What does 11:11 mean, and why do people keep seeing it
It is the most watched minute on the clock, and the reason is more interesting than coincidence.
Why this time and not another
11:11 is a mirror hour: the digits repeat, and they repeat in the simplest possible way. Four identical strokes read as a pattern instantly, faster than 12:21 or 21:12, which need a moment of arithmetic before the symmetry appears.
That legibility is most of the effect. The mind is a pattern detector that runs whether or not it is asked, and 11:11 is the cheapest pattern on the face of a clock to detect.
The honest explanation
People report seeing 11:11 far more often than chance appears to allow. The usual explanation is frequency illusion: once a pattern is marked as meaningful, every subsequent occurrence is noticed and remembered, while the hundreds of unremarkable times you checked the clock are not.
This does not make the experience false. It makes it a fact about attention rather than a fact about clocks. The minute genuinely does arrive twice a day, and you genuinely do notice it more than the others.
The wish
The common custom is to make a wish when you catch it. There is no agreed origin for this, which is itself telling: the ritual spread because a repeating, easily spotted number is a natural peg to hang a small habit on.
What the habit is really doing is marking a moment in an unmarked day. That is a modest and quite reasonable thing to want.
Owning the minute itself
On buy1minute, 11:11 is one of 1,440 minutes, and like all of them it can belong to exactly one person. It is the one people ask about first, for all the reasons above.