The Butterfly Effect: The Paradox of Life

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you made this decision or that decision, went down this route or that route? What would you be doing now? Would you be who you want to be? It’s a common question, asked by many, and although it has ignited deep conversations with either other people or with yourself, it’s something that you can’t but think about.

The Butterfly Effect, for those that don’t know, is commonly associated with time travel: A person goes back in time and accidentally changes something in the past, for example, stepping on a butterfly. That butterfly is then dismissed as something insignificant, it is a butterfly after all, what can go wrong? But when they return to present time, they discover that the world they used to know is gone and instead, something drastically different is in its place. Of course, you don’t have to only step on a butterfly to change the future, you can change anything for it to have huge consequences. Another name for this is the Ripple Effect, for it is essentially the same as throwing a stone into a body of water and watching the ripples expand outwards, never stopping until they come into contact with the outer edges.

That is essentially what I want to talk about today, how the Butterfly Effect doesn’t have to be connected specifically to time travel for its concept to work. Every decision you make, every direction you take when going home from work, every person you meet and speak to, can have a dramatic change in your life and who you are as a person. Whether that change is for the better or worse, only we can decide. If you work your way back, focus on those small decisions that you made along the way to a certain place, or just in general, what happened afterwards, and is it connected to what you are doing today? Just remember, everything you do has led you to reading this article right now.

How the Butterfly Effect has affected my life is what I want to talk about today, and don’t worry, I won’t be explaining my entire life’s story as that would get rather boring very quickly. No, I’m going to work my way backwards to the point where I feel the journey towards my writing this article actually started, where all those decisions or events that happened specifically directed me to now. It’s quite surreal if I think about it too long, and does create a tangent discussion about the existence of fate and, or destiny, but I won’t get into that now. Maybe next time.

One of my closest friends introduced me to a company known as RoosterTeeth. They make content for popular video sharing website, Youtube, and over recent years, their success has magnified greatly. At the time, they were making Trials Files, a video series dedicated to showcasing the weird and wonderful levels that their viewers have made in the Motorcross game, Trials Evolution. At first, I really wasn’t interested in purchasing the game, but I did come back every week to see what awesomeness each video had in store. However, being naturally creative, the imaginative side of myself started to want the game so that I could build my own levels. I did toy with the idea to begin with, wondering whether I actually wanted the game or just wanted it because of that video series. In the end, as you may have already worked out, I got the game. I played through the many levels, setting the best high scores that I could possibly achieve at the time before I gradually became better at it. It was then that I realised I was getting bored of competing with myself all the time, and so I moved to competing with other people online. The game asked me for an account username.

With every other username that I had created before then, I entered the most generic username there could ever be: My name, Antony Hudson. I felt it was high time that I broke that tradition and went for something a bit more upbeat, and a bit more epic. But nothing came to mind. I sat staring at the login screen for several minutes before I gave up and started to enter my name. For the first time in a very long while, my creativity didn’t help me. But then, before I hit the enter button, a light bulb illuminated over my head. To this day, I have no idea what led me to think of that idea, but an idea it was and I went for it. I opened up Google Chrome, searched for a website that creates anagrams from the words that you enter, and entered my name – because I didn’t know what else – and TonyHadNouns was the first answer to appear. ‘That’ll do,’ I said the moment I saw it. I entered that as my username, and, as predicted, the game accepted it. It was unique after all.

Once I had completed playing the game and I shut down and went to bed, I started to think about how coincidental that anagram really was. I mean, I’m a natural born writer. I love writing. I had written many fan fiction stories. So it’s strange that my name anagrammatised into something referencing words. It wasn’t a surprise to me that, that quickly became my new generic username, and the more that I used it, the more I fell in love with just how specific it really is. That’s how I got the name that you see at the top of this blog. Now, I’m going to describe the events that led up to the creation of the blog itself.

Before I considered getting my manuscript, Sector 22: Zoey, published, I was introduced to the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2012, which gave a detailed explanation about all things publishing. If you wanted to get your play published, or you film or TV script or your poetry published, then this book will have everything you need to know to do just that. And I read the entire section on book publishing from beginning to end, absorbing every word. I never really admitted beforehand that one of my dreams was to get something that I’ve written published, and when I was practically shown the entrance gates, I went for it and, long story short, my book was published. The Yearbook does recommend that, if you want to get your book out there as much as possible, then setting up a blog is the best way to do that since it will give people the chance to see your writing style, among many other useful tips that will help anyone get their work out there. I never really thought that I needed to do a blog since I sincerely believed that the art of blogging was dead and buried. ‘No one blogs anymore,’ I thought, and so I never set one up.

Then I left college and I was hunting for a job. I signed up for jobseekers as soon as I could and searched as best I could to get a job that best suited me. It’s suffice to say that it was one of the hardest challenges I ever had to do for no one accepted my CV, and the one place that did give me an interview didn’t hire me. Anyway, another long story short, I was eventually hired in the retail business and I couldn’t have been more happy. Doing retail allows my mind to be free, so to speak. The many people that you meet each day can lead to character creations, the many random scenarios that can, and did happen easily gave me the inspiration for many scenarios in my writings. But then it went all wrong. They let me go. So now I was back hunting for a job. I struck lucky and managed to find one within a week of leaving my last one, which was really surprising to say the least.

I was sitting in my bedroom, thinking about what I really wanted to do, and of course, I wanted to be a writer, but by hunting for a job and working, I unintentionally alienated myself from that world. I was essentially sitting back and waiting for things to be successful, which is never going to happen. I had to do more. I had to get my name out there. And the idea of creating a blog came crawling back stronger than ever. I leapt at the chance and haven’t looked back since. When I was asked what I would like to call my blog, it had to be, TonyHadNouns, and here I am now, writing this article.

So there we have it. My story of how this blog came to be. I’m immensely proud of myself for what I am doing and how this blog is going. And I cannot be more pleased at everyone who looked at my blog and read something that I’ve written. It blows my mind every single time when I see just how many views it has already. I don’t want to sound as if I’m bragging or anything, I really don’t. I just want to say that I’m in a state of disbelief that so many people actually want to read something that I’ve written; I don’t think I’m ever truly going to be able to process that fully, and for that I want to say a massive thank you.

For those that are wondering whether you are heading in the right direction, whether you are making all the right decisions and whether you will reach that destination; just remember that you can’t really make any wrong decisions. You may be saying that you most certainly can, but if you make the decisions that you know will make you happy, you will get there, no matter what. And if you believe in yourself when making the decisions you happy, then everything will be alright. There will be hard times ahead, you will start doubting yourself, that’s just how our brains are wired, but always stay true to yourself. Always keep pursuing what makes you happy, and those hard times will start getting easier, I can assure you of that.

Here’s to all those decisions we have yet to make, to all those people we have yet to meet, to all those scenarios that have yet to happen. You never know, that decision, that person, that event will be the one that will change your life forever.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadnouns)