100 Photos People Are Glad They Took, As Nobody Would’ve Believed Their Word

Over the course of a lifetime, most of us will probably witness plenty of strange moments that feel way too weird to be random. Some people call it fate. Others joke that it must be a glitch in the matrix. Or maybe we’re stuck in someone’s Sims game and they’re having a little too much fun with us.

As entertaining as those theories are, supposedly impossible coincidences often have perfectly ordinary explanations and may not be quite as rare as we think. They’re still fascinating, of course. Just maybe not in the mystical way we sometimes like to imagine.

You might think it’s a pretty wild coincidence to be sitting in a college class and discover that you share a birthday with one of your coursemates. At the very least, it gives you an easy excuse to start talking. Still, statistically speaking, it’s not all that rare.

If you put 23 people in a room, there’s roughly a 50% chance that at least two of them share a birthday. With 70 people, that chance rises to about 99.9%. It sounds almost impossible at first, but it really is just maths.

Another reason weird events happen more often than we expect is simply that life gives them an enormous number of chances to occur. This idea is sometimes described as the law of truly large numbers: when there are enough opportunities for something unlikely to happen, sooner or later it probably will somewhere.

So while bumping into an old school friend on holiday abroad may feel extraordinary, millions of people are travelling, meeting strangers and crossing paths every day.

We also tend to assume that when something is random, it should look nicely mixed up. In reality, randomness can produce streaks too.

For example, getting five or six heads in a row during 20 fair coin tosses isn’t especially rare. To us, though, it can feel suspiciously deliberate, even when there’s nothing strange happening at all.

Apple famously ran into this problem with the iPod. When its shuffle feature played songs randomly, users complained that they sometimes heard several tracks by the same artist or from the same album close together.

To them, that didn’t feel random at all, even though it was exactly the kind of pattern chance can produce. Apple eventually adjusted the algorithm, essentially making shuffle less random so that it would feel more random to listeners.

And you know how sometimes a certain coincidence suddenly seems to follow you around? Maybe you learn an unusual word and hear it again the next day. Or you start thinking about buying a particular car and then spot that model all over town.

This is known as the frequency illusion, sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Once something catches our attention, our brains become better at picking it out, making it seem far more common than it did before.

This tendency to look for connections is a big part of how we make sense of the world. Our brains naturally search for patterns and relationships in the information around us, even when some of those connections happen by chance.

Coincidences can therefore feel especially meaningful when they involve something we were already thinking about or care about. As psychologist Magda Osman has explained, noticing repetitions and wondering whether events are connected is a normal part of human thinking.

Of course, knowing the maths behind coincidences doesn’t make them any less fun when they happen. You can understand perfectly well that two strangers wearing identical outfits probably didn’t enter some cosmic pact and still appreciate how cool it looks.

Or, you know, maybe it really is a glitch in the matrix and one day we’ll wake up to find out we’ve been living in someone’s simulation this whole time. That part is up to you to decide.