction - it was DH’s aunt!

Slight tangent, but I also read that people are more likely to make the luck/see the connections they’re (sometimes subconsciously) looking for. For example, I assign a specific bird to feeling supported by a (now deceased) relative. I will say it often seem that when I am down this bird seems to pop up, in sometimes quite unexpected places. Do I think fate is controlling me and the bird to be in the same place? No. But do I still take some comfort/have a little smile? You bet, every time.

Never heard of this. But in my daughters class of 13 she shares a birthday with another girl!

I mean, coincidences are going to occur whether we "believe in" them or not.

Are you asking if we believe they mean something?

I was once teasing a friend's boyfriend that I was in a relationship with their dad (obviously not being serious). They challenged me re. their dad's phone number, so I reeled a "random" number off (6 digits - my parent's landline).

Guy's face went white.

Turns out that, save for the area codes, our respective parents had matching phone numbers.

My dad and his sister share the same day, as do my (two neices, their parents are siblings).