202. What Seems Meaningful

What has already been noticed becomes more noticeable. If I’m reading a book and an unusual word stands out to me, I give it extra attention, I ponder its meanings, and I might even look it up to explore its etymology. Having noticed it, I’m struck when I see it again later that day. I have not seen this word in so many years of reading and now I’ve seen it twice. When I then see it a third time, I begin to wonder if it might be haunting me.

Of course, nothing like this is happening. The repeated appearance of the same word is not significant. But because probability is so foreign to ordinary thought, it’s easy to mistakenly believe that highly improbable events are actually impossible. There’s no space in our set of expectations for events that are so rare as to almost never happen.

When the unexpected occurs, it feels meaningful. We tend to give meaning to anything that stands out from our ordinary experience. When this tendency to assign meaning is combined with our tendency to notice what has recently been the focus of attention, we can see patterns in what is no more than coincidence.

I came to believe there was something important about seeing the same word repeatedly when this was really nothing more than a series of random events filtered through my limited perception of the world. If this kind of experience were limited to mere words, it might not be so dangerous. But the same process can lead us to believe all sorts of myths, superstitions, and theories that have no foundation other than the feeling they must somehow be meaningful.

To create meaning is one of our most powerful abilities, but equally important is our ability to see through what merely seems meaningful but is not. It is through careful skepticism that we learn to see our reality more clearly, which in turn helps us accept the vast array of possibilities that could occur without any significance at all.