<p>Do you ever see something or do something and believe it represents something completely unrelated to it? Or that it somehow is a predictor of something unrelated?</p>
<p>Sometimes when I wake up in the morning and I stub my toe , I think that it signifies I will have an awful day for the rest of the day.
Or if catch the bus, it means that I did well on my exam.<br>
Or if I throw out an old paper or old photo, I am starting a new chapter in my life.</p>
<p>I don’t know why I do this because I know it doesn’t mean anything. Anyone else do this or am I just weird?</p>
<p>Absolutely not. I think that we do to life what some literary critics do to, say, Ulysses. Certainly there’s an expansive palette of interpretations and allusions and allegories, a real depth of meaning, but by analyzing it too circumspectly, we end up drawing fanciful conclusions for which there is absolutely no basis in the text. What’s to say that if you stub your toe you’re going to have a bad day?</p>
<p>It’s one of those things that keeps us from making progress. Rather than thinking about the big picture, we hone in instead on the smallest, most insignificant of details. We micromanage the most basic unit of a broken system without so much as giving currency to the idea of a complete overhaul. So nothing changes.</p>
<p>a) a rather convincing argument for the existence of God
b) a testament to how easy it is to read meaning into things that aren’t meaningful, the natural culmination of eisegesis and a progression from human love for pattern recognition</p>