Why Do Coincidences Feel Like Messages Meant for You?

What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?

Everyone has a coincidence story. I checked, carefully, and I do not have one. That absence turned out to be far more interesting than any story I could have told.

The Coincidence I Never Had

Today’s prompt asks for the weirdest coincidence I have ever experienced. I sat with it for a while, walked back through the years, and came up with nothing.

Not a modest nothing. No lost heirloom returned by a stranger. No chance meeting with someone from my own street. No phone call from the friend I had just been thinking about. If the universe has been sending me signals, it has been doing so on a frequency I do not receive.

For a while, I blamed my memory. Now I suspect it is something else: a failure to notice.

What I Was Trained to Do with a Coincidence

I work with evidence. That changes how you hear the word coincidence.

Outside the courtroom, coincidence is a charming story. Inside it, coincidence is a claim—usually a contested one. One side says, “Look how unlikely this is.” The other says, “Unlikely things happen all the time, and noticing this one tells us something about you, not necessarily about the event.”

The law recognizes that repeated occurrences can become relevant when deciding whether something was accidental or intentional. Once may be chance. Twice invites a question. Eventually, a jury may stop believing in luck. But the law cannot tell us exactly where that point lies.

The Most Expensive Coincidence

Sally Clark’s two infant sons died thirteen months apart. She was convicted of their murder after a paediatrician testified that the odds of two such deaths in one family were one in seventy-three million.

That figure was based on squaring the estimated probability of a single death—an assumption that required the two deaths to be independent. That had not been established. The Royal Statistical Society later stated that there was no statistical basis for the figure, and Clark’s conviction was eventually quashed.

The error became known as the prosecutor’s fallacy: confusing the probability of the evidence if someone is innocent with the probability that the person is innocent given the evidence. They are not the same.

So no, I do not collect coincidences. I was taught to interrogate them, and the lesson stayed with me.

What I May Have Trained Away

And yet.

J. E. Littlewood offered a useful corrective. If we experience roughly a million events a month, even a one-in-a-million occurrence should happen to us about once a month.

The improbable, in other words, is not necessarily extraordinary.

But statistics explain why an unlikely event occurs. They do not explain why that particular event catches our attention.

Jung saw synchronicity as meaningful connection beyond ordinary causality. The Stoics imagined an interconnected cosmos. Buddhism’s dependent origination likewise sees events as conditioned and interconnected, while the empiricist offers the simplest explanation: the pattern may be real, but its significance lies in the observer rather than the world.

I can keep my scepticism. But one possibility costs me something.

If coincidence reveals what the observer is already carrying—an unanswered question, a forgotten name, a decision postponed—then someone who notices no coincidences is not necessarily seeing the world more accurately.

He may simply be refusing to say what he carries.

Perhaps he has stopped knowing.

That, I suspect, is my honest answer to today’s prompt.

I have no weird coincidence to offer. What I have is the suspicion that they have been arriving on schedule all along—and that I have filed every one of them under ordinary before it could ask me anything.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 28 August 2026.

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