I try not to believe in ridiculous bullshit, but ridiculous bullshit seems determined to try its hardest to make me believe in it. Just like shooting a movie in a haunted mental hospital and having to put up with ghosts inconsiderately screwing up sound takes even when you don’t believe in ghosts, I’m the last person in the world to believe in nonsense like the universe trying to ‘tell me something’. So it really pisses me off when the universe ignores my chosen user settings of ‘no implausible nonsense’ and feeds me a never-ending diet of implausible coincidences.

Latest one: ever heard of Oliver Burkeman? I hadn’t, particularly, but in my recent avoidance of social media I’ve become a lot more prone to reading free Kindle extracts for books that might ultimately interest me, and thus found myself reading a short extract from his new book. Within the first few pages, he referred to another of his books, entitled Four Thousand Weeks, which at that point I’d never heard of. Fair enough. I finished up the extract and looked for something completely different to read.

The next thing I chose to read that day was Joe Hill’s fantastic short story Ushers. A completely different type of text to the Oliver Burkeman one, obviously. Fiction rather than non-fiction. A US writer rather than a British one. Not even the same format of short-form writing; this was a complete short story rather than an extract from a long-form piece of writing. I got to page 6 (on my rather zoomed-in formatting) and stopped a little short.

It referenced someone grabbing a paperback. The paperback the character grabbed was Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

This was a weird enough coincidence that I mentioned it to friends at the pub that night. Mentioned that, since Four Thousand Weeks is a reference to life expectancy maybe the universe was trying to tell me something. I laughed about it a little nervously, not entirely sure that it was a strong enough anecdote to share. Two books referencing the same other title is a fairly long shot, sure, but not exactly the stuff of impossibility.

Monday rolled around, and I was prepping a session about concise writing for some students. As I’m sometimes want to do, I grabbed an ebook I hadn’t read before to hopefully grab a fresh insight or quote that I hadn’t previously shared with my students. I grabbed Very Good Copy by Eddie Shleyner.

I only grabbed the Kindle sample, not the whole book. I flicked through the first few pages and…

…yeah, you guessed it.

A massive reference to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

Jesus Christ. Three Kindle downloads on the trot, all from entirely different genres, all referencing the same book that I’d never actually heard of before.

I’ve read stuff about unlikely coincidences before, of course. I’m aware of the way that the brain can be primed to notice things it wouldn’t otherwise notice. If you notice one bright yellow car, you’ll start seeing more of them than you ever believed possible. On the other hand, I can’t ever remember ever having experienced quite such a strong sense that the universe was attempting some form of cosmic product placement. It was really tough to ignore.

Obviously, I bought it. Blazed through it in about a day. It’s a really good book. Life is, indeed, short. Sometimes, you need to stop and smell the coincidences.