Edition #136: What Are the Odds?

Plus, the puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you feel, an AI dream interpreter, and polar bears

Mar 02, 2023

The Meaning of Coincidence - Otherwise Incorporated Chicago

A Note From the Editor

I was 16 years old when I saw the West Coast for the first time. The trip was to San Clemente, a small beach town in Southern California. I was accompanying my mother to a family wedding. Everything about California left me awed—the massive, red tiled-roof villas perched on steep cliffsides, the icy ocean water. Even my paper-wrapped burger at Jack in the Box was deliciously foreign.

After the wedding, my mother and I drove to Los Angeles for the day. We had no knowledge of the city, so we explored its major draws like the tourists we were—the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Pinkberry, Melrose Avenue, Venice Beach. We drove a lot that day, relying on my bulky slide cell phone for directions. Whilst zooming through the mass of speeding cars on an eight-lane highway, my phone suddenly died. We had no idea where we were going. I panicked; getting lost on a busy highway is a recurring nightmare I have.

“We need to find a library,” my mom said, “to sit and charge the phone.” From several years of distance, this seems like such a simple problem—we could’ve just stopped at Starbucks, a McDonald’s—but at the moment, it felt monumental. “We’ll never find a library,” I said, “we haven’t seen one the whole time we’ve been driving.” My mom pulled off on a random exit, we drove around for about 10 more minutes until, lo and behold, we cruised past a local library. I couldn’t believe it. “What’re the odds"?” I repeated over and over to my mother that afternoon. We laughed about it, saying maybe now we should say we just needed to stumble across a giant heap of money or Richard Gere.

Fourteen years later, the library incident isn’t so surprising because it seems life is increasingly peppered with these sorts of coincidences. A coincidence, by definition, is “a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” Statistically speaking, coincidences are often inevitable. The world is much bigger than we can imagine and things are happening all the time—not so strange, as it turns out. Sometimes, I play a game with myself in which I create a very specific circumstance—a girl named Judy is currently wearing a purple polka-dotted skirt with black Converse, sitting in a 2003 Toyota Corolla in a Target parking lot breaking up with her boyfriend—and wonder whether it’s actually occurring somewhere out there.

I’ll never know, and therein lies the magic—in the not knowing, the delicious mystery of it all. On the other side of the elusive, mysterious coin are those statistical theories including the birthday problem. If you happen to meet a stranger and discover they share your same birthday, it seems like quite a coincidence—I share a birthday with Beyoncé, a fact I can only take as some invisible spiritual connection. In reality, if you gather 23 people together, there is a 50% chance two of the 23 will share a birthday. Less magic, more inevitable.

It is April 2022 and I am two weeks into an attempt to prioritize my creative writing. I’ve been working on a short film script, for this is the format I know I want to write in most, but that I have the least practice in so far. I complete a 12-page script based on a longer story I wrote a few years back. I call it “Happier Than Ever.”

It is a Sunday. On a plane ride from Austin to New York, I read through my script. The main character’s name is Jacklyn. I change nothing about the script except her name—from Jacklyn to Luce. I go through the 12 pages and change the name at each mention—Luce, Luce, Luce.

That Tuesday, I am going on a first date with a man from Hinge. I know little about him; his profile says he works in the film industry. We meet at a sexy French restaurant in the Lower East Side. I am intimidated straight away—he is articulate with a fancy education, and I quickly discover he is well established in his career. A writer and director. I leave the date in a daze; wondering whether I’m ready to be with the sort of people I fantasize about: ultra-successful, established.

That Wednesday, I wake up early to make it to yoga class. Before I do so, I decide to Google search the man from the date. I wonder how legit he is, what films he’s made—we didn’t discuss specifics. I only have a few minutes before I need to run out the door. I type everything I know about him into Google and find him easily; his last name, his IMBD.

His most recent feature stars Octavia Butler and Naomi Watts, so he really is legit. The film is called Luce.

There are two types of people in the coincidence discourse, and maybe in the world: those who believe everything is statically provable, and those who believe in the unjustifiable divinity of ordinary things. Neither is better than the other, but I do think it can be difficult for a person from one camp to deeply connect with someone from the other camp. I often think about how, if I didn’t believe in signs or destiny, it would be difficult to find a reason to keep going. If I thought this was it—our time on this Earth, the things we can clearly see with our two human eyes, the things we can process with our human brains—then things would feel bleak to me. This is wonderful, sure, but there must be more.

A few weeks back, a girl I’d only recently met was telling me a story. At one point she looked me in the eyes in earnest and asked whether I believed in fatalism. “Do you think there’s a pre-written plan for us?” she said. I don’t, not exactly, but I could see she needed my answer to be yes. I said I think there are a number of ways any given situation can go, and that I believe we have the power to influence them to a degree. But also, there are a thousand things that could happen over which we have no control. In the end, things will work out how they’re supposed to. This seemed to bring her some relief.

I thought of it a lot afterward—is there a pre-determined plan for us, for me? If there was, would that make me feel soothed or trapped?

Two lovers meet as teenagers. They are from vastly different regions in Spain, she from the far North, he from the South. Around 18 or 19, they get together. They will stay together for the foreseeable future, falling deeper in love, and getting to know each other more intimately. They will share nearly every detail of their lives with one another.

One day, they discuss their respective origins. Her grandfather is from a small town in the middle of the country—a tiny village, really, with only 300 people. Nowhere close to where she’s from, or where he’s from, or where they met in Milan. Funny, he says, his grandfather is from the same tiny village. Disbelief; what are the odds?

Her grandfather was a blacksmith. He had a modest, successful business he planned to pass down to his son. But his son wasn’t interested in the family trade; he wanted a business school and money, adventure. Her grandfather was devastated; he was growing older. He wanted the business to live on. And so, when he met a younger man with a keen interest in the business, he took the man in, and taught him the trade. Treated him like a son. The man eventually inherited her grandfather’s business.

The man, as it turns out, was the grandfather of her lover.

When you begin to look for signs, you find them everywhere. In my notebook, I make a list entitled “Destiny Moments.” I want to see the signs, to notice the patterns. I want to follow a trail of breadcrumbs that lead me to a place of knowing I am moving in the right direction. The list fills easily and quickly. Some of the items on the list are a stretch, maybe not so coincidental as my emotions make them feel—writing in my journal about a romantic encounter and using the phrase “unlikely, yet inevitable,” on a Friday; learning about Aristotle’s philosophy on endings on Saturday from my playwriting teacher: “surprising, but inevitable.”

Noticing coincidences isn’t random, either. People who are generally more observant are going to be more likely to notice coincidental circumstances—they might overhear a stranger say something a less astute person who miss, they might be in the habit of looking up and around while walking, giving them a better chance to catch a glimpse of a sign with the same name of the street they grew up on, that sort of thing. In this way, it isn’t a coincidence that I notice more coincidences. I’m always looking around, always listening. I’m seeking them out, after all.

The most profound coincidence happens a few weeks back. I am preparing to produce and direct my first short film and, by some miracle, the most impossible feats are lining up in a way that makes the dream a possible reality. I discover a beautiful piece of land I want to shoot the film on, just across the street from my house. I visit the land several times, write the script around it. I hire the actors, my friends from New York are coming to shoot, everything is set. We are not going to get permission to film on the land—it is private land, but it is accessible from the main road.

Then a fence goes up a week before we plan to shoot and I think the film is over; there is no film if not on that land. Through a neighbor, I find the contact information of the man who owns the land. I send him a long, rambling voice note asking permission to film there. We have a phone call; he is gracious and kind. Permission granted. He was one request: that I find something in nature—a flower, a shell, whatever—that means something significant to me. I should bring that item to the land as an offering on the first day of filming.

When we hang up the phone, I go to my bedroom and see it: the small rock I packed in my suitcase, brought all the way from my last trip to the US. I am not a packrat, not one for arbitrary sentimentality unless it is in the form of the written word, but my niece and I found a pair of matching rocks over Thanksgiving and she insisted I take one with me. “That way, you can always think of me when you look at it,” she said.

The first day of filming—3:30 am, pitch dark— I bring the rock to the land, squeeze it in my hand with closed eyes, and said thank you, thank you, thank you. This isn’t random, I know it.

Cheers, my dears, and as always thank you for reading. The re-launched version of this paid newsletter goes live next week. If you’re a paying subscriber, nothing changes! If you aren’t, that means certain portions of the weekly edition will be paywalled each week. Don’t fret, there will still be a fully free edition each month!

What’re your thoughts on coincidences? Do you believe in them, in their magic? If you have any wild coincidences to share, I’d love to hear there. Or, if you want to read a collection of coincidences, you can do so here.

Perhaps You Should… Let AI Interpret Your Dream

Let’s face it, no one wants to hear about the random details of your dream as much as you want to share them. But AI does—and it’ll even guess what you’re going through once you feed it your personal mental data! Playing around with this has been fun.

Bonus Content (Polar Bears)

A polar bear and young cub cling to an iceberg.

I don’t know about you, but I love bears. Such strange creatures—are they more like cats or dogs? Neither! They’re bears! They can walk on four legs or two, they have claws like a feline. I cannot get over the strange beauty of these guys. As such, this collection of polar bear photos struck a sweet chord with me. They’re cute but also bizarre—why are their heads so oddly shaped? Almost shrunken. Anyway, I hope I see a polar bear in real life someday. Until then, this will have to do.

Also, this headline feels like a dystopian commentary or an SNL sketch, I can’t decide. Love me some New York humor. Forgot how much I loved this song.

A Quote From A Book You Should Read:

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read it’s message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.”

-The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

This newsletter is best served with a side of conversation, so drop your opinions, reflections, and thoughts in the comments below and let’s get to talking.

that's so interesting

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