What minor or inane decisions have had the biggest butterfly effect on your life?
Throughout our lives we make tons of pivotal decisions. Some of these are significant enough that we give them lots of thought and it’s not a surprise when they greatly affect our life path - things like beginning or ending a relationship, or moving to a new area, or changing our lifestyle.
Lately though I’ve been contemplating which thoughtless, inane decisions I made have had the largest butterfly effects in my life.
One example: when I was entering middle school I was, for the first time, allowed to choose which elective courses I wanted to take by filling out a paper slip. I thought playing a brass or percussion instrument seemed pretty badass so I signed up for band. Before I turned it in, though, my older sister saw it, said “band is dumb, do chorus instead,” erased my selection and marked choir instead. Being 11 years old at the time I had no strong feelings about it so I said whatever and went on with my life.
And now, several decades later, I have sang in choirs since then, the vast majority of my friends are those I met in choirs (or theater, which is choir adjacent), and I have spent most of my adult life making money working either in or around choirs in some capacity. It’s my life.
I often wonder how my life would be different if she hadn’t changed my registration sheet. (She didn’t even enjoy choir that much and quit two years later). Would I be living a parallel path of loving and working in music, but with bands instead of choirs? Would I have switched sometime during middle school and then reverted to the same life path I’m on now? Or would I have simply been less hooked to music and instead lived and worked in the field of one of my other interests that are mere hobbies right now?
I’ll never know, of course. But it sure is interesting to think about. Probably the vast majority of the tiny inane decisions we make don’t end up having much of an effect on our lives. But every now and then there’s one that randomly changes a lot.
You ever been there, Tildes?
Many years ago I went to a small bookstore and found a book entitled "In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot". They had 3 copies, and I bought 2. I kept one and gave the other to my uncle. A few weeks later I was at an event sitting on a couch, and a pretty girl that I'd seen around sat down next to me. We started talking and I mentioned this weird Bigfoot book I found. She produced the same book from her bag, and as it turns out it was the one copy I didn't buy. That was 17 years ago, and I'm still married to that pretty girl. Oh and we framed the books. ;)
28 years ago, someone put a bottle of deodorant on my classmate's school desk. The message was "you stink". He actually did stink. Later that day, while leaving school, I asked him "You're that guy that stinks, right?". "Yep", he replied. We've been friends ever since.
He doesn't stink anymore.
I love a story with a happy ending.
Was really frustrated with my wife one evening, so I spent the evening on my motorcycle clearing my head by riding around the city mindlessly. Stopped to get a pop, and ended up spending a long time observing a group of street kids who were hanging around a convenience store. Long story short, after seeing their situation, I ended up creating a drop in center and youth outreach service for those kids and it has served thousands of youth since then, and literally saved lives. It's still going 31 years later and it started because I decided to go for a bike ride one evening.
What do these centres or services actually do?
I don't really have a comparison in my head to compare this to.
Not who you asked, and maybe it's not quite the same thing as @gowestyoungman is referring to, but for a while I used to go to a youth center when I was young. It had all sorts of activities, like bumper pool, foosball, air hockey, board/card/video games, and various sporting equipment to keep us occupied, help us make friends, and stop us from being out in the wild getting into trouble. And there was also a counselor and social worker available there if we needed them too. It was basically like an after-school daycare but for "troubled" teens, LGBT+ teens, homeless teens, and/or teens from abusive/unsafe households who didn't want to go home after school.
That was part of it, yes. And because we were serving a street population we also provided hot, healthy meals, clothing, toiletries and access to services like safe overnight shelters for youth at risk. But honestly, most of the kids showed up because it was a safe, violence free zone to hang out with us and become friends - the fact that our volunteers all showed up consistently to hang out and befriend them, without being paid, got us a lot of street credibility. True friendship goes a long way when you're living through the bs of life on the street.
I had a very short conversation with a lady who has been trying to set up a home for at-risk young men in memory of her son for several years. She has been running events for it for 15 years and I don't know the whole history, but I'm curious if she just needs some help or encouragement getting started. If I were to pass you a link to her organization's page, would you be willing to take a look and possibly consider reaching out if you feel so moved? I'm curious if she just needs some encouragement. Don't want to just share the link because it's a local organization.
I'd be interested in hearing the longer story if you're willing to tell it. How is it you "ended up" doing that?
Its a bit personal to share on the interwebs, really, but suffice it to say, it was a God thing. I definitely felt very directly led to that decision.
Amazing. How were you able to get funding?
A constant task of fundraising. Most of it came from personal donations from people who believed in our vision, plus a few corporate donors and one minor grant from a philanthropic trust fund. Fundraising was about a third of my work load. People got very excited when they saw what we were doing, but it was definitely tiring constantly finding donors. Then again, its been going for 31 years, so the support is there. A large portion of the donor base are Christian and their churches.
Wow, I hope you still find time for your family and your motorbike among the crazy hours you must be pulling.
Oh, Im quite fine now. I turned the whole operation over to the strongest volunteer I had years ago. She's now full time staff and has been running the center very capably for a long time and there have been several primary leaders since I gave up the reins. My involvement now is mostly financial. I donate so the people directly involved dont have to do as much fundraising.
A family friend heard that I was kinda interested in computers when I was around 8 years old. He then gave me a pile of books and a copy of Turbo Pascal 4.0, MASM, and Quick C. Pretty much immediately after that (like days) he had some sort of mental breakdown, developed a huge cocaine addiction, came out as gay, left his family, then died of a tooth infection somewhere in in the Caribbean. However, now I've been a software developer for several decades -- who knows what I'd be doing otherwise.
That really reminds me of an experience from my own childhood! I work in IT as an adult, and when I was 7 or 8, I was already into computers and spent a lot of time typing BASIC into my secondhand ZX Spectrum. My cousin visited from England with his wife and spent several hours coding a bouncing ball simulation on the Spectrum that delighted me. Subsequently we lost touch with him for a few years and it turned out he'd gotten involved in a cult, given them all his money, separated from his wife and lost custody of his children. There's a happier ending to my story: he's back to reality now and re-married.
That is a wild story. And a real shame, because it's a very thoughtful (and generous, I guess, I don't know if that computer was obsolete or fancy for when he gave it to you) gift.
There was no computer actually, just software and manuals. I did have access to actual computers at school though, which is what I used to program. Also, I used to actually type up programs on a physical typewriter when I was at home and then take the sheets of paper to school where I would enter them into an actual computer and debug them.
Ah the before times. Some of my first websites were also written on paper first.
Started playing an MMORPG in its beta, around 2004. After breaking up with my girlfriend, I ran into a girl in the main area that I had chatted with prior. We continued to chat and like a week later she asked me out (online dating circa 2006). Well now we're getting married in March 2024 and own a home together. Also moved across the country for her. Thanks Ragnarok Online.
Dang, RO in its beta. I feel so old! 😭 I played on private servers and made IRL friends through the game, though I only keep in touch with one of them now. Congratulations on your engagement! 🥳
Thanks. Its kind of weird how the decision to play a game has steered my life so much. Don't think I'd be doing what I am today if it wasn't for RO! For the best or for worse. I'll never know haha.
Congratulations! We’ve got similar stories, except the girl who introduced me to RO somewhat moved on from it, while I became engrossed in the MMORPG genre. If only I’d known back then that I’d never rediscover that warm feeling RO so easily gave me. I played on a private server back in 2004, had a bunch of buddies on MSN Messenger and IRC. Ah, those were good times. Just look at me ramble..
I continued to play it off and on until recently! Always an enjoyable game to restart on a server and make some new friends, or have old one join in.
On a whim, I decided to join a Meetup group teaching an intro to canyoneering.
That fist Meetup made me fall in love with canyons. Sometime later I was planning my first trip ever to Europe and a friend wanted to join but he could only stay a week. I was going to come back with him, but because of this canyoneering group and a contact I got from it, I decided to stay a little longer to make a trip to Switzerland to try a canyon there. After my friend departed and I continued on solo, I stayed at a hostel in Milan and there a met a girl that has now become my wife.
We often think of the sequence of events that led us to staying at the same place on the same night as she was also traveling back home. But for me, I would have never continued on that solo journey if I didn't have that reason to go to try that canyon.
Ironically, I've mostly stopped canyoneering now that I'm married.
I took a meeting as a favor since a colleague had the day off.
A participant in that meeting asked me to join them on a different project a couple months later. Some years down the line, I'm on the board of their organization, and essentially leapfrogged the corporate ladder at my employer (who I sold my one-person company to so they'd acquire my clients).
It still blows my mind the power C-suite folks at (their) large parent companies have. They can casually change people's lives forever, just because. I'm economically set for life. I've done nothing special to earn this situation beyond what I expect all my coworkers would do in the same situation. I don't even know if I made any impression, or I just happened to become their point of contact.
And no-one seems to care. I just get rewarded, in case I wasn't just a random person there at the right time, but maybe might possibly have done something.
I have moved up into the C-levels as well and one thing I've learned is that this statement is 'wrong' IME.
I too expect others to do the same basic stuff I do and I'm constantly disappointed when they don't. After enough times of this I realized, I'm apparently not 'normal' and shouldn't expect my standard behavior from everyone else.
I was playing a game of Rocket League one day when I was a teenager. I scored a goal (pretty typical stuff) and while the goal replay was playing, a chat message popped up on screen from the opposing player I had scored against. "I'll ban you from IRC m8." (At the time I was a moderator on a Minecraft forums site, and this person and I were in a couple channels together on the site's IRC server, although we hadn't really directly interacted.)
We bantered back and forth for the rest of the game, partied up, and played together for a while. Added each other on Steam and Discord. We would go on to play hundreds of hours of Rocket League together; he would pull me away from learning Java towards learning Rust; introduce me to a great friend group of programmers far smarter than myself, and we would work on open-source stuff and chat about tech and life. I lived in a small suburb and for Reasons outside my control had very few friends (none of whom were into technology whatsoever), so this friend group quite literally changed the course of my life. It didn't end there either; he referred me for my first internship working on his team at a company that would go on to offer me a full-time position at the end of my term, that I dropped out of my (very shitty) school to accept. Fast forward a few years, we're both still working there together, and I have another great friend group with some former colleagues that's a big part of my life today.
So a chance Rocket League encounter turned into a friendship that had (and has) a core impact every aspect of my life. And my parents always told me you can never make true friends online! 🫣
Taking a typing class in high school.
Eons before the rise of personal computers, but has provided lasting benefits ever since.
Took a trigonometry class in high school. Have never used it since.
Took a "loser" typing class too. Use it every single day.
The teachers lied, man.
I at least think about trig on a regular basis. It shows up all of the time.
I've had to use trig a lot since high school. Mostly in classes, but lots of science and engineering concepts depend on it. It was definitely useful to learn it.
In contrast, it took me a few hours playing Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing to learn the basics of typing, then I naturally got a ton of practice in daily life. Not sure if that's really worth a whole semester in school.
I've had to use trig a little since high school (you are right that a lot of science and engineering concepts depend on it) but I've had to use linear algebra more and that was suspiciously absent. If I need trig, I can largely just look it up. Whether you need trig depends a lot on what field you go into, if we're honest, and it's definitely less broadly applicable to people who don't work in science or engineeering than typing is. My dad's a lawyer and I guarantee he's never needed trig, but just listening to his hunt-and-peck typing now that he doesn't have a secretary... it hurts.
I did have a keyboarding class in school and it did feel largely pointless, but only because I'm young enough that I was doing plenty of typing outside of school. And honestly my school had me take much more pointless classes, like Bible, so it doesn't annoy me that we took it.
If you get into 3d printing, you'll start to use trig (if you're designing your own models, that is).
How do you use it for 3D printing?
There are certainly lots of circles, arcs, and angles, but I haven't used trig functions when doing CAD in OnShape. I'm sure it's using them internally. There's lots of geometry involved in the constraint system.
Ah, I'm using OpenSCAD so a lot of that geometry is manual.
I took both too.
One time when I was looking for work the application process required that I take a programming quiz. They sent me to a 3rd party site that allowed me to take practice questions. One of those practice questions I just could NOT solve. To satisfy my own curiosity afterwards, I found a discussion board for mathematics. The people there told me that the solution involved finding the area of an irregular polygon and they gave me a formula for that. There is a good chance I learned that in high school and forgot it long ago.
We had to take a typing course to get into programming as a pre requisite in grade 9. It was seen as an easy bird course but I learned to touch type from that and it's been immensely useful every day since then, for thirty years.
I took a typing class in high school - we used the huge IBM electric typewriters with blank keys. It's turned out to be the most useful thing I learned there.
Same.
Saw someone writing code at summer camp when I was in high school, and I thought it looked cool and fun and I wanted to learn it.
Butterfly effect:
Over a decade later took I went to an underground rave on the other side of the ocean.
My future wife, looking to get far away from her family for college, picked the branch campus I was attending based solely on the fact that she liked the letter 'Y'. She did precisely 0 additional research, which was a poor decision on her part.
I had just come out of a nice hospital stay from a manic episode with psychosis. Happened to be wearing a fedora and jonsing for a smoke when some girl runs up to me and says "it's fedora friday!" dragging me into their conversation, where I bum a smoke off my future wife.
~15 years later... We were one and done with kid, but then we discovered Bluey mid-pandemic lockdown, which gave us too many feels, and decided we needed to teach our eldest that they were not in fact the center of the universe.
Vord's nuclear family: Brought to you by Bipolar Disorder, the letter Y, and Bluey.
A cartoon from Australia about a family of dogs. It's made for preschoolers and young children, but it's actually really enjoyable for adults too. I've seen a few episodes while babysitting and it doesn't feel overly preachy and annoying like a lot of shows for that demographic, just wholesome family antics.
Bluey also does a really good job of representing parents. You get to see them balancing work and life in the background, and it makes the whole show feel more grounded in reality (even though it stars talking dogs). Too many kids shows either omit the parents completely or just represent them as bumbling idiots. It's refreshing to see that trope broken.
Topics Bluey has touched on throughout its run, in big or small ways:
Aging
Death
Adult relationship struggles
Infertility
The changing of friendships due to puberty
Abandonment
Hangovers
Vasectomies
Mental health
okay I knew Bluey was good but now I have to know how it manages to address vasectomies
Address is a strong word. It was a reference, fresh in my mind because I just watched the episode.
A background joke that was so real of a conversation most probably ignore it.
Perfect, the boomerang scene.
I'll throw three episodes out as a must-watch to comprehend what Bluey is, at its core. They are about 7 minutes each and a worthwhile watch for everyone.
Season 1, Episode 39: Copycat
Season 2, Episode 27: Grandad
Season 3, Episode 24: Faceytalk
Bonus, just because it's super fun and Disney won't stream it:
Season 2, Episode 13: Dad Baby
I was watching an episode of Elementary and saw Sherlock picking locks that he kept on a rack for practicing on and I thought "Huh. I should try that." A few years later I had gotten pretty good at it (for a casual) and happened to see a guy shopping at the Lowe's I worked at wearing a shirt with a logo on it that I thought was from the the local locksmithing school. When I struck up a conversation with him about it, he informed me that he actually worked for a local locksmith and asked me what my skills were. Before I knew it I had an interview with his boss and I've been there almost 11 years now.
Bonus points: two of my coworkers at Lowe's had recommended that I work for this guy when they saw me picking locks, but I refused to cold call a stranger to ask for a job. I had his business card at the desk while I was being handed his business card by his employee. Also, one of my previous landlords was (unbeknownst to me) an old client of the boss, and he asked her about me and she gave me a good reference. Small world.
In August of 1993 (thirty years ago!), on the last day of my freshman orientation weekend as we were preparing to go home, I wandered away from my parents for a few minutes. I found my way to a staircase at the back of the university union building where a lot of the student organizations were located, and sat down for a few minutes. There was some music coming from upstairs - first And Justice For All by Metallica (one of my favorite bands at the time), and then Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. I thought that was a pretty odd combination of songs, so I got up and followed the sound to see where it was coming from. I found myself standing in the lobby of the campus radio station, and it was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life. I made a mental note to come back there after I got moved into my dorm room a couple of weeks later.
And little did I know, that was the moment my career in radio started. Thirty years in and still going strong.
Picked the section of a required circuits class at random my sophomore year. Turned out to be the only one taught by a particularly talented grad student. Became her grader the next semester, then did two internships with her dad's company. Because he went to Carnegie Mellon, which I had never heard of, I applied there for grad school. Got accepted (and funded). Moved to Pittsburgh, met my wife. Probably would still be living in Texas if it weren't for all that.
I bought a concert ticket from a guy through reddit in spring 2013. I was living in a new city, so I didn't have anyone to actually go to the concert with. He invited me to hang out with his friends then gave me a ride home after the show. Turned out, we lived in the same neighborhood. We've been friends ever since, even attended each other's wedding, and now have kids that hang out together.
A few days before freshman year of college I was wandering the campus aimlessly, as I did then. I heard music, and figured that was worth checking out. Turns out that was a freshman "casino" night, where they setup a bunch of classic casino games, and you played to win raffle tickets. I went around a few games, went to craps and tried to chat up a girl there, but she left and was replaced by another girl who I did chat with. She would become my freshman year girlfriend, and it's through her I met my friend Y, through which I would meet all the other friends I spent my entire college career with.
Literally all of my social connections, my hobbies, and really my entire life, was changed... Because they were playing music, and I decided to see what's up. Timelines are so incredibly fragile it's truly scary sometimes
My wife decided to go on a dating app and look at usernames alphabetically, for some reason starting at the end of the alphabet and working backwards. Came across my username first. We connected and have been together for 18 years, married for 13. If I had chosen a different username she may never have found me.
When I was like 11 or 10yo, my family went to a museum and as I was wandering the gift shop, I noticed a book for kids on how to build a website, via HTML. I was already on the Internet (AOL days) and thought it'd be cool to make my own website, for my then favorite topic: Pokemon. So I asked my parents to buy it for me. And then I made a Pokemon website (complete with midi music), initially on a floppy disk, then actually uploading it to Geocities or somewhere like that.
8yrs later, in-between the summer high school and college, I got my first "real job' as a part-time website manager/email marketer via my then GF's mom. Like had my own office and everything. Eventually turned that into more of an IT job, as I was handy with computers overall.
I've worked for this company now for 16yrs now, over two separate stints, plus working at an MSP and even the Federal Reserve.
So yeah, that book kicked-off my career.
The Beijing Olympics were in 2008, I think? I remember this because for a family event, we were staying at what I considered a really nice hotel, something that was very rare for my family. And I remembered seeing a bunch of people, especially Asians, all getting ready to go to the Olympics. For a Caucasian teenager who generally lived in a backwater town, this was a fascinating sight.
There's a LOT more to it, but now I've been living in Japan for the past five years.
I live in Ohio now because I had a crush on someone. Not because she lives here, or ever lived here, as far as I know.
I got into My Little Pony in college because she was into it. She wasn't interested in dating me, but in the process, I made a bunch of other friends, some of whom are still among my closest friends today. One of those friends introduced me to Magic: the Gathering. For a while after I graduated I kept showing up at one of the coffee shops on campus to play with them. One night a couple of new people came in. My friend invited one of them to our fledgeling D&D group, I had a talk with him about inviting people we barely know to my apartment without asking but decided to let the invitation stand, I eventually started dating her, and several years later followed her to Ohio when she moved here for graduate school.
My condolences.
(non-Ohioans don't interact only we're allowed to make this joke)
I was a Pennsylvanian, born and bred. I was helping my friend move his girlfriend to Michigan for grad school, I was the Uhaul driver.
We were driving the turnpike, and about halfway through Ohio, there was a lane closure.
Everyone merged in as soon as they saw the lane closure announcement and there was barely a slowdown in traffic!!! Not a single car zoomed up ahead in the now-empty right lane trying to jump in front of everyone else.
This was at that moment when I decided that Ohio was some sort of magical place. And I dared not move there lest that illusion be shattered.
oh god my mom hates zipper merging so I can guarantee you people do it there lmao she pointed it out every time when I was young
I didn't even know it had a name. That's how foreign the concept is.
I think it's only called zipper merging in some instances, I only learned that phrase on reddit where people are weirdly insistent about it being correct traffic protocol. My mom described it more the way you do lol
In college I was in CS, which required Calc 2. I pulled a B through the year, which I'm still proud of, but I either massively fucked up my final or the test writer sucked and I pulled an uncurved 31/100. The class had a rule that you couldn't get more than a full letter grade above what you get on the final, so I did a snap change to IT classes instead since I was already kind of waffling. I got my semester grades back back and I somehow pulled the minimum C grade - I'm guessing the curve pulled me up to a D and my other tests got me the rest of the way. So I could've stayed in CS. I decided not to, and I pulled a 4.0 in the IT major and graduated.
I feel sometimes like I'm on the alt-universe "glad I didn't do that!" path; I make decent money, but I'm occasionally bored in IT and I wonder if a better programming background would be more interesting to me than the program architecture stuff I do. Technically I could kind of switch, but I'm guessing I'm missing the structures background and portfolio of work that most people are looking for in engineering...
Started playing a text-based game when the internet was still a baby. Went to a convention meetup for it. Moved thousands of miles to live near found-family, became a programmer, traveled out of country repeatedly, and have a best friend who changed my life. All because of a game.
What game was it, if I may inquire? Was it a texted based mud?
Yep! MUSH, specifically - I'd gotten into the Pern-based ones at the time, as well as World of Darkness, but it was a Pern meetup I went for.
Nice! I was into ancient anguish around that time. I was recently excited to learn that they are still up and running and have gotten to get back on and play some. Still a great community.
Went to dinner with some old friends and ended up with a wife, kid, and mortgage.
My first year of college my roommate offered to buy me Ark: survival evolved. I played on their server but kept to myself and built my own base and basically played single player. Eventually one of the guys on there asked why I wouldn't talk to anyone. Usually I'd give an excuse, or just tell them I was just trying to get use to the game first. But that night I told the truth, I wasn't use to voice comms and couldn't tell who was who or even if their voices were different. He was offended by that admission and decided to befriend me. This is the part where I say we're married now, but plot twist! We did have feelings for each other but it didn't work out. Instead through him I met an entirely new group of people online and am now happily married to one of them. It was our five year anniversary this week!
While in high school, a teacher and advisor took me and another student to the International Woodworking Fair in Atlanta because we loved woodshop so much.While walking around we found a booth for a university offering a 4 year degree in wood product manufacturing.
that was 13 years ago. I'm now a programmer for an architectural millwork company. sadly I don't work wood on a daily basis but I get to program sick CNC machines.
My girlfriend dumped me, so I had to find a flatmate. I moved in with a colleague from work, befriended him & his group. One of his friends recommended me to some other company. I took the job, and there I befriended another guy who recommended me to another company. I took this job, ended up hating it so much that I quit and found a better job in a better country, where I moved and have been living since.
Made a stupid video. Uploaded it. Girl DMd me. Together ever since (4 years and counting).
Just after highschool I was working as a teller for a pretty large bank, it was terrible and I did not do well in the role. I had gone for lunch one day at the mall and my friend from highschool happened to be there having a walking meeting with his life coach. I had never heard of a life coach and asked more about it. Asked how my friend was doing, and chatted with the coach for a few minutes.
He asked me a question that changed my career and made me make a decision on whether I wanted to go to college or not.
"What is something you are passionate about? You have 3 seconds to answer." I answered "Something with computers and fixing crappy software"
From there I went back to work, enrolled in community college a couple months later, and promptly got let go from the teller job.
I have been working in financial institutions for 12 years and now fix process issues for my company as well as manage our data warehouse team. I am loving my career.
In a random online chat in 2001 some girl posted their ICQ number and I added her and we started chatting. Still together today now married with kids and everything.