I enjoy doing this sort of numeric trick because I love mathematics, and because I love the book Illuminatus!, but it is very important to understand that these are constructs of your mind and do not actually have any effect on the universe itself.

A lot of it comes from the fact that people underestimate how many patterns there are in actual random numbers.

When humans try to make random numbers out of their heads, they in fact produce “deliberately unpatterned numbers” that don’t look much like real random numbers at all. Conversely, if you show regular people real random numbers, they generally dismiss them as “not random enough”.

Also, heightened awareness can produce these effects.

There is so much information coming at you and so many possible coincidences. One in a million sounds like a lot, but over the course of a regular lifetime you will statistically see many one in a million events, simply because you see many billions of events.

So I strongly recommend you just enjoy these ideas as pretty artworks produced by your pattern-matching brain — entertaining but with no real significance.

Giving in to the idea that numbers in the real world are arranged just to send a message to you — this is “magical thinking” in a bad way and that is often a first symptom of either mania or schizophrenia, as you observed.