Showerthought: I found out most 'chance' meetings happen within a 5 mile radius

I was reading that study from MIT about human mobility patterns and how we tend to stay in small zones. It said something like 70 percent of random encounters happen within 3 miles of home or work. That hit me because I always thought big travel brought random meetings, but really it's just my daily coffee shop run or the gas station I use twice a week. Has anyone else noticed their best chance encounters were super close to home?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_mila5d ago

Oh for crying out loud, you mean all those dramatic movie scenes where strangers lock eyes across a crowded airport in another country are basically lies? I guess my most romantic chance encounter was when I ran into my neighbor at the local grocery store while we were both squeezing avocados. She was buying the same sad discount chicken I was, and now we've been married for 12 years. So yeah, the universe really just works at the Circle K on Maple Street, not on some grand exotic adventure.

victorhill5d ago

Hey, I gotta push back on that a little. I mean, your story is great and all, but I think there's something to the whole exotic chance encounter thing. My buddy met his wife on a train in the middle of rural Spain after she asked him if his copy of "Norwegian Wood" was any good. They spent three days traveling together and now they live in Barcelona with kids. On the flip side, I've also seen people force the whole "destiny" thing hard and end up with someone who just happened to be at the same airport bar. Your mileage may vary, but I've seen both sides work out, just in different ways.