What’s the Strangest Coincidence You’ve Ever Experienced?
Whether you believe in fate or destiny, or that there is some other higher power that affects who we meet or what we do, we have all experienced coincidences that seem too wild to be true. Yesterday I came across this coincidence on my Twitter feed, and it could just as well have been a romcom plot that I would definitely watch:
This tweet prompted the Lifehacker staff to spend a full 45 minutes talking about the various coincidences we encountered (in between, of course, they actually worked). Partners who once lived in the same house, but never crossed paths. Finding a “friend / acquaintance on social media” that you have interacted with on the Internet for years, but have never actually met the life next door. Two co-workers who once figured out that their fathers live next door to each other and were best friends when they were young children.
Lifehacker magazine senior editor Beth Skorecki met her husband in college. It turns out they both meant the same minor college that they both almost attended. And both were two small and rather random schools, especially considering that they studied different specialties.
“So there’s a parallel universe in which there’s absolutely nothing else but that the old university sweatshirt I still wear sometimes has a different name,” she tells me.
Our personal finance writer Mike Winters made me laugh the most:
“In my life there are only insignificant, small, but incredible coincidences,” he tells me. “I was talking about ASMR one time while walking around the neighborhood, and in the middle of a sentence I saw ASMR on a license plate (I have a witness).”
Don’t doubt him – he has a witness. (This was in Ontario, he says, in case you think he’s adding an extra letter to sugarcoat the story.)
My favorite genre of these coincidences is the “could / should have met my partner much earlier than me” variety, but I found out that any old “said something and then saw it on a license plate” coincidence will amuse me. So tell us in the comments: what’s the strangest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?