We all know that TikTok is a powerful entity that can introduce us to everything from a new pop princess to a cool recipe. TikTok trends can also create moments for reflection as users recap their lives and how in the world they ended up where they did. TikTok’s newest reflection trend, “the butterfly effect,” comes from chaos theory and is all about how unpredictable your current situation really is — but it seems like everyone’s doing it wrong.
The basics of the butterfly effect trend are this: you describe how something small impacted your entire life. Whether the story of choice for a user is how they ended up in their current relationship, at their current job, or in their industry of interest, the idea is to realize just how little control you have over where you end up. Unfortunately, a lot of the people participating in this trend appear to be missing a key element of what makes the butterfly effect part of the chaos theory it pulls from. Here’s the TL;DR: the butterfly effect is not about what choices you made or didn’t make. It’s about the wild stuff completely out of your control that somehow led to a completely unexpected situation.
Some TikTok users are confusing this phenomenon with, simply put, cause and effect.
Since some TikTokers are doing the whole trend all wrong, others are meme-ing the misunderstanding. (And it’s hilarious.)
WHAT IS THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT?
The butterfly effect was first named by Edward Lorenz, a meteorology professor at MIT, way back in the 1960s. The basic idea was that there are so many variables in nature that we can’t predict the full impact of a particular event. In the original example, the idea is that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas. Mathematicians then used Lorenz’s idea to found chaos theory, which is all about predicting the unpredictable.
Here’s an example of this in the context of the TikTok trend. You’re applying for a summer job when your internet cuts out. Needing to find a place to connect, you head to your usual coffee shop with free wifi, only to find it’s inaccessible due to construction in the area that day. With that, you decide to try a completely different spot. There, you see an ad for a job in a completely different industry, but that meets your availability and your qualifications. You decide to apply there and find that the hiring manager went to the same high school as you — cut to ten years later, and now you’ve been promoted at that company.
What makes that the butterfly effect is that you had no control over the fact that your internet cut out or that you needed to find another location with free wifi. If you had made the conscious decision to look for opportunities outside of your preferred industry, that wouldn’t be the butterfly effect — it would just be plain old cause-and-effect. When your decisions didn’t lead you to where you are, but some random series of events did — that’s the butterfly effect.