I was getting philosophical the other day for the opposite reason, looking at all the things that went slightly different than they would have been expected to go, or that I had previously wished had not gone "wrong," but if they had happened the "right" way, we never would have met.
I don't think Google's spying can help me identify those, but in the end I'm grateful for the winding path that led here, even if I didn't love it along the way!
Think of all the causal paths since the beginning of the universe that led to your birth. Even the smallest difference would have resulted in what you are now being a different person, if you existed at all. Just one atom in a supernova explosion billions of years ago having a slightly different trajectory ...
With all due respect, we don't know that. Knowing this as a fact would mean provably demonstrating the degree of instability at any instant of the universe, essentially its whole trajectory in a potentially infinite (and at least incredibly high) dimensional space.
It's just as possible that for a given person, molecules could have changed somewhere or even "bigger" events could have happened one or more times, and their existence would have remained. Automatically assuming a chaos of infinite possibilities with completely divergent universe is potentially reducing the complexity of the world and its countless smaller stabilizing feedback loops that locally do reduce divergences. Otherwise we'd never do anything for fear of spontaneously exploding or other funny things.
I don't think Google's spying can help me identify those, but in the end I'm grateful for the winding path that led here, even if I didn't love it along the way!