A psychiatrist decided his own bowel movements were messages from God

When Dr. Finch found an unusually large, well-formed stool in his toilet one afternoon, he called his entire household into the bathroom to see it. He pointed at the tip breaking the surface of the water and announced that this was a message from God: their finances, which had been terrible for months, were about to turn around. He had Hope scoop it out with a spatula and carry it outside to dry on the picnic table, the first of what became an ongoing collection.

From then on, Finch inspected his own bowel movements for financial forecasts, wrote up his findings with illustrations, and mailed the results to his patients in a monthly newsletter. Small, broken stools meant good news for Augusten Burroughs's chances of getting into beauty school. Diarrhea meant the IRS records would get confused and the house would be saved. When the pattern happened to line up with real good news, like an insurance settlement, everyone took it as proof the system worked.

Finch's daughter Hope did the same thing with a small white bible, opening it at random and dropping her finger on a word to answer questions like whether she should visit a friend or which sandwich to order. If the word was "harvest," turkey on multigrain seemed close enough. If the word was "awakened," she decided against a visit because her friend probably needed her sleep.

None of this required a psychiatric diagnosis to notice. It's the same thing that happens whenever someone consults a horoscope right before a big decision, or scrolls back through old messages looking for proof an ex never really loved them. Once you already believe something, almost any random input can be arranged to confirm it, because you register the hits and quietly forget the misses. A random word in an old book will always have some plausible connection to your question if you're willing to stretch for it, the same way a shape in a toilet will always be readable as an omen.

The unsettling part isn't that one family did this with such theatrical enthusiasm. It's how ordinary the underlying instinct is, and how rarely anyone stops to ask what evidence would have counted as a no.

Before your next big decision, try writing down what outcome you're hoping for, on paper, before you go looking for a sign, a review, an old message, or anything else that might confirm it. Then ask yourself honestly what result would have counted as evidence against your hope, not just for it, because if you can't name one, you were never really testing anything. When you notice yourself repeating a ritual before a decision, a certain search, a lucky object, a familiar superstition, pause and separate the comfort it gives you from the information it actually provides. Treat coincidences as coincidences until they show up more than chance would predict, and let your decisions rest on that instead.