Introduction

I met my wife on St. Patrick’s Day night in 2012. A friend called me around 4pm that day, telling me we needed to head to the celebrations at Flannery’s, a local Irish pub in Santiago, Chile. I was tired, but on a hunch decided to go anyway.

The place was very crowded and after a few minutes we were enjoying a red ale on the sidewalk outside the pub. As we were talking, I noticed someone’s gaze: a tall blonde was looking at me from afar. I didn’t think much of it, it could’ve been a coincidence, but she kept looking at me, almost like saying “come now, or you’ll miss your chance.” I noticed she was with a group of people and among them was a Romanian entrepreneur who had come to Chile thanks to Start-up Chile and whom I had briefly spoken to the week before at a barbecue. Chance was on my side, that was my opening. I told my friend to come and before he realized what was happening we were talking to the blonde’s group.

She was a Dutch student interning at a hotel close to my apartment. We went out once after that night and we spent the next weekend together. At the end of it I made the foolish mistake of telling her we were moving too fast. Stupid, because I didn’t really feel like it. Being with her just felt natural. Of course, she didn’t appreciate that and cut off all communication. Lucky for me, a few hours later there was a minor earthquake in the city (~6.5 or so), just when I was getting desperate. I immediately texted “Did you feel that?” Which started a long conversation about earthquakes (I believe this one was her first ever).

She had traveled thousands of kilometers from the Netherlands to Chile, we had to go to the same pub that night and she had to be in a group with a random guy neither of us really knew, and of course, there had to be an earthquake to make us forget about my stupid comment.

The swift alignment of circumstances may provoke us to believe “It was meant to be”. But, was it?

Unraveling the Power of Hindsight

Many of us tend to say, “everything fell into place perfectly,” as we look back at our past experiences. Whether it was a star player’s victory or a successful election campaign, such scenarios tend to ignite hindsight bias. This is a tendency to see past events as predictable or inevitable after they have already occurred.

The two main reasons for this are emotions and our predisposition to focus on known outcomes.

Our emotions and memories are deeply linked. A few years ago, I wrote about how the best lasagna I ever ate wasn’t as satisfying later on. I had initially enjoyed it immensely because it reminded me of a very strong emotion: being in love.

It happens all the time, for bad or worse. Everyone knows exactly what they were doing during 9/11 or during a big earthquake or natural disasters. After the 2010 earthquake in Chile there was a meme about how all conversations inevitably led to “during the earthquake I was.”

When my dad passed away in Chile I was in Mexico. I got the call while riding my bike around the city and I can narrate the next half an hour very precisely. Or so I think.

Scientists have run experiments in which they ask people to describe their memories tied up to strong emotional responses or they create new ones exposing them to different scenarios or experiences. When fact checked, many of the details in those memories are wrong or distorted. Times that don’t match, things that couldn’t possibly happen, or just made up events that only exist in our minds. The strong emotion makes sure the memory stays there, it happened, but that doesn’t necessarily include the specific details about it.

It’s almost like those emotionally charged memories have so much more relative weight than our normal ones we start adding details just to make them measure up to our expectations. “This was really important, I should remember better!” We start believing we remember the details, when in truth we don’t.

I can still taste the lasagna, that flavor I have never experience again. Yeah, maybe that’s an inaccurate detail, but the important thing is real: I had a great time with my future wife.

Our emotions play a big role in memory creation. I feel so strongly about my wife that I shape my memories to make her look as it was meant to be. I was so sad and shocked about my dad that I shaped my memories to make them more vivid.

What about the information itself?

Humans are naturally biased. Our minds are constantly making decisions to help us react faster to potentially life-threatening events. Social interaction is critical for our survival. Even days-old babies can read our face and act accordingly. We can identify potential predators just by looking at a landscape. We can run and throw something at the same time.

Our brains have to take shortcuts to do all those things quickly and they sacrifice efficiency. You’re scared of the dark? That’s our brains saying “look for light or other people.” Not very rational or efficient, but effective if we’re in a hostile environment and need to survive.

In this trade-off between acting quickly and being rational, new information is critical. Once something has happened, we assimilate it so thoroughly we can’t even imagine a different outcome. It’s as if our brains refuse to waste precious resources on ‘what-if’ scenarios. No need to act upon alternative realities, life moves on.

A sports team wins and right away we think “it was so obvious, they had this star player.” A candidate wins and we find the memories to make it look like it was inevitable. We find our life’s partners and we shape our memories to make it seem like it was meant to be. It’s obvious! If it happened, it’s because it was meant to happen.

But the reality is much more complex. Other outcomes were just as likely, it’s just that we’re inept at envisioning those outcomes once we know the actual result.

Rewriting human history

This doesn’t only apply to personal memories, it also applies to collective memories as humanity. You can see it in history books. Depending on what was happening at the time, historians use different language, different mental frameworks, that somehow rewrite history. Of course, history has never been objective, but I don’t think many people think about the real implications of it being subjective.

What happens when the stories and histories we tell sound like they were meant to be? “It was inevitable that we ended up having climate change or poverty”. Was it?

Hindsight is always perfect, not just because retrospect makes the outcome seem apparent, but also because we subconsciously adjust our memories to make sense of it. Even if we had reasonable doubts, they go away without us even noticing.

What if we’re stuck in particular ways of thinking and organizing our societies simply because we presumed they were “meant to be”? This is discussed starkly in “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They explore thousands of years of human history to tell a different story of civilization and its current state, painting a more vibrant and varied picture of our ancestors’ a lives. Evidence shows again and again that human societies always had choices and experimented with different social and political systems. For example, some groups explicitly chose to avoid concentrations of power or wealth, and most had very fluid ways of organizing, changing from one political model to another depending on the season.

Final thoughts

We’re very adept at rewriting and adjusting our narratives, even when they contradict evidence and often common sense because we feel strongly about them or because we can’t visualize how things could have been. Today we have powerful tools our ancestors couldn’t even dream about, but sometimes it feels like our main limitations come from within. Our own biases and romantic preconceptions hinder us from moving on, from challenging our status quo. Good thing today we also know a lot more about our own minds, can the knowledge of our biases help us move beyond our meant to be stories? I have no idea. I’m perfectly happy with my “meant to be” marriage, but there are other things in life we might as well question.

Some further resources: