I just saw a scary image of the wall of a plane being ripped out mid-flight and someone in the comment section said that it was a perfect example of the burnt toast theory.
The two people that were supposed to sit in the area of the wall collapse missed their flights that day so no one got hurt but what does this have to do with the burnt toast theory?
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The burnt toast “theory” is just the idea that your life might be saved by a little thing. You burn your toast, have to make more, and while that’s happening, a drunk driver crashes into your yard where you’d have been standing had you not burnt your toast. You were saved by burnt toast!
It’s a positive way of looking at the world – had this minor inconvenience not happened, I might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, so therefore, don’t be upset.
The issue is that it often goes the other way. If you’re in a car accident, conditions might not have lined up had you run that yellow light a bit earlier.
This quickly turns into a very complex thing which just leads to infinite what-ifs. How many chance encounters have you had at the grocery store, which led to meeting someone who offered you a good job, or meeting a new friend because you stood in line together.
Go back farther and we can guess that the Beatles probably knew each other from school (I don’t know, let’s pretend it’s true), but their parents only moved to the same area because one of the dads messed up and didn’t put an offer in on the house they actually wanted. If he had, they wouldn’t have moved to that neighbourhood and the Beatles hadn’t existed.
Etc.
You can always work backwards and say “wow, how unlikely is it that this happened this way?” but the reality is that everything is unlikely.
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