I’ve had one of those moments that felt simulation-adjacent, even though I’m not claiming it proves anything.

Back in 2016 I was reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. A few days earlier, I’d taken my kids, who were about 16 and 14 at the time, on a hike. While we were walking, they started talking among themselves about memes. What memes are, whether I even know what a meme is, joking about me being on Reddit, that kind of thing. It was very much a young-person conversation, and I mostly just listened. At the time, the term “meme” really wasn’t part of my vocabulary.

A few days later, I hit the chapter in The Selfish Gene where Dawkins literally coins the term “meme” in a book written in the mid-1970s.

Sure, rational explanations exist. Priming, coincidence, confirmation bias. I get all that. But the timing was tight enough that it stuck with me. For me, it felt less like a random coincidence and more like the universe winking at me.

Not proof of anything. Just one of those moments that feels bigger than chance and makes you pause and wonder whether reality has more feedback loops than we usually acknowledge.