Back in the day when I was very much into gambling, I remember that whenever I was playing some games on the website, I would always tell myself to pick randomly and never follow a pattern. This was because I had this mentality that picking a pattern would make the machine predict what I was going to pick next and place the odds against me.
So I would pick randomly, or at least that was what I thought I was doing until maybe the third, where I would notice that although it might seem like I was picking randomly, I also was following a pattern. That was probably the moment I realized that we humans are wired to always follow a pattern in whatever it is we do, no matter how much we try to randomize it.
It's the way our brains are wired to find a pattern.
Let me give you an example. Let's say on your way back from school, there are three roads that lead back to your place: roads A, B, and C. You're used to always taking road A, but then one day, the thought comes to your mind about the topic of how humans always follow a pattern, so you decide to prove it wrong.
So rather than follow road A, you decided to follow road B. The next day you decided to follow C. It might not happen immediately, but eventually you find yourself picking between these roads in a way where, if someone studies you for a given number of time, they'd be able to predict which road between the three roads that you will most likely follow.
Like the gambling, I found myself ignoring certain teams because I already played them earlier and then playing teams I normally wouldn't play. And by the time I got to my fifth game, the pattern was there; anyone who was watching me could almost predict what team I was going to pick.
I really wish I could find a better example to better explain my point (I'm obviously struggling to do that), but I did discover this by watching myself do certain things that I thought were random, but I soon found out were all just part of a pattern, and it made me feel some kind of way, almost like I wasn't totally in control.
But yeah, please do tell me if you understand what I'm trying to say, and if you have a better example, please drop them in the comments below.