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There has been more than one occasion lately when, after watching a video or reading about some niche topic irrelevant to my daily life, I've landed in a conversation where I could proudly drop that exact piece of trivia that I learned.

It's happened enough times that I started wondering whether everything really was just a coincidence.

I read a web comic recently about an adult character who travels back in time repeatedly and tries to change their undesirable future by altering their school life. At first, some things could be brushed off, like getting involved with the same people despite trying not to. But, for one particular tragic event that the protagonist absolutely did not want to let happen—no matter how different the circumstances were: completely avoiding that person, or moving to another location entirely—they were dragged into the same scenario over and over again, like it was an unchangeable fate.

Of course, the comic was not a #tragedy, so all was well in the end, but that part of the story really stuck with me.

Could our lives really be all planned out for us, unfolding the same way even if we could turn back time and make different choices?

To illustrate this, another character in the same comic who was not happy with certain events in their career, manages to change their path multiple times—but no matter what profession they switched to, they ended up in the same mental and emotional state, proving that the problem was not what job they had.

From my unserious surface research about the differences between serendipity, coincidence, and fate, what I gathered was that serendipity results in a fortunate or positive outcome through acting on a presented opportunity; coincidence is a neutral random occurrence; while fate is a perceived predetermined cosmic plan.

No matter which of the three it is, it will always feel uncanny when “I was just watching a video about that yesterday.”