The Plot Theory

I've had this ridiculous theory stuck in my head for years. It's one of those ideas that occasionally pops up when I'm bored, makes me question a few things about reality and then disappears somewhere into the mess that is my brain

I've tried explaining it to myself countless times. Every time I think I'm finally getting somewhere, another hundred possibilities appear, contradicting everything I just thought

At some point i started calling it The Plot Theory. Sometimes The Luck Theory

The basic idea is that maybe not everything that happens in our universe is entirely random (at least in the way we usually think about randomness)

What if there's another factor, buried somewhere among the countless things that influence an event, that slightly changes the probability of something happening based on how it fits into everything that has already happened?

Not fate. Not karma. Not some god writing a screenplay about your life

Just an additional, incredibly complicated influence on probability

Imagine your mother warns you not to drive somewhere because she's worried something might happen. You ignore her and go anyway. You even hide the trip from her

Now what if those circumstances alone slightly increased the probability of something going wrong?

Or decreased it?

Or, for absolutely no obvious reason, increased the probability of something happening to your mother while you're away instead?

And what if trying to predict any of this actually changes those probabilities again?

I know. It sounds completely insane but that's barely the beginning of the idea

I've spent years occasionally playing with this in my head, making up scenarios, noticing coincidences and wondering if there's any possible way to make sense of it

I have absolutely no evidence that any of this exists. It's not a scientific theory and I'm certainly not claiming I've discovered some hidden law of the universe

It's an elaborate thought experiment that might be complete nonsense

But it's surely pretty fun nonsense