Fluke

Whew, that was close!

How many times have you said this, after narrowly avoiding a car crash, a slipped knife, or a bad fall? Just when you think something bad is going to happen, something else pops up to prevent it. The driver swerves, the knife goes the other way, you catch your balance. We approach death or injury because of a series of events, each of which depends upon the one that came before. Then we avert such death or injury because of yet another event. A fluke.

Social scientist – or as he calls himself, “disillusioned” social scientist – Brian Klass is fascinated by the idea of flukes, so much so that he wrote a book about them. Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters details many instances where something that looked like it was going one way ended up going another. Think of the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, which Klaas mentions. In that flick, Helen, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, runs down to the Tube to catch a train. (This is London, not DC!) The doors slide closed as she approaches (hence the name of the story), and she boards the next one. The rest of the movie shows how her life would spool out if she had missed the train, and how very differently it would go if she had caught it. It is a great demonstration of the premise of Fluke, which is “[B]ut for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be profoundly different.”  

This book is full of jaw-dropping assertions and stories, and one of them that hit me hard was his description of how unlikely it is that any of us are here at all. Our being born was the result of millions of events, one of which, if different, could have resulted in a different trajectory.

[Y]ou wouldn’t exist if your parents hadn’t met in just the same, exact way. Even if the timing had been slightly different, a different person would have been born.

But that’s also true for your grandparent, and your great-grandparents, and your great-great-grandparents, stretching back millennia.

We sit here today as the result of countless events over thousands (millions? gazillions?) of years. At every step of the way things could have gone otherwise.  

It’s startling to think about how much impact random and unrelated events have over our lives. Klass says that we ignore the randomness because it’s much more comforting to think about our existence being governed by some big, clear forces that have a point, not quirky little mundane stuff. That makes sense, doesn’t it? We’d rather be guided by the Power of the Universe than the power of the train schedule. 

This book helps me to see that missing out on something doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve really missed out. Something else will come my way. Good or bad? When life is governed by flukes, it’s impossible to say.