On Fate as a Rut in the Road

Imagine we have ten thousand ways to live tomorrow. We could go to work, quit, buy a ticket to another country, call someone we haven’t seen in ten years, turn down a street we’ve never walked, or suddenly decide to learn the drums.

In theory, the options are almost endless. In practice, most of them never even cross our minds.

Because between us and all those possibilities stands one enormous filter: ourselves.

Character, past experience, habits, education, the people around us, fears, interests, where we live, what we earn, our relationships, our work — all of it quietly cuts away nearly every option long before we get around to calling what’s happening a “choice.”

Put very simply: us → values → habits → environment → decisions → possibilities → new decisions.

Say that out of ten thousand possible actions, maybe thirty are realistically on the table for us. We pick one — and in doing so, we reshape the set of options that shows up the next day.

And so on, day after day.

We can keep making new decisions and still roll along more or less the same rut. Ten or twenty years later, the path we took to be a vast space of free choice may turn out to be surprisingly narrow. It’s just that the same driver has had their hands on the wheel almost the whole time — our usual life.

We could call this a decision attractor.

In dynamical systems theory, an attractor is a region a system tends to return to. Like a marble in a funnel: nudge it to the side, and it still wants to roll back down.

What’s more, even an attempt to choose something “completely at random” turns out to be not so random after all.

In 2025, researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the University of North Carolina and Yale ran three experiments in which people generated random numbers and picked random points. It turned out that every participant had their own stable quirks in how they tried to be random. Those quirks repeated across different tasks and held up even a year later. PubMed

Which makes for a funny thing: even when we try to act unpredictably, we stay fairly predictable.

And that’s exactly why I find the Randonautica experiment so interesting.

Strip away the mystical part, and the principle is simple: the system hands us a random coordinate, and we head somewhere we most likely would never have gone on our own.

At first glance — just a bit of fun. But suddenly, into our familiar chain of cause and effect drops an event whose origin has nothing to do with our life so far.

Normally: my history → my character → my preferences → my choice.

Here: a random coordinate → a new place → an event that most likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

We are literally inserting a small piece of outside randomness into our lives.

Say the coordinate leads us to an unfamiliar neighborhood. We stop for a coffee, get to talking with someone, meet someone else through them, and three years later we’re building a business together. Or we simply have a nice walk, which is, statistically, a bit more likely.

But in the first case, a trivial starting event has changed the whole tree of what comes next.

It’s a well-known property of complex systems: a tiny change in the initial conditions can lead to enormous differences far down the line.

Then again, no one’s stopping us from taking the mystical version too. I happen to like it when the world keeps a little room for mystery. But the scientific explanation is every bit as beautiful.

Our future may not be predetermined — yet still be heavily constrained by our past.

Most of the time, we choose from a set of possibilities we built ourselves through earlier decisions.

But now and then an outside push comes along — chance, another person, a move, a mistake, a trip, an experiment — and throws us onto an unlikely branch.

And once we’re there, we suddenly have access to a future that, from where we stood before, simply wasn’t on the agenda.

So the idea of “escaping one’s fate” can be put into perfectly rational terms: sometimes an outside disturbance is all it takes to break out of the trajectory our own past has laid down.

Or shorter still: sometimes, to change the future, we don’t need to know where to go.

It’s enough to go where we would never have gone on our own.

Here’s to climbing out of our usual rut every once in a while! 😎