Time & Perspective Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland’s line is a dare dressed up as a shrug: if every moment is a coincidence, then all our cherished narratives of destiny and personal “arcs” are just post-production edits. The blunt absolutism (“every single”) does the work of a manifesto, while the word “coincidence” sneaks in a double charge. It can mean randomness, yes, but it also implies an uncanny fit, the eerie feeling that unrelated things keep landing on the same square. Coupland lives in that tension: a world that’s statistically indifferent yet emotionally loaded.

The specific intent isn’t to flatten life into nihilism; it’s to puncture the way late-modern culture markets meaning. In a media ecosystem that turns ordinary experience into content, we’re trained to treat our days as a story with foreshadowing, a playlist with an algorithmic “for you.” Coupland’s sentence refuses the algorithm. It says: stop confusing pattern-recognition with purpose.

The subtext is generational. His work has long hovered around the psychic weather of post-Boomer life: prosperity without certainty, choice without grounding, connection without closeness. “Coincidence” becomes the signature feeling of the networked age, where your most intimate turns (a breakup, a job offer, a diagnosis) arrive via systems that don’t know you, only your data. The phrase also carries a quiet liberation. If meaning isn’t pre-assigned, you’re not failing a script you never agreed to. You get to build significance after the fact, not discover it waiting for you like a prize.