Why you keep seeing it everywhere now

What a new word and a new car have in common.

You learn a new word. A strange one you are sure you have never heard.

Then, within days, you see it everywhere. In a book. In a headline. Someone says it at dinner.

It feels like the universe is sending a signal. The word is suddenly following you around.

It is not. The word's frequency did not change. Your attention did.

This is the frequency illusion, sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Once your brain tags something as relevant, it starts noticing every instance it used to filter out.

The word was always there at the same rate. You simply could not see it before, and now you can.

Two things are happening at once. Your attention has been primed to catch the thing. And each time you spot it, a small glow of recognition makes that moment stick, while the thousands of words you did not notice leave no trace.

It is the same reason a car you just bought suddenly seems to be on every road.

On its own, this is a harmless quirk. The trouble starts when we read meaning into it.

Because the feeling of "this keeps appearing, it must mean something" is exactly how the mind builds false patterns.

You worry about a symptom, and suddenly every twinge confirms it. You suspect a friend has gone cold, and every text now reads that way. You decide the world is a certain way, and the evidence seems to pour in.

But the evidence did not appear. You just started counting the hits and ignoring the misses.

Your attention is not a neutral camera. It is a filter you are constantly, invisibly, setting.

So when something seems to be everywhere, lately, ask the quiet question. Did the world change? Or did I just start looking?

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Robertson Davies