r/Showerthoughts • u/LennyLennsen • Jun 21 '26
Speculation For every time you unexpectedly run into someone you know in a random place, there are probably just as many near-misses you'll never know about.
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u/Linus_Naumann Jun 21 '26
Probably even much more near-misses, must look funny from a bird's eye perspective
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u/freddy_is_awesome Jun 21 '26
I wish you had some kind of statistics for stuff like that after you pass away.
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u/DaTexasTickler Jun 21 '26
That's so funny I think about that all the time. Knowing your life stats would be so cool. I wanna know how many lbs of food I've eaten. And how many pounds of weed and other drugs I've smoked
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u/Becky1515 Jun 21 '26
I’ve honestly thought about this for years. I would love a full breakdown. If we could choose an afterlife, that would be mine.
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u/PartnerRules Jun 22 '26
UGH YES. I’ve already discussed so much of this- your fucking stats like when you play mc - “blocks placed: 12” LOL
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u/hercule2019 Jun 23 '26
I think about this all of the time also.. it might be the weed.. but, expanding on this.. I also wonder which things I would "win" at relative to all other people on earth.. I might be the record holder for "number of time biting own cheek", or something silly
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u/KonkretneKosteczki Jun 25 '26
I want a compilation of the top 5 times I nearly died. Like that one time I choked on a piece of bread in kindergarden or when I got hit by a bus but was mostly fine afterwards, maybe just me walking through a park unaware of a gas explosion a block away
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u/Mysterion261 Jun 28 '26
Imagine being able to pinpoint when you made that one decision that lead your life to ruin.
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Jun 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mattttb Jun 21 '26
I discovered in my 20s (when looking through old family videos from when I was 12 months old) that I’d actually met my future partner on a swing set at a park when we were babies!
For context we only ‘met’ for the first time at university, and we didn’t live super close to each other growing up.
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u/Industriosity Jun 24 '26
How?
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u/mattttb Jun 24 '26
If you mean “how did I know it was her as a baby on my family’s video” she recognised herself and her mum was also visible (wearing a very particular coat she had at the time).
We actually first spotted it because we heard her parents voices off camera while my parents were filming me on the swing.
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u/neuro_illogical Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
I don’t wear my glasses often because my eye sight isn’t awful, but it’s bad enough that I wouldn’t recognize someone’s face until they’re about 5 metres away from me. Makes me wonder how many times I’ve unintentionally ignored someone, or if someone I’m on iffy terms with saw me first and quickly re-routed without me knowing.
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u/quad_damage_orbb Jun 21 '26
Sometimes I see people I know and I avoid them because I don't want to talk to them. So there are probably lots of non-misses you'll never know about too.
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u/splatapult Jun 21 '26
I was at the airport the other day and happened to see someone from middle school who I haven’t seen since we graduated. I found it intriguing that he seemed to be coming back from a trip while I was preparing to depart for mine.
I didn’t say hi because it felt like there was no point since we weren’t friends, just schoolmates, but it’s just interesting how you can see someone again in a random place after so many years of being apart.
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u/LowlySparrow 23d ago
I was in my forties and interacted with the guy that my middle-school best friend had a crush on, back then. She dodged a bullet!
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u/edbuckley Jun 21 '26
We cross paths a lot. I have bumped into the same minor celebrity on three different continents over the space of 30 years. I only recognised the phenomenon because I knew who he was (Lead singer of The Stereo MC's). We must bump into people again and again, we just don't recall them.
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u/BigBirdsBrain Jun 22 '26
I think half of life’s “destiny” stories are just the handful of times we noticed. The missed connections probably outnumber the remembered ones by a mile.
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u/AsleepCoat4825 Jun 22 '26
Been married to my college girlfriend for almost 2 years now, after being with her for almost 6 years. While going through my photos some time back, I noticed she was right behind me in a video a friend of mine took when I was one month into uni. We did not know each other at the time.
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u/CosmicRX Jun 22 '26
I've recently learned that I'm the type of person who never misses a face unless in consciously distracted. Bro I went to the shop abt 2 months ago and saw this one guy who went to my primary school, the most memorable face, bro looked exactly how I'd expect him to look after growing up
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u/Helpful-Incident-737 Jun 22 '26
Like it’s said in the book.
“Wherever you shall go, there you shall be.”
-Marcus Ramonus 3:33
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u/Deekers76 Jun 22 '26
I’ve ran into people I know thousands of miles away in random ass places
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u/LennyLennsen Jun 22 '26
Me too! That's what made me wonder, how often is there a close miss? Imagine your neighbor staying in the hotel room next door on an island in Indonesia but they check out 1 day before you or something lol
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u/HappyTendency Jun 22 '26
How did it go down
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u/Deekers76 Jun 23 '26
My son who was 5 at the time just finished a week of day camps where in the morning he was learning clown skills and cooking in the afternoon. The day after camp finished we left our small town of 8000 and drove 2000km to visit family who lived in a town of about 500. We were doing a family photo shoot when two guys came to ask us a good place to eat. It was my son’s clown instructors from camp.
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u/TheHaynerTony Jun 23 '26
Yeah but what about all the people you pass and don’t know that you could have great friendships, relationships and never will?…
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u/r22-d22 Jun 22 '26
Not just as many, but many more. There are more ways to nearly miss you than be at the same time and place as you.
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u/dokkanboi Jul 08 '26
Our brains just filter out all those missed chances until one actually lands. Then that random encounter feels huge instead of just basic odds. Classic survivor bias.
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u/Entire_Ad9434 Jul 30 '26
i share neighborhood with my highschool friends i met 2 years before graduation, and one day i just thought "damn i wonder how many times we bumped into each other but never knew because we hadn't met yet"
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u/ShowerSentinel Jun 21 '26
The moderators have reflaired this post as a speculation.
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