Breadcrumbs: Searching for Synchronicity, in Life and Literature

In the essay “Dodger Stadium” in her 1977 semi-autobiographical book Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve Babitz gives sound advice to the lonely single looking for a bit of evening fun. If you’re looking to be treated to a nice French dinner, settle in and make yourself a quality French omelet at home. By doing so, you signal to God that you are virtuous and good, and so you are rewarded (or tempted) by a dinner invitation just as you sit down to eat. Babitz, craving an outing that would be “not quite dinner,” makes herself scrambled eggs with melted cheese with no bread on the side, and soon receives a ring from a gentleman caller inviting her out to a baseball game at Dodger Stadium. She was wise not to include a high-quality chorizo with her scrambled eggs, for that would’ve elicited too much trouble for a weekday night.

Babitz writes this spontaneous baseball outing as a situation beyond serendipity. To her, it is more likely a tease from the Three Fates, weaving into the tapestry of your story both novel and familiar threads, making you feel like your life is a never-ending cycle of the same event in different fonts. Yet, these teases or shocks to our nervous systems at these moments are not the same sensations as when we experience a lucky break. They are particular to the phenomenon of a synchronicity—that coincidence that is just too coincidental to explain away with chance.

Synchronicity as a quasi-scientific, metaphysical phenomenon was first conceived by Carl Jung. In his 1952 book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, he defines a synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, in which something other than the probability of chance is involved. In other words, two independent events occur with an improbability that outweighs a chance of repetition. Ever the responsible psychiatrist, he delves into a number of case studies with his patients and even conducts a rigorous study of the astrological charts of married couples, determining a statistically significant correlation between their marriages and the status of the stars at each person’s birth.

Jung himself recounts moments of synchronicity in his own life. One notable case included a patient relaying a dream to Jung about a golden scarab from the prior night. As they dissect the meaning of this dream, Jung hears a gentle tapping on the window behind him, and in flies a scarabaeid beetle. Jung, naturally, does not come to a conclusive thesis about the nature of the synchronicity, though he hypothesized that there may be a non-magical force outside the psyche that allows for these mysterious parallel events. Jung’s fascination with synchronous metaphysics is even more apparent in his 20-plus year correspondence with Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics. He, too, suspected a connection between the physical world and unsettling events. Pauli and Jung found connection through their fringe theoretical frameworks, psychology and physics playing on each other to make up one beautiful and haunting mess of a universe.

Jung and Pauli’s hyper-intellectualization of everyday phenomena leaves out a fundamental component of the synchronicity—a deep emotional disturbance. Some of us do not have Babitz’s unbothered coolness towards life’s curveballs. Let’s say, a friend of mine, on her walk back from her barista job in South Philly, began to think about a certain someone from her past who had once gripped her heart. At the time, she was indifferent to his attentions, though the heartbreak she had experienced continued to resonate through her throat, chest, and gut in fleeting moments when her mind was not sufficiently occupied with more important matters.

In a moment of inspiration while walking on the scenic Pine Street, she tells herself, what would happen if I took 12th street up, instead of my usual route along 21st? Maybe, she told herself, a different path might shake the melancholy loose. She pivots and crosses the street, and not even a moment later, a block away at a distance, she notices a young man with that familiar stature, a signature arrogant swing in his step, with curls forming a haloed silhouette around his head and an unlit cigarette peeking out behind his ear. He was on the phone, raising his voice just enough to draw attention to himself.

Was it not just one minute ago when she set an intention for a divinely oriented surprise? They soon began to fall into the familiar script of their past, their old flirtatious yet measured speech patterns, and they caught up as he walked her some ways toward her destination. He parted with only a “see you around,” the girl thinking to herself, heart pounding, yes, that seems likely.

It would be tempting to assume this run-in was not only fated, but a green light to hold onto to the one who got away. But after the brief high of thinking to oneself, “this is meant to be,” comes the sinking thought—perhaps this is only a test. To the materialist atheist, these may not be serious considerations, but to the romantic who looks to signs and follows them to a happy ending, these are cosmic breadcrumbs that feed us, but may also lead us to the door of the witch who brews soup with children’s bones.

The advent of New Thought in 19th century America solidified eerie psychic patterns into an everyday talking point. New Age-y philosophies are not, of course, the first to suggest that we have control over specific outcomes. Prayer is a basic practice of almost all religions, and what is prayer if not a beseeching of a synchronicity from God? Disillusioned by Christianity, those seeking an alternative approach to religion turned their prayers away from Jesus and Mary and turned inward to the self. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, one of the fathers of the New Thought movement, carried Cartesian dualism to its extreme: mind over matter, always. By reducing mental suffering, physiological suffering falls, too.

The positive-thinking trend eventually spread beyond the realm of health—with the sheer force of your thought patterns, you can attract any lover you desire and any amount of wealth you can imagine. These manifestation techniques range anywhere from verbal robotic repetitions of affirmations (“I am open to receiving,” “I don’t chase, I attract,” “X is in love with me and not with Y”), recorded hypnotic suggestions played in a sleep state, visualizations of your desire while meditating, or simply “letting go” by training yourself to un-desire your desire to paradoxically receive what you initially sought.

You can go on r/manifestation (I didn’t say should) and read thousands of posts by Redditors sharing tips on how they effectively willed their dreams into reality through the power of their own consciousness. One frequent talking point on these Reddit threads are “birds before landing.”  Before a manifestation “arrives” into one’s reality, there are foreshadowing signs. One Reddit user trying to a manifest the love of a specific person (abbreviated as “SP” in the manifestation world) writes:

Yesterday I saw someone that looked so much like him I did a double take. Then today I saw someone else that looked like him too. I also found his hair in my house two separate times this past week lol—he has not been in my home for over a month and I vacuum and mop weekly and wash my sheets. The first time I randomly found one as I was picking up something I dropped on the floor. The second time I was going to feed my dogs and it was in one of their bowls.

Commenters on the thread encourage the user to see it as a signal of confidence that their wishes will soon become reality. You can’t help but wonder if someone who is frantically posting about loose hair and doppelgangers is in actuality successfully manifesting anything worthwhile into their life—they are hardly on the path of not-wanting what you want. Taking the time to post on Reddit is more a declaration of obsessive need than it is a renunciation of desire.

In an increasing areligious America, we lap up the signs and symbols to get a taste of meaning and direction. The spiritual is commodified not only in terms of crystals and yoga mats; soft scrambled eggs and run-ins with exes are devoured with gusto. Our moments of uncanny convergence—like bumping into an old flame at the exact right (or wrong) time—function like indulgences did in the days of Martin Luther, tempting us in the promise of paradise. The most obvious indicators of something beyond ourselves—the unconditionality of a mother’s love, the vastness of the night sky—become lost on us, only because they are boring, perhaps overdone to our fried senses. Novelty becomes the name of the game in lieu of our mundane daily bread.

Amanda Montell’s 2024 book The Age of Magical Overthinking zeroes in on one culprit of our irrational tendencies: cognitive biases—“self-deceptive thought patterns that developed due to our brains’ imperfect abilities to process information from the world around us.” Montell looks to evolutionary biology to help explain our paranoid response to seemingly irrelevant events. In an environment full of dangers, natural selection favors those who can detect meaning from a plethora of extraneous information. It is that same paranoid tendency that leads well-intentioned people off the deep end, into right-wing conspiracy groups and pitiful victim complexes.

In addition to information overload, sources for meaning are diminishing in our lives—there are simultaneously multiple recessions being had in America. Financial prosperity is dying, of course, but so too are friendships, romantic relationships, and family planning. The agency that comes with a liberal secularist society does not account for the structure that religion once provided in meaning-making. Our love for independence and self-reliance cannot help but be synchronous with loneliness.

There are no easy fixes to these societal maladies. Religion may or may not be the opiate of the masses, but it seems any other simulacrum does a mediocre job at comparable intoxication for the spiritually needy. Without the well or ill-intentioned guide of theological doctrine, everything stands poised to become a metaphor. Our entire lives can be reduced to objects which signify a more significant object, which signifies an even more significant subject, i.e, ourselves. This is psychoanalysis, plainly, and there is no escaping the mediation of the psyche.

You may be wondering what occurred after the exchange on 9th and Locust; you would be right to guess that in the following months, this friend continued to mistake the tests as nods from heaven, and each time she followed the sign, it drove her deeper into her own hell. Eventually, she adopted a “whatever will be, will be” mindset. But still, she catches herself every so often noticing the black cat that crosses her path or the butterfly that lands in front of her. Such incidents, in the past, would have had her run home, and write about them furiously in her journal, worried that forgetting them would erase the blessings corresponded to it. What comes to mind from that street corner is a bittersweetness—a longing that once was but no longer is. How nice it is to notice the cat and the butterfly at all, when before they would have each been a mere detail to be overlooked.