Jung, Synchronicity, Fame & the Meaning of It All

Over the past few days, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos with titles like “The Downfall of X” or “Why So-and-So Lost 91% of Their Followers.” What struck me most wasn’t the spectacle of internet gossip but the undercurrent of perceived altruism. We seem to collectively admire those who appear to sacrifice personal status for the sake of someone else. From an evolutionary standpoint, this echoes familiar theories of reciprocal altruism: there’s a strong selective advantage when individuals cooperate, even if cooperation sometimes relies more on optics than genuine benevolence. There are models for these things. I’m enthralled by the way a mere suggestion of humility could transform public perception and generate political and social capital.

Eventually, this curiosity led me back to Jung’s notion of synchronicity and the question of how we assign meaning to coincidence. Jung’s argument suggests that our experiences are more than mechanistic chains of cause and effect. As a scientist with a background in evolutionary biology, I recognize the materialist underpinnings of human behavior—our cognitive processes shaped by genetic and environmental pressures, our free will quite possibly an emergent illusion. Yet I also recognize that my subjective experience of meaning is both profound and irreducible. I can’t help but live as if events carry significance, even when a purely physical worldview might reduce them to particles interacting in deterministic or random ways.

And so I find myself in a paradox, one shared by many thinkers across disciplines. On the one hand, free will may be just a product of neural complexity—like a race car pinned to its track, every turn in principle predictable. On the other, the moment-to-moment feeling of choice and insight is no less real for being hard to reconcile with strict determinism. Sam Harris has argued that a life aligned with well-being is a reasonable guiding principle, whether or not free will exists in any absolute sense. This pragmatic view dovetails with both my scientific understanding of cooperation’s evolutionary value and my personal sense that life must be lived as though infused with meaning. If there is a cosmic designer—or if reality is merely an indifferent matrix of natural laws—my role remains to navigate the labyrinth with curiosity, compassion, and a willingness to keep questioning. In the end, maybe the hunt for meaning itself is what elevates us, bridging the gap between what is biologically determined and what is existentially discovered.