Let’s get serious for a moment, Pandas. Do you believe in Fate or do you think that the universe is essentially chaotic? Do you think that we are all free to forge our own paths in life or are we at the mercy of randomness? Whatever your personal beliefs might be on this, it’s hard to ignore that some moments seem to have been predestined because of the number of coincidences that had to happen. Some attribute this to chance, others think a guardian angel had a hand in things.
When it comes down to it, every choice that you make can have a major impact on what happens in the world. And we can’t be aware of all the consequences! The idea that small causes can have large effects is known as the butterfly effect. Changing one thing changes everything.
Internet users opened up about their personal real-life butterfly effect stories in a viral r/AskReddit thread. They shared a bit of everything. From stories about meeting their soulmates completely by accident to surviving life-threatening situations due to a stroke of luck. Read on for their very best tales and upvote the posts that impressed you the most, Pandas. Do you have any stories about the butterfly effect from your own lives? Feel free to write about them in the comment section.
For some more butterfly effect stories, take a peek at Bored Panda's previous feature right here.
#1
About 20 years ago I was watching a tv show about a guy in Australia who feeds the homeless. At the end they interviewed a few of the homeless who all said he was great, and their names flashed up on the bottom of the screen.
One of the guys had the same name as my brother, who I hadn't seen for about 15 years. I looked at the screen, squinted...and there under the dirt and grime was my brother, who was an addict and lost touch with us years ago.
I called the tv program and got the name of the feeder guy, he contacted my brother and passed on my phone number. A couple of days later I got a call and told him he could come live with me. And he did.
He moved in at my place, then the next morning went up the road to get a newspaper to look for a job (this was about 2000) Came back and he'd found someone advertising for English teachers in China. He asked me what I thought...I said, what have you got to lose?
So off he went. And loved it. Kept telling me to go too, so six months later I quit my job, sold my car, moved everything I wanted to keep over to my older brother's place...and left for China.
I was there for 18 years. I met a girl, got married, bought an apartment, had two kids. Then the Hong Kong troubles came and I moved back to Australia a few months ago.
And it all started from watching a tv show and seeing a name I knew.
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591points
#2
I unfollowed someone on Twitter.
I did this because my phone was having an issue where I received a notification for every single tweet, and I couldn't turn them off. One guy, in particular, Tweeted constantly. So I unfollowed him until I could figure my phone out.
He was a Youtuber whose channel had been losing traction. When he noticed I unfollowed him, he recognized me as someone who followed him for a long time and it made him sad. He decided to message me to ask what he could improve with his content and to say sorry to see me go.
I explain myself and we keep talking. And talking... And talking...
I had been in a very bad place in my life. I worked from home and totally isolated myself. I never talked to people. I was on the verge of a very dark place. But I just couldn't stop talking to this guy.
After coming to visit, continuing to talk every day, moving in and becoming my roommate, we are now happily in love and are even now trying to start a family. A day hasn't gone by where we haven't loved talking to each other. I'm so glad I unfollowed him!
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476points
#3
About ten years ago I went to Paris and stayed in a hostel. I wasn’t feeling the best, and a stranger offers me his book, said he’d red it when I was feeling a bit down, and the book actually cheered him up. I read it, (It was ‘A picture of Dorian Grey) and it quickly became my favourite book. It pulled me through feeling really lonely.
After I was done I wrote my name and the place I left it in and ask others to take it on a trip and leave it for someone new to find. Also I wrote a short note about how the book had been a life saver, and to whoever was reading, they would never be truly alone, a stranger is out to them through the pages of this book.
I set it on the bookshelf and checked out at the end of my stay.
When I was back at the same hostel 3 years later, I saw a copy of that book. So I pulled it out, intending to read it. And there on the cover page was my name at the top. The book had traveled through most of Europe, the US, Australia and parts of Asia. The back was filled with notes. Some like mine, kind Words to strangers, others were told stories of adventures they’d had, others how finding those notes helped them through dark and difficult times.
I reread the book, wrote my name down again and added a note thanking everyone for sending the book on its journey, and asking the next reader to continue it.
I reread the book, wrote my name down again and added a note thanking everyone for sending the book on its journey, and asking the next reader to continue it.
That strangers small gesture to me by giving me his book, turned into something that was cherished by a lot of people, and I’d like to believe, the notes it had inside helped others along the way.
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448points
Colloquially, the butterfly effect is likened to the domino effect, as well as the ripple effect. All three of them have the same thing in common, specifically, that a single action can start a cascade of events.
Many of them can be completely unintentional or unexpected. Like how giving a stranger a lift home can eventually lead you to find your soulmate a long time down the line. Or how a ‘mistake’ while setting your alarm clock meant that you survived a natural disaster.
#4
In high school, my mom was randomly sitting next to this girl one day in her Spanish class. They ended up chatting everyday and ultimately became best friends, all because of that day in Spanish class.
Fast forward over 10 years, they are both married and find out they’re pregnant. Due on the same day! My mom has a girl, me, and her friend has a boy (not born on the same day, but close). Our families stayed close even though we lived across the country from one another.
Fast forward some more years, I realize that boy who was due on the same day as me is the absolute love of my life. After several years of long distance dating, and moving across the country together, we’re getting married in November.
Thank goodness for that day in Spanish class!
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329points
#5
The devastating earthquake that rocked Amori Prefecture in March of 2011.
I was based in Japan that time with the Air Force. For about two weeks, some friends of mine and I decided to plan a trip to go to Amori. We made hotel reservations, carpool plans, everything.
The day we were supposed to leave, I woke up too late because I set my alarm for PM instead of AM. We ended up not going because everybody was waiting for me to go. The next day, the earthquake happened the city was ravaged by a tsunami. The hotel I was going to stay at was wiped away. We could’ve died, but did not.
All because I set my alarm the wrong way.
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294points
#6
I went to Amsterdam to meet up with friends.
On the way back there was a train at the station, but the display didn't show information. I decided to ask a random guy who was entering the train if this was the right one. It was and we start chatting.
Holy s**t this guy is a perfect match for my mom. I asked him he would like to date her. He agreed, because of the unique condition.
They had a relationship within a month.
Lived together within a year.
11 years later still together, married for 4 years.
All because of a broken display.
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252points
Some time ago, Bored Panda spoke about the butterfly and domino effects with content creator and photographer Haythamj. He explained that human curiosity explains why many of us are so interested in these effects. We need to know the reasons behind events.
"I think it resonates with people because we’re always obsessed with why things happen. It’s the backbone of all education. so naturally, when this can relate to people’s personal interests, such as pop culture or history, it will grip people," he told us earlier.
#7
I was supposed to go to a U2 concert with this girl was friends with, her boyfriend, and a couple other people. I had a knack for getting good seats at shows so it was up to me to get tickets. She went nuts and accused me of trying to break into her house to clean her carpets while she was in Croatia so I kept the tickets (they hadn't paid me yet) because I still wanted to go but not with them because they were really good seats. I went to a street fair in town a couple of weeks later and ran into a girl I was friends with from high school who loved U2. I sold her a ticket and she asked if she could bring a friend which just made me think "woohoo, I'm selling another one of these really pricey tickets!" The girls show up at my place day of show and her friend smiles as she is walking in. I saw the smile and knew that was it, I'm going to be spending the rest of my life chasing that smile.
Well over 20 years, a couple of kids and dogs later, and as soon as I finish typing this I'm headed to bed to snuggle up next her.
Tl:Dr I met my wife because one of my friends went nuts and accused me of trying to clean her carpets while she was in Croatia.
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240points
#8
I think I was around 8 or 9 when I befriended a street cat. My uncle and I were checking out the house that we were renovating and since I was a kid, I was out the streets chilling and saw an old dirty orange cat. I took the cat and cleaned her up and fed her. We played for about three hours before my uncle told me we had to go. I left the cat and left.
We moved in a couple of months later. Now, unbeknownst to us, the area had a bit of a mice and snake problem. Fortunately for us we never had much of an issue on that part. Our neighbors weren't so lucky.
A few years later when we had the place renovated again, we found the orange cat and her kids living inside our ceiling and they were the ones killing the mice and snakes. They also caught some of the cockroaches too.
It's been years now and the orange cat I unknowingly adopted has now died but her legacy still lives on because one of her kids moved into my apartment with me. My place is the only mice free one in my street.
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215points
#9
When I was 19 I was working a s****y retail job and had an awful store manager that was a really nasty guy. One day I snapped and had enough and stormed out. I never came back.
I felt guilty as the store manager only scheduled two people on at the end of the day, so with me gone it was just him and my colleague who was about to leave for the day...on his last ever day.
The colleague stayed on an extra hour or two on his last day to cover for me and I guess because I'd left abruptly, agreed to work a few extra shifts until I was replaced.
My replacement was a woman whom later became his wife and now they have two children.
If I hadn't rage quit that day the likelihood is they never would have met and those kids would never exist!
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207points
According to the content creator, it’s impossible to predict events with certainty. It’s impossible to take every tiny little factor into account.
“The smallest things, such as the Austro-Hungarian throne heir's car taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo in 1914, can have huge consequences that completely shape our world today," he noted.
"Everything is interlinked. You can track WW2 and therefore the Cold War and 9/11 back to Christopher Columbus, so it’s just really interesting," he said.
#10
The first year I lived in San Francisco, we parked on the street but never locked our car (it was old and better to let people rummage through it than break a window.)
One night a tweaker must have been going through cars and at some point ended up in our back seat with the night’s haul. Maybe they fell asleep or got scared off, at any rate my boyfriend comes back in the morning with a Canon AE1 35mm camera that was left in the backseat. And that’s how I got into photography.
That was 15 years ago, I’ve been published in countless magazines, I’ve had a number of gallery shows, sold loads of prints, I was profiled in the Wall Street Journal and I’m shopping a book. I couldn’t live without photography.
Still have that AE1 too!
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203points
#11
After high school, I attended a community college for a few years. I'm rather introverted and am not good at making new friends, so for most of my first term I basically didn't interact with anyone.
I had a two-hour break between two of my classes, so I started hanging out in the cafeteria because it had chairs and food. One day I saw a guy rocking a blue fedora (this was before the fedora-wearing neckbeard stereotype really became a thing, and also this particular guy is not and never has been a neckbeard in any way) and I complimented him on it. We chatted a little bit and he invited me to join him and his friends who also spent their free time hanging out in the cafeteria.
Fedora Guy and I dated for a little while, but ultimately we weren't a good fit long-term, though we have remained good friends. The big thing, though, was that he introduced me to an internet discussion forum he was part of. I joined that forum and became a very active member in that community, and made a lot of friends through there.
Several years later, I was feeling pretty trapped in where I was in life, working a retail job and barely making ends meet, with no resources to go back to school and no marketable skills to look for other work. A couple from the forums (who lived a good 600 miles from me) offered to let me move in with them and they'd support me while I essentially tried to restart my life. I took them up on their offer, moved from Oregon to California, met a guy I really hit it off with, and am now married and working a job that gives me a great deal of satisfaction.
All because I said "Dude, I like your hat" to a stranger in the cafeteria 15 years ago.
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195points
#12
It all started with the first week of my college freshman year.
It goes:
- I drunkenly wandered into a frat party one night and thought “Oh f**k, they have a fire pit, that’s cool.”
- I joined that fraternity, drank a lot of beer, got the freshman 15, and looked like s**t.
- My roommate suggested that I start boxing with him to get in better shape and to get girls (hint: got 0).
- A year later I had my first sanctioned amateur boxing bout
- Two years later I won an amateur U.S. national championship
- Thanks to that, I became the captain of my college boxing team and dipped into coaching new people
- Realized I really f*****g liked coaching and teaching people new things
- Decided to try becoming a teacher and get my masters in education (Applied with a 2.7 gpa lol)
- **Holy s**t, I’m a f*****g teacher now.**
- Can’t imagine a more fun and fulfilling job
All of this because I was really drunk and liked that one frat house with a fire pit. So yeah, moral of that story... I have a fire pit in my back yard now.
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156points
Meanwhile, during an earlier interview, Bored Panda had reached out to Suzanne Degges-White, a Licensed Counselor, Professor, and Chair at the Department of Counseling and Higher Education at Northern Illinois University for a chat about the psychology behind believing in fate and luck.
"As long as there have been humans, there has been a desire to imagine that somewhere some thing or some being or some force is helping direct us along our paths to a positive destination. Many people want to believe in luck because that gives us hope that one day maybe it will be 'our turn' to win the lottery, find true love, be at the right place at the right moment,” she said, adding that life tends to confirm our self-biases.
"If we believe we're going to fail at something, we've already set ourselves up for failure. Believing that we carry bad luck around like a cloud gives us a reason not to do our best, not to try our hardest, and to make it 'okay' to fail. While we'd think that a strong belief in good luck would work totally in our favor, there are drawbacks to this belief, too," the professor explained to us earlier.
#13
This woman I know was living with some guy and one night, years ago, they were watching a local public access TV show on cable. She said to her squeez, "This is so s****y; WE could do better." She had a video background, so they did. They ran it a weekly show for years with a volunteer crew, with the woman as producer. Relationships were formed among the volunteers, at least one child was born and a couple of marriages. One of them was mine; I came on as a volunteer toward the end -- and ended up marrying the woman who was producing.
The show was science fiction fan-based, and a bunch of them got together to found a convention for sf fanzine publishers. Thirty-five years later, it's still sustaining itself as a con, moving from city to city every year.
All because my wife saw a bad public access TV show and made a decision.
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150points
#14
When I was 24, one of my close friends kept complaining about her roommate. She was saving up to get married and said the roommate didn't contribute to the house(didn't cook or clean) and she had been paying part of his rent too. (They had been friends for years.) The dude had always annoyed me, so we had never really talked.
I slept over at her house one night and babysat for her while she ran some errands. Dude came home from work and said niceties to me. I don't know why, but my big mouth overflowed and I started laying into him about how stressed she was and how he needed to be a man....
Turns out he had been paying double rent and she was using it to fuel her wedding. We had 1 conversation (our first), and it led to both of us dropping contact with her and dating.
We've been together 8 years, have 2 kids, and are genuinely happy. Now he pays my rent instead and he has always appreciated my honesty and courage. I'm so glad I'm a mouthy woman, I can't imagine my life without him.
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145points
#15
In November of 2018, there was a huge blizzard right around Thanksgiving. My college didn’t close for the blizzard so I went out early to get some hash browns from the dining hall before my psychology exam. I ended up falling and getting a really bad concussion and had to reschedule my midterm.
The day after (or maybe two days after), I ended up taking a triple dose of my panic attack medication because benzos and concussions make you *really* confused. I knew something was wrong so I went to the ER and nobody believed me that the overdose was by accident.
So at the psychiatric inpatient, I was prescribed some antidepressants. Nurse reassured me that the good mood was just not being depressed. Instead I was actually manically happy and high.
Got serotonin syndrome-muscle spasms, muscle atrophy, seizures, fever that didn’t go down with tylenol so had to use an ice bath, coma for a bit.
Quit college because I couldn’t even feel hunger, went home, did physical therapy, therapy, and got antidepressants because serotonin syndrome ruined my ability to make serotonin. Took a dna test and found out I metabolize SSRIs at double the pace. In the meantime, got to meet tons of nurses and doctors and discovered I wanted to be a nurse. Started volunteering emt and even got to deliver a baby. Got a full ride to college for nursing too.
So wanting blizzard/class + hash browns = concussion -> overdose -> inpatient -> serotonin syndrome -> quitting college for multiple treatments -> finding my true passion, going back to school, and delivered a baby!
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143points
"When we don't take ownership of our good choices, our effective actions, or our hard work, we are selling ourselves short. It's true that sometimes circumstances can 'work in our favor,' or we can meet the right person at the right time, but we still need to recognize our own part in taking advantage of positive circumstances or setting things up so that we can succeed,” she said.
"If we have an internal locus of control, we see ourselves as agentic in our world—we know that we can make things happen and we take ownership of both our good decisions and our poor decisions. But this lets us learn from our decisions—how to continue to do things that work out for us and how to avoid things that do not. An external locus of control sets us up to be 'victims' of life or luck," the professor told Bored Panda before.
"Research suggests that the people who have 'good luck' are just being more aware of their surroundings, making smart decisions based on current conditions, and actually 'believe' that good things will happen for them. That's a positive bias in our favor—we look for the good, so we're more likely to see it."
#16
At university we took an exam in a large gym hall. It was so cold you could see your breath in there. Enough students complained that the university agreed to give everyone an extra 5%. That 5% was the difference between a pass/fail for me. Not just that exam, but the entire year. If it wasn't cold that day, I would have to have either retaken the year, or drop out of uni, completely altering the course of my life.
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138points
#17
Well, here is the biggest known case of butterfly effect -
**World War II** did not start with some massive machinations of world leaders. Rather, it culminated into a wide-scale butchery just because of a very small incident in June 1914.
Franz Ferdinand, the crown prince of Hungary, was going on a ride in a street of Bosnia, when his driver **mistakenly took a wrong turn**, and by chance bumped into a revolutionary named Gavrilo Princip.
The revolutionary, seeing the opportunity, instantly shot Ferdinand and his wife, who both succumbed to their injuries. Their death led to declaration of war by Austria-Hungary (supported by Russia) on Serbia, and the frenzy was soon joined by countries like Germany, France, and Britain due to several diplomatic treaties signed during that time, which blew into a full-scale world war.
If World War I had not happened, Versailles’s treaty would have never been made leading to Germany’s humiliation. Fanatics like Hitler would have never got the opportunity to come to power, and **World War II** could have been averted with six million Jews and 60 million other lives saved (estimated to be roughly 3% of 1940 population!). Also, Britain would have never drained its resources in financing the war, and there might have been three superpowers instead of just two, probably avoiding cold war, nuclear-arms race, and Vietnam and Korea conflict.
The outburst of war also had another butterfly effect on science. We would have never appreciated the intelligence of **Albert Einstein** if World War 1 had not happened.
Einstein needed mathematical proof for his **theory of relativity,** and to do that, he needed pictures of total solar eclipse, which was scheduled to take place in Crimea, then in Russia. He sent an expedition to the country for the same, but by then, **World War I** had erupted.
The appliances which the expedition had carried was confiscated by the Russian army, and Einstein waited for years for the war to be over. Naturally, he grew desperate and anxious, cursing his luck all through-out this time. One day, while skimming through his calculations, he realized he had committed some errors in his equations. He re-engineered his calculations, and sent a fresh expedition once the war was over. The pictures which finally arrived proved his theory correct.
If the ongoing war had not prevented the arrival of pictures in 1914, Einstein’s theory would have been surely proven wrong, and our understanding about cosmology, or origin of universe might have never reached this level. And of course, all talks of time travel may have remained complete fiction without any substance.
**And it all happened just because driver of Franz Ferdinand took a wrong turn!**
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123points
#18
Fifth or sixth grade, I tried to confess to my crush by gifting him a strawberry muffin, I left it in his desk and my plan was to confess I was the one giving the muffin, he ended up having an allergic reaction that caused him to be taken by an ambulance, this caused me to never confess, fast forward to junior year, we were starting to study the bases of a research project to help with our thesis the following year, his original project partner ended up moving to another part of the country and had to switch schools, so he joined my group, at this point I was over the crush, but it was nice having him as a friend, then one day that we were working on the project, I don’t remember exactly how, but we brought out the topic that we should share a secret with each other to become closer friends, I told him about the muffin and he came out of the closet to me, a couple of week later he did it at the school, this caused us to become basically joined by the hip, and he introduced me to his family, and still unknown to me, introduced me to my future bf, his older brother, we have been dating for over 2 years now
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115points
#19
TL;DR - I bought a t-shirt, this caused me to meet my wife and move from England to the USA.
So many years ago I bought a Geeky t-shirt that had "Byte me!" on the front.
Wore it to a night club one Saturday night and as the club is kicking out a girl walks up to me and says she loves my t-shirt. She is quite drunk so I walk her home to make sure she gets there and get her phone number. Call her the next few days, and eventually meet up later that week at a pub with some of her friends. Get there are there are two other gents both clearly interested in her. So I decide to chat with her other friends to get to know them. Get into a 4 hour debate over philosophy and religion with one girl and stay in touch. We get into a relationship, however she was American and only in England for a study abroad. So we figured out that we had to get married to stay together in any meaningful way. So we did, she lived with me in England for 2 years then we moved to the USA for job opportunities.
I have now been in the USA for 12 years with our 14th anniversary coming in may.
All of this because I happened to buy a geeky t-shirt and wore THAT t-shirt to a night club.
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83points
#20
A guy who had been an acquaintance during university got hired at the lab where I was a full-time lab tech.
We didn’t talk much at work. One day, I saw him walking to the bus stop after work. It turned out he only lived a few blocks from me, so I gave him a ride home. We started talking.
I became friends with his friends group. We all hung out every week. There were many international students from Japan and people who had formerly studied abroad there. I started thinking about my dream to live abroad and teach English, and started considering japan.
One girl in the group had a boyfriend who lived in Japan. I heard his name for six months before I ever met him.
They broke up. He took a job in our city and moved back. He still hung out with the group of friends, so I got to know him. We started dating.
He got a job offer in Japan. I applied to jobs there too. We broke up. I got a job offer. I took the job offer anyway.
I still live here years later. I don’t regret having the guts to move here despite the relationship ending. I’ve built a life for myself here. I don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t started talking to my coworker that day, but maybe not here.
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76points