It Didn’t Have to Be
How a Coffee Mug Explains the Precarious Nature of Existence
Have you ever realized that the universe could have ticked along quite happily without you?
If one of your distant ancestors had fallen into a pit, or chosen to court someone else, the space you occupy right now would be completely empty. You are here, reading this sentence, only because an improbable chain of events happened to fall into place. Change just one link, and you might never have existed.
Philosophers have a word for this precarious state of affairs: contingency. Something is contingent if it didn’t have to exist, or if things could easily have been otherwise. Its counterpart is necessity — what cannot fail to exist, or what cannot be any other way.
To most people, these sound like heavy, dry academic terms; however you don’t need a degree in philosophy to understand them. In fact, you can find their entire architectural blueprint sitting quietly on your kitchen table, right next to the kettle.
Two Flavours of the Unnecessary
Think of your favourite coffee mug.
It is there, familiar, probably with a small chip near the rim or a faint coffee ring near the top. Yet it allows you to confidently make a philosophical claim: “it didn’t have to exist.” In other words, your mug is contingent. The universe would carry on just as well without it ever having come into being.
Consider how that particular mug arrived in your hands. It is an artefact, a product someone designed to solve a simple problem: holding hot coffee without burning our fingers. Someone spun wet clay, fired it in a kiln, boxed the finished piece, shipped it, and someone set it on a shelf where you (or someone who gifted it to you) bought it.
Your mug owes its existence to deliberate human decisions. Had the potter run out of clay that morning, or had you chosen the blue ceramic cup next to it in the shop, this specific object would never have reached your kitchen. Its contingency is rooted in human purpose because someone decided to bring it into this world.
Now, lift your eyes from the mug and consider yourself.
You, too, are contingent. Nothing in the fundamental laws of nature mandates that you must be breathing right now. You could easily never have been.
Yet your contingency feels completely different from that of the mug.
You were not engineered to keep hot coffee in a container. You were not fired in a kiln. Your existence is the outcome of an unbroken, four-billion-year chain of biological survival and sheer circumstance.
Every single one of your ancestors had to survive long enough to pass on their genes. A fatal illness in fourteenth-century Europe, an icy slip on a mountain path, and the branch snaps. In fact, two particular people had to meet in an exact window of time, and one single, microscopic cell out of hundreds of millions had to win a sprint race. Alter the timing of a single afternoon decades ago, and your parents might never have met.
In summary, the coffee mug is contingent because human beings willed it into existence; it exists because someone designed it. You are contingent because reality stumbled into you; you exist by circumstance.
Neither the mug nor you is necessary. The universe would continue to expand and gravity would continue to pull if either of you were subtracted from the room.
The Shift from Things to Propositions
So far, we have treated contingent and necessary as descriptions of things that happen to exist versus things that must exist.
Philosophy gets much more interesting when we move from the things we look at to the statements we make about them. Objects simply exist or do not; it is our claims about them that are true or false, and truth comes in the exact same two flavours.
A contingent truth is a claim that happens to match the world right now, but could have been otherwise without breaking any rules of logic.
Suppose you say: “My coffee mug is blue and sits twenty centimetres from the edge of the kitchen table.” This is true right now, but the colour and location are accidental properties. If you paint the mug white or slide it across the table, the statement suddenly becomes false.
A necessary truth, by contrast, is an unshakeable feature of reality. It is true here, true on Mars, and true in any alternate universe you could imagine.
For example, consider the claim: “My mug cannot be both completely whole and completely shattered at the exact same moment.” A mug can be whole, or it can be broken, but it cannot be both at once, therefore this statement is always true. You don’t need to measure the ceramic or test it in a lab to verify it. Even though the mug itself is a fragile, accidental clump of baked clay, the rules governing its physical limits are absolute. The object is contingent, and the physical laws governing it are necessary.
Now, turn the same lens on yourself.
Suppose I assert: “You are currently sitting quietly while reading this essay.” That is a contingent truth. You could stand up, or close your eyes, and the claim would become false, so its truth depends entirely on your actions.
Now consider this: “You cannot be both alive and biologically dead at this exact moment.” That is a necessary truth. You can dye your hair or change your posture, but you cannot negotiate your way around the law of non-contradiction (something cannot be true and false at the same time and in the same sense).
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Even though you are an ephemeral, contingent creature, your existence is bound by necessary, natural laws.
Mirroring the Mirror
At this point, we have built a clean, thinking model: Objects can be contingent (the mug, yourself); Statements about them can be contingent (the mug is blue; you are reading) or necessary (the mug cannot be whole and broken at the same time; you cannot be simultaneously alive and dead).
Now, what happens if we turn this philosophical tool back upon itself?
Take this claim: “Every human existence is contingent.”
We know it is true of you, of me, and of everyone who has ever lived. But what kind of truth is it? Is it a contingent truth or a necessary truth?
The moment we ask this, we are no longer just examining the mug or our family tree. The concept of contingency is turning around to examine its own reflection, and depending on which philosophical perspective you adopt, you get two fascinating, completely different answers.
Answer 1: It is a Necessary Truth (The Essentialist View)
From this angle, the answer seems obvious: Of course it is necessary. It couldn’t be any other way. Why? Because contingency is baked directly into the very definition of what it means to be human.
A human being is not an eternal, abstract concept like the number seven or a perfect, unchangeable geometric form. A human is a biological organism made of chemical elements and cells. By definition, a living physical creature depends on outside causes: parents to give it life, air to sustain it, and food from its environment.
Anything that depends on outside conditions to exist is, by definition, contingent. Remove the air, and we die.
From this viewpoint, a “necessary human” (a person who exists entirely of their own power, who had no beginning and cannot die) is a contradiction in terms, like a square circle. If an entity existed necessarily, it wouldn’t be human at all; it would be something else entirely, like an eternal law of physics or an uncaused prime mover.
Therefore, for the essentialist, the claim is a necessary truth. In every possible universe, if something is human, it must be contingent.
Answer 2: It is a Contingent Truth (The Empirical View)
Just as that explanation feels settled, another philosophical voice steps in and asks: Are you sure?
How did we arrive at the idea that all humans are contingent? Well, we looked around, consulted history as well as evolutionary biology, and noticed that all humans are born, live, and eventually die.
Yet in philosophy, treating observation as an iron law of necessity is a known risk. Just because every swan we have ever seen is white doesn’t mean a black swan is logically impossible. Are we stating an absolute rule of pure reason, or are we just describing how biology happens to operate on our planet?
Consider these two challenges.
First, think about strict determinism, in the tradition of thinkers like Spinoza. If every event in the cosmos follows from prior physical laws with unbroken, mathematical necessity, then nothing in cosmic history could ever have unfolded differently. In that kind of universe, “contingency” is just a polite word for human ignorance; we call an event accidental simply because we do not know all its prior causes. If that is true, you aren’t an accident at all; your birth was as inevitable as the sunrise. The claim that your existence is contingent might not be necessary; it might not even be true!
Second, consider the limits of what is conceivable. Could a universe exist where a conscious, living human being exists necessarily, perhaps sustained eternally by that imaginary world’s fundamental physics? If that scenario is logically coherent in even one remote, hypothetical world, then our statement fails the test of strict necessity. It is not an eternal law of logic, but merely a contingent fact of our world: a description of our fragile biology, rather than an unalterable rule of reality.
What Does It All Mean?
When you place two mirrors face-to-face, the reflection stretches away into an endless, receding hallway. That is what happens when you take a concept like contingency and test it against itself.
We began with ordinary things. We picked up a coffee mug and saw that it was contingent (a simple piece of baked clay shaped by human hands for a specific daily purpose). We looked at ourselves and recognized our own fragility (a conscious life hanging on a precarious thread of historical and biological chance).
But the moment we tried to turn that fragility into an absolute law (insisting that human life must be contingent) we discovered that we cannot step outside our own minds to inspect reality from above. The categories we use inherit their meaning from the perspective we choose, whether we view the world through biological evolution, mechanical determinism, or pure conceptual definitions.
Now, bring your attention back to your room.
There is the mug, resting quietly on the kitchen table with coffee cooling inside it. You are sitting beside it, pondering questions that no law of physics requires you to ask. Neither of you was necessary. In an hour, the mug might slip and shatter; in a century or two, your life might be a distant, unremembered string of events.
You may judge this unsettling, though, in fact, it is rather grounding. Acknowledging that you are contingent simply means that every morning you wake up, and every thought you entertain, is a remarkable, unscripted stroke of luck in a universe that easily could have carried on without you.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Originally published at https://laurentcailliette.substack.com on October 21, 2026.
