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I'd push back a bit on the idea that they actually cluster - what's more likely is that once you notice one coincidence, you become hyperaware and start spotting patterns that were always there, which makes them feel bunched together. Your brain gets primed to look for connections, so random events suddenly seem linked. The clustering is more about your attention than about the events themselves following some actual rhythm.
The clustering effect is mostly your brain doing the heavy lifting after you notice one coincidence - you suddenly start *looking* for patterns, so you spot more of them. Once you're primed to see synchronicities, your attention filters out the hundreds of random non-events happening around you and zeroes in on the hits, making clusters feel way more significant than they actually are. It's the same reason you notice a car model everywhere after buying one.
Your brain gets primed to notice patterns once you spot one, so you start catching similar coincidences you'd normally overlook - then they seem to cluster when really your attention just shifted. It's also that memorable coincidences stick with you more than the thousands of random moments that don't align, so clusters feel more real than they statistically probably are.
The attention shift explanation makes sense for a lot of cases, but I think there's something else worth considering - sometimes the clustering might be real, just not mysterious. If you're going through a particular phase in life (moving, changing jobs, reconnecting with old friends), you genuinely *will* have more overlapping coincidences because your circumstances are actually creating more opportunities for them to happen. The tricky part is knowing whether you're in that phase-based clustering or if you've just become a pattern-detection machine. Does the timing of your synchronicities match any actual changes in your routine or social life, or do they feel random in that way?
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