What are synchronicities?

You think of an old friend for the first time in years, and that afternoon they message you. The number 11:11 keeps surfacing on clocks, receipts, the microwave. You read a passage in a book that answers, almost word for word, the thing you argued about at breakfast. These are the moments people mean by synchronicity, and most of us have a few.

The word was coined by Carl Jung. He used it for coincidences that feel meaningfully connected even though no ordinary cause links them. Not the dropped glass that breaks because you dropped it. The kind where two unrelated things line up and the alignment seems to be saying something.

Where the idea actually comes from

Jung spent a long time on this. He worked with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, and he set the theory out properly in his 1952 essay, usually translated as “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” His most quoted case is a patient who was describing a dream about a golden scarab when an actual rose-chafer beetle, close enough to the Egyptian scarab, tapped against the window. He let it in, handed it to her, and the moment broke a stuck patch in her therapy.

Worth knowing, because the concept gets thrown about online as if it were ancient mystic lore. It is barely seventy years old and it came out of a clinical practice, not a temple.

The honest part nobody likes

Our brains are pattern machines. We are built to spot connection, and we are gloriously bad at statistics. The chance of any single striking coincidence happening to you this week is low. The chance of some striking coincidence happening, across the thousands of small events in your week, is very high indeed. We notice the hit and forget the thousand misses. Statisticians call it the law of truly large numbers, and it explains a great deal of what feels uncanny.

I am not telling you this to flatten the experience. I’m telling you because pretending otherwise is how people get fleeced. If a coincidence is being used to sell you a service, a course, or a sense that you must act now, the pattern-machine in your head is being played.

Reading them without losing the run of yourself

So what do you do with the friend who messages the day you thought of them? Probably nothing dramatic. Notice it. Enjoy the small strangeness of being alive. Maybe ring them, because the thought clearly wanted you to.

The useful trick is to treat a synchronicity as a prompt rather than an instruction. When 11:11 keeps appearing, the question is not “what is the universe commanding,” it’s “what have I been avoiding that this nudge is making me look at?” Jung’s beetle worked because it cracked something open in the patient, not because beetles carry orders. The meaning was made in the room.

This is also why I rate tarot and similar tools, used honestly. They are structured ways of provoking exactly this kind of meaningful coincidence on purpose, so you can think about a problem sideways. The card you pull means nothing on its own. It means something because you brought a question to it.

Keep a light grip. A coincidence that nudges you toward calling your mum, finishing the application, leaving the job you’ve outgrown is doing good work, whether the source is cosmic or simply your own attention catching up with what you already knew. Either way, the move is yours to make.