I wonder. A lot. About a lot.
To what extent are coincidences unplanned, uncoordinated and unrelated?
To what extent are planned occurrences deliberate, independent and timed?
Ramblings much? Perhaps. Onto something? Maybe. The enterprise of writing , after all, has always involved a degree of madness.
With more than 7 billion people on the planet, who can truly tell what each of them is planning or thinking? Yet, history has shown us that there are events that have happened in different parts of the world, at the same time, involving different people.
For example, March 20th 2023 will see mass action in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia.
As I was pondering on the probability of these events being coincidences or coordinated, I came across two interesting vantage points.
One was by Klaus Conrad, a psychiatrist who while writing on schizophrenia in 1958 coined the term ‘apophenia’. A human propensity to unreasonably seek patterns in random information.
In the second, two economists in their book ‘Freakonomics’ explore the ‘law of unrelated things.’ This is the phenomenon where seemingly unrelated things somehow appear to have a connection.
What interesting coincidences have you come across?