One hears from, say, people who got fired from a job, but then that indirectly led them to self-employment; one hears from those who stayed in a job for 20-30 years, but then wondered what would have happened had they taken that gap year; and one wonders if things would have ended up the same way, but with a different route.

You'll know your own little paths/deviations (it's interesting what you say about whether you'd have followed your dad into town planning). It does seem, with the benefit of hindsight, to envision a certain path if things had been different, but would the destination been the same, anyway, just in a longer and more indirect way?

Back in the 90s I had a job offer to teach at the law school of UC Berkeley. Had I taken up that offer, I would not have married my wife and none of my kids would exist and... and... that's enough of a change from what happened, for sure. Would anybody today be wishing me a Happy Father's Day?

Earlier than that, fresh out of law school, I was working for one of -- yeesh -- Trump's main attorneys, but I couldn't stomach the place, so I quit. Gave up what would've been a major paycheck in exchange for sanity.

Then there was the time when I was 6 years old and a strange car stopped in front of our driveway, the door opened, and a voice from the darkness invited me in for candy, and I moved toward the door... when suddenly I was yanked back, thrown to ground, and after only remember my older brother yelling for me to run into the house.

You were born in West Brom. Your dad was a town planner & you were wondering whether you might follow him there. Suppose you didn’r Move & worked for Sandwell or Walsall councils.

I could be living in a town where JB might have had a part in designing the plan. Bet it would have looked better than it does now. Just saying

Same here! I sometimes say to people half-jokingly that I owe my life to Hitler, which sometimes provokes confused reactions - but technically it's absolutely true, and it does illustrate the Butterfly Effect in action.

I've told the story before here, but my grandfather on my mother's side was a US soldier stationed in Eastern Europe during WWII, where he met my Hungarian grandmother in a labor camp. The rest is (my) history.