The Unbearable Boredom of Synchronicity

I can’t be the only person who’s marveled at how incredibly dull it is to read or hear about someone else’s experience of synchronicity.  This is not to be snarky; I am talking about people I consider generally to be interesting thinkers who, once they start in on the saga of My Meaningful Coincidence send me into a coma so deep you’d have to read me the 1965 British Rail timetable backward and with a Lithuanian accent to even start to get me out of it.

Jung’s notion of synchronicity always seemed off-base to me, but in a charming, “Old World” (we’re talking the good Old World here, not the other one) way that makes you not want to just throw it out with the dishwater.   When I stumbled upon Stephen Braude’s book The Gold Leaf Lady with its chapter on “The Synchronicity Confusion,” I felt vindicated.  Braude does a nice job at walking us all through a logic that I only vaguely surmised before I decided on my categorical dismissal of claims of synchronicity.

Thinking about Braude whilst grazing along my Twitter feed today, I came across a post by Nick Redfern that was all about synchronicity.  “Aha!” I thought to myself.  “Nick Redfern is a polished professional whose work is of the highest quality.  If there is any suasive story for synchronicity to be woven, surely it is Nick Redfern whose hand is at the loom.”  I clicked through to the blog post.  A bare few sentences in—in fact, as soon as Beachy Head was mentioned—I knew where it was going.  Beachy Head reference, Aleister Crowley reference, after which a Boleskine/Loch Ness reference is almost inevitable.  Blah, blah, blah.  It was no secret that Crowley was very choughed about climbing Beachy Head; he wrote about it extensively.  He also made other significant ascents with his early climbing partner, Oscar Eckenstein, who invented the 12-point crampon.  These were old stories before I even became a fan of Redfern’s books.

Redfern was researching a fairly narrow topic not too far outside his cultural ken, but he found all kinds of significance in what he turned up.   I don’t know why doing research that links one of your interests to another of your interests should be considered synchronicity.  It’s like, “OMG!  I’m doing research!  I’m finding all sorts of shit out!! IT IS ALL RELATED!”  Yeah, it’s all related, and guess what’s the common denominator?   You, the most meaningful and important being in the universe.  This is not to single out Nick Redfern.  We all do this; it’s how we’re built.

So you’ve got to control for that.  If on reading an article by Nick Redfern I could predict as soon as he mentioned a song called Beachy Head key content points for the rest of the article—no, that’s not synchronicity.  That’s something that normally would be called social or cultural capital, but in this case might be called unconscious cultural capital. For you pop culture types, it’s being embedded in the matrix, absorbing it all but then your mind not regurgitating it until it’s needed.

The nice thing about Braude’s analysis of synchronicity is that he does not dismiss the actual existence of meaningful event clusters.  He rejects Jung’s flawed explanation of them and points out how the Jungian term may be incorrectly applied to common human experiences.   Implicitly, Braude urges us to be more critical and less self-centered when considering what counts as a meaningful event cluster, while still acknowledging the possibility of outside source (or sorcerers).  To this message I would add: please don’t tell me about your meaningful event cluster because—and trust me on this—it will be nowhere near as meaningful to me as it was to you.  Thank you.  Thank you!  OMG, thank you.