You’ve probably heard of the ‘butterfly effect’ from the 2004 American sci-fi movie featuring young Ashton Kutcher. But the term stems from the branch of math called chaos theory and is actually associated with mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz.
According to Lorenz, a tornado could be influenced by minor perturbations and a tiny change in the initial conditions would create a significantly different outcome. His ideas quickly spread among philosophers and mathematicians, but today, the whole concept of the butterfly effect is often used to describe a situation when a small change causes great consequences.
Like the decisions we make in life. So this time, we’re diving deep into real-life stories of the “butterfly effect” shared by people in this Reddit thread. Some of them are truly unbelievable, but hey, truth is stranger than fiction.
TL;DR: I over-drafted and caused four marriages and five babies. Longer version, I was just out of high school and new in town with no job. I was living off what savings I had left and my account went below zero without me knowing. I was overdraft charged like 10 times and owed $300+. I went down to the bank spoke with a teller and she ended up being a lifesaver. She worked with me and got all the charges removed. On top of getting the charges removed, we got to talking about my situation and she said that her son worked at a local restaurant and she would help me get a job. She was a woman of her word and by the end of the week I was working full time. Fast forward, I meet a cool dude who worked there, we became friends, I introduced him to my sister, they fell in love, got married and had two kids. His best friend came into town for the wedding and I introduced him to my roommate at the time, they fell in love, got married and had two babies. I also got my best friend a job at the restaurant where he met a girl working there, they feel in love, got married and had a kid. Right before I left I got my roommate a job at the restaurant, where he met a customer, fell in love, got married and had a kid. As a bonus, my best friend, who I helped get the job repaid the favor and got me a job at a different restaurant, where I met a girl, fell in love and got married.
I was walking to school and got distracted by a hedgehog that ran in a bush next to me then a big ass tree branch fell infront of me, would’ve crushed me if I didn’t get distracted by a spikey little mouse scurrying in the bushes. I gave him a dead cricket the next day, he took it and ran off. God speed spikey mouse.
To find out more about this incredible phenomenon, Bored Panda reached out to Helen Marlo, a licensed clinical psychologist and Jungian psychoanalyst who provides psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and consultation. Helen is also a Professor of Clinical Psychology and the Department Chair at Notre Dame de Namur University.
“At its core, the ‘butterfly effect’ describes a phenomenon of interconnection between people and our larger world,” she explained and added that “This phenomenon has been expressed poetically by Walt Whitman in ‘Song of Myself’ when he describes the natural, inherent interconnectedness across space and time between individuals and the world.”
“Whitman writes:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume, you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Walt Whitman (1959, p. 25)”
My teacher encouraged me to enter a poetry competition when I was 17 years old. I only entered because there was a cash prize, but I ended up winning and getting my poem published. Well, a couple of months later, I got a Facebook message from a girl who wanted to know more about my poem because she had to analyze it for her upcoming exam. It turned out that we were about the same age, so we decided to meet up and discuss it. We’ve been together for four years and are getting married next month. I often wonder what my life would look like if my teacher hadn’t approached me back then.
When my dad was 20, he needed to find someone’s phone number, so he called the operator from a pay phone and she gave him the number. He hung up, and she accidentally refunded the money back to the pay phone. She called the pay phone back and asked him if he could put the money back in, which he did and hung up again. She accidentally refunded the money a third time and had to call back again to ask him to put the money back in…he did and hung up. She was so flustered, she refunded the money AGAIN and called back AGAIN and, since it was such a funny situation, my father got to chatting with her and got HER number. They set up a date, got coffee, and — four years later — were married. This coming August, it’ll be 50 years for them. If my dad didn’t need that original phone number, I wouldn’t be here. My dad still calls it ‘The most expensive phone call he ever made.
When I was in eighth grade, I had a really long bus ride home, so I would pass the time by reading. One day, I faced the very serious situation of having nothing to read and only a minute to grab something in the library. For whatever reason, I grabbed a book on astronomy. That book was amazing and grabbed me like nothing else had before. I remember being so excited to realize every astronomer on Earth was 13 years old once too, and that was a career you could actually do, even if you were from Pittsburgh! Anyway, today I am a professional astronomer who studies gigantic space explosions for a living. There was a lot of work to get from that moment to this one, but I’m always grateful that I picked up that library book!
My mother and her five siblings were deported to Auschwitz in May of 1944. Soon after their arrival, my mother was placed into a line of people assigned to ‘take showers’ after their long trip. My mother was 13 years old and very frightened, so she held her mother’s hand. Well, a Nazi soldier happened to spot this, and he ordered my mother into a different line, thinking it would be funny to separate her from her mother and make her cry. My grandmother was gassed to death about 15 minutes later, but my mother had been put in the line for the work camp. She worked in that camp until the Russians liberated Auschwitz in 1945, then moved to Romania, where she met the man who would become my father