Congratulations! You have successfully unraveled the metaphor. You may now return to your unexamined life and change nothing!

Most people are trapped in time loops of some sort, that feel repetitive and unchangeable. And many are like “what’s the point of doing this small thing or that small thing, it’s not going to do anything significant or matter.”

The hindsight part of this doesn’t matter. More the mindset that hey, maybe the tiny things you do WILL cause a change. It’s a possibility. Isn’t that better than living the same reality anyway, being too jaded to even see if something can give?

Seriously, people here seem to think the butterfly effect has something to do with effort, but it's nothing of the sort. It's about chaos which cannot be predicted.

Say I went for a jog one morning and wound up getting mugged. It went poorly, and I was shot and killed. My life ended, and that sent cause and effect ripples which affected other things in the world.

Now say instead I felt lazy that morning, so instead I went for a jog that afternoon. I was never at the same place and time as that mugger. I lived on never conceiving this other potential timeline, and I went on to do things which drastically affected the world in a different way.

Obviously this allegory is a bit hyperbolic, but you should get my point. The only thing I changed was the time of day I went for a jog, it had drastically different outcomes, and I would have had no foresight and therefore no real control over those outcomes. It just comes down to luck, causality, and chaos.

In order to harness the butterfly effect in the way /r/getmotivated would like you to, one would need to be supernaturally prescient, which is absurd.

I think the type of people who frequent this subreddit and find it helpful tend to believe they are much more in control of their lives than they really are, and suggesting otherwise is upsetting to them.

I would probably do both those these things tbh

Or is calling things dumb with a positive potential actually dumb?