On a stroll through the West Village last summer, a small group of New Yorkers brought together by a shared sense of wonder and curiosity looked down. Yellow paint lined a grate — a virtually Pantone-perfect color match for the sneakers worn by one attendee and the sandals worn by another.
It wasn’t a big deal, just a little moment, a minor curiosity — a coincidence. And it’s exactly the sort of reason the members of the Association Association began coming together for monthly meetups and strolls through the boroughs a few months earlier. With a keen eye for detail, they look for and revel in the tiny connections most of us miss in our day-to-day lives.
“I was interested in finding the kind of people who would want to go explore new parts of the city and look at the world in slightly off-kilter, different ways,” said Emerie Snyder, the group’s founder.
Snyder spends most of her time creating theatrical projects, with a special emphasis on those that invite playful audience participation and make use of unconventional spaces. The Association Association’s focus on coincidences takes a similar ethic, with members finding what’s special in the nuance of the environment around them.
An attendee recommends a book to another — only to find the exact book is already with him, in his backpack. Two friends, amid a city of 8.5 million, surprise each other by showing up at the same quirky club’s meetup.
More than the coincidences themselves, though, the point of the club is coming together to appreciate the brain’s natural ability to recognize chance patterns at a time when so many people feel overwhelmingly lonely and socially disconnected. In an era of rampant misinformation, confirmation bias and social divides, members find using the natural inclination toward pattern recognition for good feels refreshingly wholesome and uniting. And for many, the group has become a great source of joy and new adult friendships.
Snyder got the idea after noticing a sudden uptick in coincidences in her own life — like meeting a birthday twin just before her own birthday or meeting someone from her hometown while far from it.
She spread word of the group’s first meeting in a few neighborhood groups, listservs and through friends, hoping to find kindred spirits.
The concept of celebrating coincidences, she added, proved successfully self-selecting in its abstract specificity.
“The kind of people who hear about the idea of a coincidences club and think ‘Huh? What? That’s weird, why would you do that?’ are not the people who are going to sign up, and that’s great,” Snyder said.
The Association Association, founded by Emerie Snyder (in the purple coat at center), has about 200 members on its mailing list.
During past meetings, members have discovered that they used to live in the same building, or that the author of a book left next to a gravestone seen along a walk had the same initials as the deceased. The attention to detail has had practical upsides. On one occasion, the group observed that a set of keys had been left in the door of a bar.
“This isn’t exactly a coincidence, but [happened] because we were paying attention in a different way,” Snyder said. “We took them inside and the bartender was enormously grateful.”
Today, Snyder has about 200 people on the Association Association's member email list and the group has met 14 times, with about five to 20 people attending every time. Each meeting is in a new location — past ones have included the East Village, Astoria, Midtown and Red Hook — decided by the prior month’s attendees. They like to use what she called a “sort of chance-based process” to decide. It’s different each time, but has included tossing coins at a pretend map of New York, employing a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey-like method, and pointing at a real map of New York City.
As for what actually happens during the Association Association's meetings, “I don’t want to give away too much,” Snyder said. One of the most delightful aspects of the group, she said, is how little members know coming in.
“One person who came and had a great time said that originally, when she saw the website, she thought it might be a cult, but she was intrigued by that,” Snyder laughed.
“ The website is, like, perfectly janky and vague” in its Web 1.0 simplicity, said that person, architectural designer Anna Rothschild, who described the group as “a fun way to meet people that you wouldn’t normally cross paths with. The site doesn’t have much in the way of fancy formatting, but it does include a tagline: “p.s. No, this is not a cult.”
Rachel Karp has attended about five meetings. She said the group leads to a lot of “lovely little moments” of feeling “just, like, what are the odds?”
“The structure of it makes it really easy to be there and put yourself out there and do something even if you don't know anyone else, and just learn a whole different perspective,” Karp said.
Dustin Freeman, a Dimes Square resident and start-up founder, said he thinks of the group as a welcome alternative to paid walking tours: “It's a nice way of being present in the physical world.”
Snyder noted the Association Association brings people together not over a shared, conventional, concrete interest like running or bird-watching but a common love of serendipity in an abstract but innately human sense. The common thread in the group, she said, is “a little bit more eccentric and unusual.”
The group, she believes, appeals to New Yorkers’ desire to find connections in their city and with their fellow city denizens in real time.
“I think there's a desire for real human connection in real space, as opposed to all the digital worlds we live in,” she said.
