Frequency Illusion

You decide to buy a certain car, and suddenly the roads are full of it. You learn a new word on Monday and hear it three times by Friday. The world is not conspiring; your filter is working.

You met this in these pages under another name, and it deserves the repetition, because the illusion runs deep: we mistake the movement of our own attention for a movement in the world. Nothing became more frequent. You became more noticing.

The dangerous version comes with worry. Learn a diagnosis and the news fills with it; fear a trend and evidence of it multiplies daily. The filter fetches what you flagged — that is its job — and hands you a frightening, one-sided newspaper of the world.

So when it seems that "suddenly, everyone is..." — pause and ask the honest question: did the world change, or did my filter? Nine times out of ten the streets were always full of that car. You simply never had reason to see it before.