There’s a story from a This American Life episode that I think about a lot. I tried to find the episode, but I can’t remember the title or the producer, but if it rings a bell, please let me know.

In it, a man falls on ice, hits his head, and when he comes to — while being carried on a stretcher — he asks what happens. And when he’s told that he’d slipped and fell, he made a joke about that; something like — well that’s one way to get off the ice.

He was experiencing short-term memory loss because of the concussion, so minutes after that, he asked again what had happened. And when he was told that he’d slipped and fell on the ice, he made the exact same joke. He kept living in a loop — making that exact same joke over and over and over until he regained his memory.

It’s an argument for our lack of free-will, or at the very least, the limits of our free-will. We are chemical beings. Two parts Hydrogen, one part Oxygen will always yield water. The slip, the ask, the answer will always yield the same joke.

I experienced a similar thing earlier today. My friend Jo refreshed my Hinge profile because I wasn’t getting any matches, and when the new profiles came up for me to “swipe on”, I tried to figure out which of them are genuinely new, and which are ones I’ve seen before.

Some were easy. It’s a face I remember. Or there was something funny in their prompts. And some I couldn’t tell probably because I never registered them the first time around either.

But then this profile came up. She was cute. Stylish. Values seem aligned. Muslim.

“I think this is a new person,” I told Jo.

“You should like her,” Jo said.

I scrolled down to see if there’s a photo or prompt I can comment on, and I saw this photo of her wearing a very shiny metallic belt, and the first thing that came to my mind for what I should comment was —

Did you win that in a wrestling match?

Which, of course, is exactly what I’d comment the first time I came across her profile. It was only when I saw the belt that I realised I’d actually came across her profile previously.

“You can’t open with that,” Jo said. “You can’t start with roasting someone you don’t know.”

So I scrolled back up, and at the top, for one of the prompts, she’d written — Every experience is unique.

And to that I commented,

“So what do you think of deja vu?”