30 People Share Cases Of The "Butterfly Effect" Happening In Real Life

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."