Apparently, Everything is a theory.
I never imagined myself as the type of person to care so much about theories. To me, they were just interesting ideas I came across online. Everything changed because of my brother. He had a way of bringing theories into so many of our conversations, and I found it attractive. It made me start questioning things about life I had always taken for granted. Those conversations turned curiosity into a habit. Before I knew it, I found myself reading different theories, not just to know them, but to understand them. Maybe, if I’m being honest, to also sound as sexy as my brother whenever he brings them up in our conversations.
This piece is a collection of some of the theories I’ve explored, the questions they’ve raised, and the perspectives they’ve offered.
What I didn’t expect was how easily a theory could make something ordinary feel unfamiliar. A conversation, a habit, a memory, a relationship, even something as simple as the way I make decisions could suddenly become something worth questioning. The more I read, the more I realised that theories aren’t necessarily about finding the right answer. Sometimes, they’re about making you uncomfortable enough to question the answers you already have. And to be honest, I think that’s what drew me in.
Illusion of Choice
Of all the theories I’ve come across, this is probably my favourite. It was also one of the first ones my brother explained to me, and naturally, he used girls and relationships as his example.
The idea was simple: sometimes, we think we have more choices than we actually do.
Take relationships, for example. Imagine you’re with someone you genuinely like. Things are good. You have no major reason to leave, but then you start thinking about the possibility that there might be someone better out there. Someone prettier. Funnier. More interesting. Someone who might understand you better. Someone who might give you everything you didn’t even realise you wanted. And suddenly, the person you’re with is no longer just the person you’re choosing; they’re one option among many. The funny thing is, you don’t actually know if those other options are better. You haven’t experienced them. You have only imagined them. Yet somehow, the possibility of something better can make what you already have feel less valuable. That was what fascinated me about the “illusion of choice”. We can become so focused on the options we could have that we stop appreciating the one we actually already have, and maybe that’s the illusion. Maybe it’s you just believing that having more options automatically means having more freedom.
My brother’s example made me start noticing it everywhere. We do it with relationships, careers, friendships, even the smallest decisions. We keep wondering whether there is a better option somewhere else, as if life is an endless catalogue and the perfect choice is always just one more option away.
But how many choices do we really make freely? How many are influenced by what we’re shown, what we’ve been taught to want, what other people have, or what we think we should want?
That question was what made this theory stick with me. Because sometimes, I wonder if we’re actually choosing between possibilities or simply choosing between the possibilities we’ve been allowed to see.
Butterfly Effect
I learnt about the butterfly effect from my brother while we were watching Sinners. Somewhere around the point where the whole vampire incident began, he paused to explain the theory to me.
The idea is pretty simple: a small decision or event can set off a chain of consequences that eventually becomes something much bigger than the original action.
He used what was happening in the movie to explain it. When the man and his wife decided to protect that guy instead of allowing the townspeople to take him away, it seemed like a relatively small decision. They were simply trying to protect someone, but that one decision allowed everything that followed to happen. What fascinated me was how far the consequences travelled. The people making that decision had no idea what it would eventually lead to. They couldn’t have known that their choice would contribute to events that would affect Smoke and his twin, who were in a completely different place and had nothing to do with that initial decision.
That was when the theory really made sense to me. We tend to think of our actions as belonging to the moment in which we make them. I decide something, something happens, and then I move on, but the butterfly effect suggests that things aren’t always that neatly contained. A decision can create another decision. That decision can create another event. And that event can affect someone who wasn’t even part of the original situation.
It made me think about how strange life is. Sometimes, a person enters a room because they decided to take a different route home. Someone meets someone else because they happened to sit in a particular seat. You make one seemingly insignificant decision on a random Tuesday, and years later, you’re living a life that might never have existed if you’d chosen differently. And the strangest part is that we rarely know which moments will matter. We only recognise the importance of certain decisions when we look backwards. At the time, they just seemed like ordinary choices.
Maybe that’s what I find most fascinating about the butterfly effect: we are constantly creating consequences that we cannot see yet.
A small choice can remain small, or it can become the beginning of something much bigger. And we usually don’t get to know which one it will be.
Invincible Guest Theory
Get Anjolaoluwa’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
My brother explained the Invincible Guest Theory to me while I was preparing for my cousin’s wedding.
I was worried about the shoes I was going to wear. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember being concerned about how they looked and probably how other people would see me. And somehow, that became the perfect opportunity for him to explain something to me.
He made me realise that while I was worrying about my shoes, someone else, somewhere, was probably worrying about their hair. Another person was probably concerned about their teeth. Someone was probably changing their outfit for the third time, wondering if they looked good enough. We were all preparing to attend the same event, but we were each occupied with ourselves. And that was the idea.
We spend so much time worrying about how other people would see us that we forget they are doing the same thing. We imagine people paying attention to our flaws, noticing the little things we wish were different, and judging the details we have spent so much time worrying about. Meanwhile, they are probably too occupied with their own insecurities to give ours the attention we imagine. This is what makes you the Invincible guest.
Think about it. How often do you leave an event remembering what someone wore, how they walked, or whether their shoes matched their outfit? Unless something particularly catches your attention, you probably don’t remember much. You were too busy being there, experiencing the event, and thinking about yourself, and other people are doing the same. Perhaps that is one of the most liberating things to realise. You can spend an entire morning worrying about your appearance, only to arrive and discover that nobody is examining you as closely as you examined yourself in the mirror.
We make ourselves the subject of an audience that often exists more vividly in our minds than in reality.
The Invincible Guest Theory reminds us that we are allowed to exist without constantly monitoring ourselves. We can wear the shoes, take the pictures, join the conversation, dance, laugh, and enjoy the moment without wondering what every person in the room thinks of us. And that’s because while you are busy worrying about how you appear to other people, they are busy worrying about how they appear to you.
Maybe we have been giving other people’s imagined opinions too much power over our lives. Maybe we have been so busy trying to be seen in the right way that we have forgotten to actually live. Maybe, just maybe, we are all a little more invisible than we think.
Placebo Effect
My brother explained the placebo effect to me, and this time he used religious beliefs and everyday situations to help me understand it.
The idea is that sometimes believing something will work can actually affect how we feel or respond, even when the thing itself isn’t necessarily causing the change. A simple example is an exam. Imagine you’re really scared of an exam, you’ve been stressing about it for days, and then someone who has already written it tells you, “It wasn’t hard.” Suddenly, the same exam that had you so worried doesn’t feel as serious anymore. You become more confident, feel less anxious, and start believing you can actually do well.
The exam hasn’t changed. The questions are still going to be the same. The only thing that changed was what you believed about it.
My brother’s explanation using religious beliefs made it even more interesting to me. It made me realise just how powerful belief can be, and how much our expectations can influence the way we experience things.
Sometimes, what changes our experience isn’t what happened. It’s what we believe will happen.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias was one I came across on my own while reading about the way we form opinions and make sense of things. I don’t remember exactly what I was looking for when I found it, but once I understood the idea, I started noticing it in myself almost immediately.
The idea is that once we believe something, we naturally look for things that support that belief. At the same time, we tend to overlook, dismiss, or explain away things that contradict it. It sounds pretty obvious when you put it that way, but I don’t think we realise how often we do it. Imagine deciding that someone doesn’t like you. They take hours to reply to your message, and you immediately take it as proof. Then they reply and explain that they were busy. Instead of thinking, “Oh, maybe I was wrong,” you might start looking for another reason not to believe them. Maybe they could have replied earlier. Maybe they’re just making excuses. Meanwhile, every small thing they do that seems cold suddenly becomes another piece of evidence.
The same thing happens with opinions. You can have an idea about a person before you really know them, and then everything they do starts fitting into that idea. If they do something nice, you might think it’s unusual. If they do something you don’t like, it confirms everything you already thought about them.
What I found interesting was that confirmation bias doesn’t necessarily mean we’re intentionally lying to ourselves. Most of the time, we’re probably not even aware we’re doing it. We genuinely feel like we’re just paying attention to what is happening. But if we’re only paying attention to the things that fit what we already believe, then we’re not really seeing the whole picture. That made me think about how easily our beliefs can become filters. Once we decide what something means, we start seeing the world through that decision. And the more evidence we find, the more certain we become that we were right in the first place.
There are so many other theories I could have written about, and honestly, I probably will keep discovering more. But for now, these are the few that stayed with me enough to make it onto this piece. What I like about theories is that they don’t always give you answers; sometimes, they just make the questions harder to ignore. The more I read, the more I realise that even the way I understand the world is shaped by what I have experienced, what I have been told, and what I have chosen to believe. Maybe some of the things we call facts are just theories we have become comfortable with. Maybe even everything I have written here is just another theory. So, if everything we know is only a theory, then what, exactly, do we know?
