If you’ve ended up on this page, it’s likely that shortly before, you came across one or more TikTok videos with the following caption: “My butterfly effect is.” A phrase followed by a few lines narrating how a small event from one’s past had a profound impact on personal life or career. Background music: “Plage Coquillage (First Kiss Song)” by Tao Mon Amour. The trend takes inspiration (and its name) from a physical-mathematical concept underlying chaos theory, aptly named the “butterfly effect.”
According to the Treccani encyclopedia, the expression is used to indicate that microscopic changes within a nonlinear dynamic system can lead to far-reaching consequences. The concept was first introduced by Edward Lorenz in 1972 during a conference titled “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” A metaphorical way of saying that a single action, though seemingly insignificant, can have much more significant repercussions than anticipated.
The same concept applies to real life. “If I had stayed home that evening, we wouldn’t be together now,” “If I hadn’t changed schools, I would never have met my best friend,” “If I hadn’t posted that video, I wouldn’t be in my dream job now.” And so on. Many are sharing their butterfly effects on TikTok, and in most cases, they revolve around matters of love and career milestones. But there are also those who reflect on episodes that had a negative, sometimes devastating impact: “If I had stayed with Dad that morning, he would still be with us today.”
In essence, while the butterfly effect teaches us to be more aware of small daily actions because we never know where they might lead, it also encourages us to live without making too many predictions about the future because not everything can be controlled. There is always a margin of error, a flap of wings, capable of changing everything and generating the unpredictable.
