Fluke
Notes
When we consider the what-if moments, it’s obvious that arbitrary, tiny changes and seemingly random, happenstance events can divert our career paths, rearrange our relationships, and transform how we see the world.
To explain how we came to be who we are, we recognize pivot points that so often were out of our control. But what we ignore are the invisible pivots, the moments that we will never realize were consequential, the near misses or near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives.
Could being late to a meeting or missing an exit off the highway not just change your life, but alter the course of history? And if that happened, would you even realize it? Or would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind?
If every detail of the past created our present, then every moment of our present is creating our future, too.
Is this really true? That every detail of the past created our present? And that every detail of our present is creating our future?
In any given moment we must decide where to take our next step. When we do, the possible paths before us change, forking endlessly, opening up new possible futures and closing others down. Every step is important.
Our paths are not determined solely by us. The paths open to us are the offshots of past histories, paved by the past steps others have taken. More disorienting still, it is not just our steps that matter because the paths through our garden are also being constantly moved by the decisions of living people that we will neither see nor meet. The paths we decide between are relentlessly redirected, our trajectories divereted, by the peculiar details of other lives we never notice.
Yet, when we try to explain the world—to explain who we are, how we got here, and why the world works the way it does—we ignore the flukes.
Chance and chaos drive change more than we imagine. It’s true: many facets of our lives are stable, dictated by regularities and comforting routine. Most random encounters and happenstance events are merely inconsequential curiosities that don’t matter.
But everyone can pinpoint a moment, that, in hindsight, was a fluke that changed his or her life. However, we feel as though we construct our lives not with chance, but with the building blocks of large, hopefully wise—choices that we feel we, alone, control.
The real story of our lives is often written in the margins. Small details matter, and even the apparently insignificant choices of people we will never meet can seal our own fates.
Chaos theory says that small changes can make a big difference. If an infinitesimal change in wind speed can create storms a few months later, what about your decision to leap out of bed on Tuesday morning rather than hitting the snooze button? Are our lives ruled by insignificant choices and seemingly random bits of misfortune or luck? In an intertwined world such as ours, everything that we do matters because our ripples can produce storms.
Is this really true? That everything that we do matters?
Ours is an intertwined world. Once you accept that entangled existence, it becomes clear that chance, chaos, and arbitrary accidents play an outsize role in why things happen. In an intertwined world, flukes matter. There can be no true split between “the signal” and “the noise.” There is no noise. The noise of one person’s life is the signal for another, even when we can’t detect it. Our chaotic, intertwined existence reveals a potent, astonishing fact:
We control nothing, but influence everything.
Convergence and Contingency
Imagine our lives are like a film and you could rewind back to yesterday. Then, when you reach the start of your day, you change one small detail, such as whether you stopped to have coffee before you rushed out the door. If your day stayed mostly the same whether or not you paused to have your coffee, then that would be a convergent event. The details didn’t matter that much. What happened was bound to happen regardless. The train of your life left the station a few minutes later but followed the same track. However, if you stopped to have coffee and everything about your future life unfolded differently, then that would be a contingent event because so much hinged on one small detail.