What Is a Coincidence?
A coincidence is the striking alignment of events or circumstances that appear meaningfully connected, yet lack an identifiable causal link. These moments often catch us off guard—surprising, emotionally charged, and sometimes deeply memorable.
“Imagine going to the university campus for an unrelated reason and unexpectedly running into a friend who persuades you to attend a recruitment event—one that ultimately leads to a job offer. Such unplanned convergence often feels meaningful in hindsight.”
— Getting My First Job (to be published soon)
Coincidences range from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Bumping into a neighbour at a local café may feel unremarkable. But running into a childhood friend in a remote town halfway across the world? That stirs something else—wonder, disbelief, even destiny. Yet the surprise of a coincidence doesn’t depend solely on how rare it is. Context and perception shape our interpretation far more than we often realise.
What Makes a Coincidence Feel Remarkable?
We tend to notice certain coincidences more than others because they tick particular boxes—some mathematical, others psychological. Here's how that breaks down:
Statistical Factors
Unpredictability – Coincidences often defy our expectations about how unrelated events should unfold.
Rarity – The less likely the combination of events, the more it stands out.
Deviation from randomness – When events that should be independent seem linked, they demand our attention.
Psychological Factors
Perceived significance – Even without a logical connection, we attach emotional or symbolic meaning.
Pattern recognition – Humans are wired to spot patterns; we often connect dots that weren’t meant to be joined.
Emotional impact – Coincidences that provoke strong feelings—amusement, awe, joy, curiosity, even unease—are more likely to linger in our minds.
The Psychology of Coincidence: A Closer Look
While many coincidences may be statistically ordinary, they rarely feel that way. Often, they strike us as deeply personal or oddly well-timed—like messages, nudges, or clues. This isn’t just about reason or probability. The sense of meaning we attach to coincidence is shaped by how our minds and emotions work—wired over time through memory, biology, and evolution.
Let’s unpack the psychological forces at play.
1. Emotional Resonance
Coincidences often arrive with emotional weight—delight, awe, confusion, even fear. These feelings act as amplifiers. They don’t just help us remember the event; they can convince us it meant something.
Emotions like wonder and surprise increase our openness and sense of connection.
In heightened emotional states—grief, falling in love, crisis—we're more likely to interpret events as significant.
The event itself might be ordinary, but its emotional timing can make it unforgettable.
2. Our Pattern-Seeking Brain
Humans evolved to spot patterns. It’s how we learned to survive—by detecting danger, recognising seasons, or anticipating behaviour.
This tendency is called apophenia: perceiving connections where none objectively exist.
A common form, pareidolia, makes us see faces in clouds or images in tea leaves.
In everyday life, this wiring turns us into storytellers. It pushes us to link unrelated events and impose order on randomness.
In a complex world, our brains work hard to make sense of things—sometimes connecting dots that aren’t really there.
3. Meaning-Making Minds
We don’t just live our lives—we narrate them. Especially during times of change, we look for clues that confirm we're heading in the right direction.
Coincidences that echo our inner themes—ambition, identity, longing—can feel like affirmations.
The timing might seem too precise to ignore: “It was meant to be.”
This is narrative construction in action—not superstition, but the way we turn noise into meaning.
Our minds are always asking questions. Sometimes, a coincidence feels like an answer.
4. Memory and Attention: What We Notice, We Keep
We don’t remember everything. We remember what interrupts the norm.
Coincidences disrupt expectations.
They often arrive at emotionally charged moments.
They can confirm—or challenge—our existing beliefs.
This is where confirmation bias plays its part. We tend to remember the coincidences that support our worldview and forget the rest. Over time, these remembered moments become part of our personal mythology.
5. What Coincidences Do for Us (Even If They’re Random)
Coincidences aren’t just curiosities. Psychologists suggest they serve subtle but important functions:
Meaning-making: Offers comfort, insight, or coherence in uncertain times
Reinforcement: Validates beliefs or decisions (“I must be on the right path”)
Motivation: Encourages action (“It’s a sign I should do this”)
Connection: Enhances our sense of alignment with others or the wider world
Even sceptics feel the pull when the timing is just right. It’s not irrational—it’s human.
6. What the Brain’s Doing
Neuroscience offers a few insights into what’s happening behind the scenes:
The Default Mode Network (DMN) activates when we reflect or construct stories about ourselves.
The Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) spots anomalies or surprising patterns.
The dopamine system rewards novelty and reinforces perceived significance.
So the feeling that “this means something” has a neurological footprint. We’re wired to care about these moments—even if, on paper, they’re just statistical noise.
Taken together, these psychological ingredients help explain why coincidences feel rich, personal, and often unforgettable. They’re not always messages from the universe—but they can be meaningful messages from us to ourselves, shaped by the emotional, cognitive, and neural frameworks that make us human.
Interpretive Frameworks
Coincidence doesn’t sit alone. It shares its territory with several related ideas—synchronicity, serendipity, chance, probability, and chaos theory—each offering a different lens on how unexpected events unfold and why they matter. These are not distinct physical phenomena, but overlapping interpretive frameworks that emphasise different aspects of what we commonly call a coincidence.
Humans have long grappled with the tension between randomness and meaning. These concepts help mark out that philosophical ground. A coincidence is usually seen as a striking alignment of events with no obvious cause. Synchronicity, a term introduced by Carl Jung, adds a symbolic or psychological dimension—what he called “meaningful coincidences” without causality. Serendipity speaks to happy accidents—chance encounters or discoveries that unexpectedly turn out well. Chance refers to randomness itself, while probability and Chaos Theory gives us the mathematical tools to describe and assess it.
Coincidence is the shared event. The rest are interpretations.
They are not mutually exclusive. Often, a single experience contains all four perspectives.
Each of these ideas carries its own history and nuance. In the next sections, we’ll take them one at a time—exploring how they’ve been interpreted across science, psychology, philosophy, and culture, and what they reveal about the human appetite for meaning in a random world.
Research credit: Developed with support from ChatGPT Deep Research by OpenAI.
Starting Friday, 1st August 2025, I’ll begin sharing a series of major coincidence stories—each paired with a full interpretation using the frameworks introduced in Part 1: Understanding Coincidence.
If you’d like to learn more about Coincidences, the writing project behind these stories, start with the Preface and About.