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 idea, as far as I understand it, is that some inconvenience or diversion from your hoped-for outcome turns out to protect you from something worse.
The people who would have sat there didn’t make it for whatever reason and it may have been because they burned their toast and it took time to make new toast.
The burned toast theory is that when you burn your toast (or experience some other small inconvenience), the time that wastes you could save you from some other major accident or similar.
The people that missed their flight would be dead – but supposedly some silly reason (like burning their toast) meant that they missed their flight.
“Burnt toast theory” isn’t really a theory in any meaningful way, rather its a way of looking at inconveniences in life as being actually beneficial by saving you from unknown tragedy that would have happened if the inconvenience hadn’t happened. The idea is that burning toast may have been bad, but it could have been that burning toast saved you from dying in a car crash, so perhaps it was actually a good thing?
For the people who missed their flights, typically missing a flight is seen as a major inconvenience and is a major concern for many people when flying. However, for those two people missing their flight may have actually saved their lives – an actual example of what could be considered “burnt toast theory”’s premise. This does suffer severely from selection bias, but for people who find “burnt toast theory” a helpful way to look at life it can be a way to reinforce that perspective.
The burnt toast theory is the idea that a small inconvenience can end up being beneficial in the end by preventing you from being involved in a larger disaster.
If whatever caused them to miss their flights hadn’t happened – if they hadn’t burnt their toast and been forced to remake it, delaying them – they’d have been on the flight, and gotten hurt or died, which is likely worse than whatever prevented them from making their flights.
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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.
Based on what I have read here, it seems that it is a load of bollocks, but maybe might be a helpful philosophy if your mind works a certain way…
the best [example](https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/the-moth-01gv2bv14079rhv1ch6dvacmr7/episode/the-moth-radio-hour-live-from-jackson-01gttyyf006t95pd61attz7fp4) i’ve heard of this was from an episode of The Moth, a storytelling podcast.
the theme for the night was about flirting with disaster, and one of the storytellers got up and spoke about how he went to a gay bar in Milwaukee in the 80’s and he was so infatuated with one mysterious good looking man at the bar who always went home with a different stranger. the storyteller was crushed that he never got picked up, to the point where when he was the last guy available, the stranger decided to leave alone.
come to find out, it was Jeffrey Dahmer who was taking boys home from that bar…talk about dodging a bullet.
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