At some points in our lives, we may find ourselves getting the feeling that nothing we do matters.
Whether we find this feeling depressing or relieving depends on the context but it’s certainly not hard to find situations that make you feel powerless. However, we never truly know what impact we’ll end up having on the world and we can sometimes find that the actions that didn’t mean much to us made a world of difference for someone else.
And that certainly seems to be the case for one TikToker who affected his family’s future in a hauntingly powerful way just by being born.
On January 8, 19-year-old Mark Bowling answered a prompt calling for people’s “craziest one-on-a-million” stories from their lives.
In his resulting video , Bowling explained that his father always wanted a son and seemed committed to that goal even after having three daughters.
And it seemed that the fourth time was the charm for dear old dad because Bowling would turn out to be the family’s next child.
Although he couldn’t recall whether his birth was early or late, he knows for a fact that his birthday was not the predicted due date.
And that difference in dates would end up mattering a great deal because Bowling’s birthday was September 11, 2001.
Although that infamous day likely brought millions of Americans to a standstill, Bowling’s father already knew he had to cancel what he had planned at work before the day arrived due to his son’s imminent birth.
And what exactly was Bowling’s dad supposed to do on 9/11?
As Bowling said, had he not been around for the birth of his son, he would have attended a security meeting on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
As CNN reported , this was the first tower hit on 9/11 and one that would collapse just before 10:30 am that morning.
On January 9, Bowling posted a follow-up TikTok responding to a comment that said, “You saved your dad’s life by existing.”
And it seemed that millions of others were about as stunned by this revelation as this person was since the original video has since amassed over 16.1 million views, 4.1 million likes, and 53,600 comments.
However, it seems that among these amazed viewers were some skeptics who weren’t sure everything lined up as perfectly as Bowling told it.
Bowling addressed their questions in his follow-up video by providing his student ID, which has its date of birth on it.
Although it appears backwards in the TikTok and therefore a little hard to read, we can see if we look closely enough that it does confirm he was born on September 11, 2001.
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Not only was Bowling’s dad able to meet the son he always wanted but doing so ensured he could see the rest of his family for decades to come.
So the next time you start to think that nothing you do in life matters, remember that it’s possible you can make a significant change in the world around you simply by entering it in the first place.
