People who have experienced the 'butterfly effect', what happened? - (r/AskReddit)

our slash ass credit redditors with real-life butterfly effect stories what happened and what was the series of events and outcomes about 20 years ago I was watching a TV show about a guy in Australia who feeds a homeless at the end they interviewed a few of the homeless who all said he was great and their names flashed up on the bottom of the screen one of the guys had the same name as my brother who I hadn't seen for about 15 years I looked at the screen squinted and there under the dirt and grime was my brother who was an addict and lost touch with us years ago I called the TV program and got the name of the feeder guy he contacted my brother and passed on my phone number a couple of days later I got a call and told him he could come live with me and he did he moved in at my place then the next morning went up the road together newspaper to look for a job this was about 2000 came back and he'd found someone advertising for English teachers in China he asked me what I thought I said what have you got to lose so off he went and loved it kept telling me to go to so six months later I quit my job sold my car moved everything I wanted to keep over to my elder brother's place and left for China I was there for 18 years I met a girl got married bought an apartment had two kids then the Hong Kong troubles came and I moved back to Australia a few months ago and it all started from watching a TV show and seeing a name I knew I ran out of smokes late tonight went to the gas station at 3 a.m. to grab a pack which led to a friendship that has lasted two decades now my apartment was the party place my roommate was a cook and after his shift all the cooks would come over and bring food and beer and we would hang out and play xbox and drink and smoke and smoke one guy was a Russian dude he was cool always polite always had great stories always the last to leave this particular night cold as duck January in the Midwest was the same as every other for me the Russian dude had been coming over after shift for weeks at this point all the cooks hung out slowly everyone went on home and he was again the last to leave I found that I had run out of smokes decided to hit up the gas station across the street as I walked out into the freezing night I saw the Russian dudes car in the back of my parking lot I went over and saw him sleeping in the driver's seat I knocked on the window and woke him up asked what he was up to he informed me that several weeks prior he had been kicked out of his host family's house cause his student visa expired and was now living in his car he had an alarm set to wake him up every half hour so he could run his car heat for a bit so as not to freeze to death I told him to get his ass in the house and he could sleep on the couch as long as he needed he never left he basically moved in at that point used his under-the-table cash job to help buy groceries and pay rent he became my very best friend in the whole world he got married became a legit citizen and I am now godfather to his son I can't even imagine what my life would have been like if I had not gone to buy a pack of smokes at night I was invited to hang out with an acquaintance who I barely knew freshman year of high school I wasn't sure if I should go but decided to try it out we had so much fun she became my best friend and it led to a regular meetups and we both started bringing in more friends and just got bigger every month with almost 30 people who got together every weekend by senior year many of us are still good friends and our lives spouses and careers have all been shaped by this group that I honestly don't think would have formed if I hadn't been invited that night freshman year it all started with the first week of my college freshman year it goes all of this because I was really drunk and like that one frat house with a fire pit so yet moral of that story I have a fire pit in my back yard now I was supposed to go to a u2 concert with this girl was friends with her boyfriend and a couple other people I had a knack for getting good seats that shows so it was up to me to get tickets she went nuts and accused me of trying to break into the house to clean her carpets while she was in Croatia so I kept the tickets they hadn't paid me yet because I still wanted to go but not with them because there were really good seats I went to a street fair in town a couple of weeks later and ran into a girl I was friends with from high school who loved you too I sold her a ticket and she asked if she could bring a friend which just made me think woohoo I'm selling another one of these really pricey tickets the girls show up at my place day of show and her friend smiles as she is walking in I saw the smile and knew that was it I'm going to be spending the rest of my life chasing that smile well over 20 years a couple of kids and dogs later and as soon as I finish typing this I'm headed to bed to snuggle up next her too long didn't we'd I met my wife because one of my friends went nuts and accused me of trying to clean her carpets while she was in Croatia your entire life is kind of one big butterfly effect really it all started when I was born at an exceptionally young age fifth or sixth grade I tried to confess to my crush by gifting in a strawberry muffin I left it in his desk and my plan was to confess I was the one giving the muffin he ended up having an allergic reaction that caused him to be taken by an ambulance this caused me to never confess fast forward to June a year we were starting to study the basis of a research project to help with our thesis the following year his original project partner ended up moving to another part of the country and had to switch schools so he joined my group at this point I was over the crush but it was nice having him as a friend then one day that we were working on the project I don't remember exactly how but we brought out the topic that we should share a secret with each other to become closer friends I told him about the muffin and he came out of the closets to me a couple of week later he did it at the school this caused us to become basically joined by the hip and he introduced me to his family and still unknown to me introduced me to my future bf his older brother we have been dating for over two years now boyfriend broke up with me soon after I got the opportunity to work abroad I wouldn't have taken said job if the relationship would have continued but because I was afraid to run into him constantly I decided to go away met a very nice co-worker also foreigner he turned out to be the love of my life now I'm living in his country being married a couple of years and we're expecting our first baby my husband and I are from different continents he's my one and only I never would have found him at that dumb boyfriend wouldn't have broken up with me I thanked that ex so much this woman I know was living with some guy and one night years ago they were watching a local public-access TV show on cable she said to her squeezed this is so shitty we could do better she had a video background so they did they ran it a weekly show for years with a volunteer crew with the woman as a producer relationships were formed among the volunteers at least one child was born in a couple of marriages one of them was mine I came on as a volunteer toward the end and ended up marrying the woman who was producing the show was science fiction fan based and a bunch of them got together to found a convention for SF fanzine publishers 35 years later it's still sustaining itself as a calm moving from city to city every year all because my wife saw bad public access TV show and made a decision turned 16 had like 3k saved up and my parents let me picked in a one-night picked a local Italian place that has an empty lot next door that always has used cars parked there that night I found a cool car that I ended up buying that got me online to learn more about that car which turned me into a car guy which kept me working more hours to fun said car which kept me away from some potential problematic friends who were into drugs and alcohol so cars loser friends after high school I attended a community college for a few years I'm rather introverted and I'm not good at making new friends so for most of my first term I basically didn't interact with I had a two-hour break between two of my classes so I started hanging out in the cafeteria because it had chairs and food one day I saw a guy rocking a blue fedora this was before the fedora wearing necklace stereotype really became a thing and also this particular guy is not and never has been a neck but in any way and I complimented him on it we chatted a little bit and he invited me to join him and his friends who also spent their free time hanging out in the cafeteria Fedora guy and I dated for a little while but ultimately we weren't a good fit long term where we have remained good friends the big thing though was that he introduced me to an Internet discussion forum he was part of I joined that forum and became a very active member in that community and made a lot of friends through there several years later I was feeling pretty trapped in where I was in life working a retail job and barely making ends meet with no resources to go back to school and no marketable skills to look for other work a couple from the forums who lived a good 600 miles from me offered to let me move in with them and they'd support me while I essentially tried to restart my life I took them up on their offer moved from Oregon to California met a guy I really hit it off with and I'm now married and working a job that gives me a great deal of satisfaction all because I said dude I like your hat to a stranger in the cafeteria fifteen years ago world war two some guys are looking for volunteers to go join a group that goes behind enemy lines no one volunteers they randomly select my grandfather everyone that didn't join that group in that camp was killed on frontlines well here is the biggest known case of butterfly effect World War two did not start with some massive machinations of world leaders rather it culminated into a wide scale butchery just because of a very small incident in June 1914 franz ferdinand the crown prince of hungary was going on a ride in a street off bosnia when his driver mistakenly took a wrong turn and by chance bumped into a revolutionary named Gavrilo print the revolutionary seeing the opportunity instantly shot Ferdinand and his wife whom both succumbed to their injuries their death led to declaration of war by austria-hungary supported by Russia on Serbia and the frenzy was soon joined by countries like Germany France and Britain due to several diplomatic treaties signed during that time which blew into a full-scale World War if World War one had not happened the size treaty would have never been made leading to Germany's humiliation fanatics like Hitler would have never got the opportunity to come to power and World War two could have been averted with six million Jews and sixty million other lives saved estimated to be roughly 3% of 1940 population also Britain would have never drained its resources in financing the war and there might have been three superpowers instead of just two probably avoiding Cold War nuclear arms race and Vietnam and Korea conflict the outburst of war also had another butterfly effect on science we would have never appreciated the intelligence of Albert Einstein if World War one had not happened Einstein needed mathematical proof for his theory of relativity and to do that he needed pictures of total solar eclipse which was scheduled to take place in Crimea then in Russia he sent an expedition to the country for the same but by then World War one had erupted the appliances which the expedition had carried was confiscated by the Russian army and Einstein waited four years for the war to be over naturally he grew desperate and anxious cursing his luck all throughout this time one day while skimming through his calculations he realized he had committed some errors in his equations here a engineered his calculations and sent a fresh expedition once the war was over the pictures which finally arrived proved his theory correct if the ongoing war had not prevented the arrival of pictures in 1914 Einstein's theory would have been surely proven wrong and our understanding about cosmology or origin of universe might have never reached this level and of course all talks of time travel may have remained complete fiction with any substance and it all happened just because driver off Franz Ferdinand took a wrong turn my best friend and I were going to get breakfast and then ride to an event together one morning she was running late so we decided to meet at the diner and drive separately instead of meeting at my house and leaving her car there after breakfast I got in a wreck and the seat where she would have been sitting if she had written with me was totally smashed she would have died if she had been on time for breakfast that same wreck caused me to miss an important deadline I was planning to move out of state but was injured in the accident and ended up staying put for several more months to recover while I was recovering I started dating a guy if I'd moved as I had planned to before the accident we might never have started dating he ended up being really bad for me but when we broke up my rebound guy ended up being a real winner we've been married for 13 years and have two amazing children sorry about this sad story but here it goes when I was about five our family was planning to go to how a village to celebrate festive season dad was a doctor and he thought it would be cool to buy a new car before going he called his friends dealership and they sent three cars for viewing we ended up liking one car and we kept that but my silly sister left her favorite shoes in the car and kept crying over it she was like - next morning dad said that why don't you guys take the new car with the driver and leave and I will swing by the dealership pick up shoes drop off old car and get there by train mom reluctantly agreed and our driver took us to our village dad decided to leave next day but that night fighting broke out between two rival groups and few people were shot dad had to operate on those all night saving lives next morning being too tired he decided to skip going to dealership and join us directly the family of the gunshot victim being grateful offered to drive my dad in his old car to our village the driver was idiot or tired or whatever he drove the car into a ditch causing injuries to him and dad injuries weren't bad but it led to my dad having a heart attack and passed away ten days after don't leave your shoes in the kif's this girl that I had a crush on posted in a Facebook group for my sell trade in a small college community about looking for a boyfriend it was deleted in less than five minutes by the admins for being against the rules I saw her post in those five minutes I messaged her we started dating fell in love immediately we moved across the country together over six years later I'm still living in the state we moved to together even though we broke up a year after arriving I think there's a good chance I'll spend the rest of my life here but that's not all because of her I got connected to another Facebook group for drug reform jobs through that group I found my first job in cannabis something that's led directly to my next three jobs including my current job and maybe my entire career I'm in college a year ago I happened to take a class outside of my major for fun the TAFE of my lab was cool but I didn't actually talk to him until one night when he happened to be staying late to work on some homework and I was staying late to finish the lab we talked a little it was fun a bit later after the class was over he asked for my snap and invited me to a house party he was having a girl from my major and two friends of hers were at a party across the street but thought it was lame so decided to crash xt a's party because they noticed a lot of people were there when they got there I recognized the girl I knew and she introduced me to her two friends now I'm dating the ex TA and my room mates are the two girls from that party if I never took that class that I didn't need gave me no necessary credit I never would have met ex ta if he and I hadn't stayed late to one day probably wouldn't have had an actual conversation with him beyond what am I doing wrong if I hadn't gone to his party and the other party hadn't been laman those girls hadn't snuck into his house I would have never met my now run mates the most important people in my everyday life right now all trace back to that single class I decided to take for fun everything can change in just a single moment : not sure a lot of these stories qualify including this one but seems to be a theme of how things work out by accident or incident had bottomed out in LA and decided to go to Asia to get my TEFL had completed the certification and was beginning the job search for a teacher gig was looking for a new apartment when I hear a guy playing guitar in his room the door was open and I tell him he sounds good he asks if I play I do and offers me a go then says I should come audition at the bar he works for the next day I couldn't get sneezed on as a muse oh in LA but unlike sha it'll be fun just to plug in and jam with some cats for a minute turns out they offered me a house gig playing nights as well as doing their creative work during the day best job I ever had mostly thanks to being open I couldn't afford college so I applied for a naval ROTC scholarship the recruiter told me an engineering major would have a higher chance of acceptance so I applied for the scholarship with a chemical engineering and got it because of this scholarship my choice of college was significantly narrowed down to colleges that accepted me I applied fa FSA for had a n ROTC program and engineering program I had one college to choose from the Navy thing didn't work out because I didn't do it for the right reasons but because of it I ended up going to school in Michigan and the engineering school without this whole ROTC thing I wouldn't have never gone to Michigan and would have never chose an engineering major Chemical Engineering didn't work out I failed physics 1 and organic chem 2 barely passed the first one didn't know what I was doing on a ton of loans for out-of-state tuition and Porras [ __ ] I signed up for whatever free food opportunities and one was then was free lunch with a grad student program purpose of the program was for the grad student to convince undergrads to pursue grad school the grad student I was paired with convinced me to give computer science a try I did since it was fine if I sucked at physics and chemistry had to do summer school to catch up on classes since I switched my major in the overlap between chemical engineering and computer science wasn't too big got a job as a summer camp counselor at the University for high school and middle school students the professor that ran the camp also gave me a job as a tape of the remainder of my time in college no longer poor is [ __ ] during school still a ton of loans the professor also got in contact with a recruiter at Microsoft saying I'd be a great candidate got scheduled for a screening interview studied my ass off got a real interview studied my ass off more got an internship graduated college went back full-time now living in Seattle a city I absolutely love loan free and no longer poor as [ __ ] I have absolutely no idea where I would have ended up if I didn't try for that rotc things since computer science engineering with as far away from what I wanted to do as I could have imagined not my story but my parents my dad left the RAF in 1953 and began working in a local factory he'd been working there for roughly six months when his dad passed away my dad was distraught and struggled to cope with his grief particularly as his own dad was reasonably young when he died he ultimately decided that a combination of grief and a growing sense of alienation outside of the RAF was too much and decided to Rea enlist a few days before he was due to formalize his Rea entry he was approached by a colleague at work who told him that one of the girls liked him and would like to go on a date my dad was fairly introverted at this stage and although he agreed to go on the date he never showed up partly because he suspected people were setting him up the day after his colleague asks him where he was as the girl waited for him for a while and was a little upset when he was a no-show my dad was a little nonplussed by this and couldn't believe it had actually been a genuine thing he asked if he could have a second chance and she agreed to it on the night of the date he arrived trying to act as cool as possible but as soon as he saw her he knew he wouldn't be acting cool he fell for her straight away and after he dropped her off at home said he floated home they were married a year later had four children 13 grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren they both passed away in 2017 within six months of each other 63 years of marriage and a large loving family I realize this may not fit the description of the butterfly effect but to the cities and we are always thankful for it got mental-health treatment and found out I have AV PD from years of abuse I saw a cool witchcraft shop across the road from a gaming shop I went to semi-regularly convinced BF to come with me owner is nice we get on well turns out he loved him soldiers et Cie when he was a kid and is thinking about starting a new business I introduced him to the guy who runs the gaming shop three months later the gaming store closes due to sky high rents wizard of the game store manager come up with a plan for an amazing game store with all kinds of tabletop and wargames three months later they hold an event to advertise and scope out customer base bf and I go and help organize meeting people and making friends one year later the new store opens and it's awesome I become a regular have a best friend and many other friends place becomes like a second home three years pass bf and I realize we don't want the same things in life we break up but are now besties later I realized that I am in love with best friend from game store I confess he feels the same turns out we fell for each other and were both too scared to say anything while I was still in a relationship we date four months later he proposes and it feels right so I say yes everyone including xbf are thrilled for us and that's how I helped start the biggest gaming store in the southern hemisphere and met the love of my life by walking into a witchcraft shop some background I was severely depressed and bored out of my mind my relationship was non-existent and I was at a socially low point in my life where I didn't talk to anyone who I was dating or related to so naturally I played video games obsessively this happened last January at 2:00 3:00 a.m. I impulsively logged into League of Legends and cued into an Iram match as a solo player in a team of five I was given a champion who was canonically blind and trying to funny desperate for so chill interaction I type into our Lobby chat hey guys what champion did I get I can't see and one of the other four people on my team laughed at my joke and then added me after the game we became fast friends fell in love and moved in together at the end of the year if I had not queued up at the right time or made that joke I wouldn't have met the absolute love of my life and I'm so thankful for it every day whoa you made it to the end you're ducking beasts I'll cut you a deal smash LIKE and subscribe for more curated content might it's free in that a 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Keywords: reddit, askreddit, askreddit funny, top posts, top posts of r/, r/, r/askreddit, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, top posts of all time, askreddit question, askreddit top posts, ask reddit, askreddit reading, subreddit, reddit stories, best of r/askreddit, funny reddit, best reddit posts, best of reddit, emkay, ToadFilms, sir reddit, doctor reddit, reddit and chill

Id: Y9eSX5zxANM

Length: 24min 39sec (1479 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020