You know when a song comes on the radio at just the right time?
🎵 Rocketman 🎵
“Hah! That’s crazy we were just talking about rocket launches.”
Yes. That is crazy — if you believe statistics and physics are bedrock.
To be clear… they’re pretty damn bedrock. If you’re new to this blog, I espouse a “Yes, and…” model of reality.
Genetics is totally a thing. Our DNA does determine what biological machinery gets made and, to a great extent, what it does. I’m just agnostic about whether or not whether the “random” mutations in DNA replication might be tied to the outcomes of some hyperdimenional alien teenager’s atari game.
To be clear… I don’t actually believe that genetic mutation is caused by losses in a game of breakout. But shit man, who knows? That’s my official stance at the periphery.
I think of these “hard” forces as defaults these days. They’re in place for the experience — and it seems like they politely get out of the way when they’re in the way of the experience.
These moments of magical, meaningful rule breaking are called synchroncity. Yesterday my friend told me about a time when he was listening to a song on the radio at the same he watching American Idol. An Adele song started playing on the radio, but then he noticed it was playing on TV at the same time.
…the exact same time. Synchronized.
Did that moment mean anything? Or was it pure statistical anomaly? I’m of the opinion that synchronicities are, in part, a means of understanding through play.
I also believe that they aren’t so much as breaking the rules as they are an expression of a deeper rule set. One that even physics bows to.
But how deep could that rule set possibly go? What if it was way, way more profound than just moments of meaningful coincidence?
Beyond Synchronicity
This is a theory. It’s play with ideas. And since we’re just playing, why not go all out?
I read about a synchronicity magnitude scale in a book one time and I really liked it. Which is why I’m going to completely ignore it and create my own. Just as you should completely ignore my arbitrary categorization and make your own (if you feel like it).
Let’s call that first synchronicity, when a highly relevant song comes on…
Level 1 Synchronicity
It’s noteworthy enough that even someone not looking for synchronicities would be interested in it. What would it take for this to have happened? (We’re going to take the more magical interpretation of synchronicities from here. I’m not even going to bother pretending they’re mere coincidence. Click the little X in the top corner of your screen if you’re not into that.)
It would mean that someone or something caused this exact song to play because we were talking about rocket launches. The exact meaning is up to you, but it’ll be something like that. It happened cause it’s relevant.
What about that much wilder story from my friend in which two songs play at the exact same time? We’ll call that a…
Level 2 Synchronicity
What would it take for that to have happened?
It would mean that someone or something caused a long series of dominos to fall to influence the scheduling and song choices of two different media channels at exactly the right time to make one random guy hear them at the same time — presumably, so he could go:
“Whoa.”
Wow, that’s pretty wild!
But we can go farther. What if there really are no limits?
Level 3 Synchronicity
What happens when we crank this shit? What would a level 3 synchronicity look like? And what would it mean about how all this really works?
The Bespoke Universe
I once listened to a favorite song of mine and had the profound experience of almost every single line of the song’s lyrics describing that moment of my life. Okay, I say once but it’s happened more than once to lesser degrees.
If we take that seriously, what would what mean? That the artist wrote, performed, recorded, and built a career (in part) around that song specifically so that some random dude would hear it one day and have it perfectly describe one moment in his life?
Holy shit.
Now that’s crazy. No way, right?
I wrote a (fictional) story once that ended up describing an event that would actually happen to me 20 years later in life. That event was very supernatural and very impossible, or so I believed. At the time I believed I was just writing a story. Imagine my face when I read it again.
This happened again, by the way. Another story I wrote describing an event that would also happen to me later in life. Also “impossible”. Both the event and the “coincidence”.
So what gives?
What gives is that many of the books you read, the songs you hear, and the people you meet could all be lining up — unconsciously conspiring, if you will, to create experiences specifically for you.
That would mean that your reality (your personal universe) could be entirely bespoke. If there truly are no limits, why not?
We’re just playing here, so why not entertain it?
From that perspective there’s no reason why a song, a story — or any event no matter how seemingly complex could not arise specifically for a single moment of meaning your life.
That means you Daniel in Kentucky. Maybe your favorite metal band really does exist just for you.
It’s all for you, Daniel.
Unless you’re not Daniel from Kentucky. Then it’s all for you, instead.
It’s a fun theory. How else, besides lowering yourself to handwaving denial, do you explain such causal chains of events? It honestly seems less crazy to just say “Oh. It’s all happening for me.” than to start whiteboarding what it takes to explain it by conventional means.
Everything that brought that metal band together happened so that Daniel could lay in bed one summer afternoon and have a pretty rad musical experience.
It’s happening for you too. All the time. I’ll bet, if you start looking for a level 3 synchronicity — it’ll be just for you — I bet you’ll find one.
Who knows, maybe I even wrote this article just for you.