"It was on purpose!"
And once we get to where we are (and the stations along the way) you often have the feeling that it was "meant" to turn out exactly as it did... Maybe there is such a plan with one's life, in advance? Or it's mostly a function of our human, grand, creative tendency to automatically try to make wholes out of fragments… magical thinking.
Well, I guess I'm on the brakes here... We seem to "have it in us", to want to see reasons behind what happens to us. Some more than others, too, that have been researched... Have referred to this article before, I know... Here is an abstract with a summary of what they thought they found in their experiments on various groups.
Farias, M., Claridge, G., & Lalljee, M. (2005). Personality and cognitive predictors of New Age practices and beliefs. Personality and Individual Differences, 39(5), 979-989.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-12590-013
What they did (free from memory) was put people in front of a computer screen where 100 dots appeared in random combinations & asked the subjects to say when they saw a motif (I think the instruction was that intended motifs could appear?)… And “newage- are” saw significantly more such… animals, angels, etc.
It was thus found that people who embraced certain holistic?, "neo-spiritual", conceptions of existence also had a tendency to see "meaning, order" even where there is none. Now how to understand it? Is closely related to superstition, one might think. As enlightenment, positivism, "taken out of us" to some degree. Made us more skeptical, scientific, sane. On guard against ourselves. Against our human tendency to want to see connections, for example? And sometimes become too skeptical, "sensible", maybe... But anyway...
