>Hey, JTQ, sorry to hear things are not working out well at the moment, mate. I think the phenomenon you’re describing is just a kind of confirmation bias rather than the world conspiring against you.
I’ll try an expanation minus the modern(pop) psychology.
Way back nature (with the help of evolution) happened upon a bunch of tricks(read ‘mindtools’), in large part selected for courtesy of not just the expression of any individual biology, but biologies (plural) acting within environments, much of those environments had social aspects, so it can be said the social environments of past were part of the selection dynamic that has us this biology that has us receptive.
Sexual reproduction historically required a joint effort of, somewhat of both parent (mum and dad), but also of the group, which way back were more directly related than today.
Yearnings for company, and anxieties about being alone, these roughly tend reproductive opportunities, to generalize, and are not entirely departed from (loss of) access to resources for such things. There’s social status too, which most people don’t necessarily want a lot of, but then they don’t want to be alienated from resources and be or feel like or be treated as if they are bad company (excluding eccentric recluses for a moment – not a bad option).
The fact is that radio(music) going way back is full of references to and about yearnings, unfulfillment, the hope of fulfillment, frustrated desire, loneliness, misery, loss, but hope and adustment too. Half of it though (of modern times) is to have us marching along to clocks, war drums 24/7, and has some similarities to bursts from an AK47.
Our worries (and distress) tend an urgency, an immediacy, of things in the social field too. Rough mechanisms maybe, that tend to get the job done. Experience calibrates, adusts the knobs, put crudely, but then the internal mechanisms nature gifted us can be a bit brutish, which is not all bad anyway, as the self, individual personality, ‘I’ is in the work done to better it, or work with it.
Given the prevalence of models of the mind that involve something like associative learning, or associationism, and its exploitation by media, government, and every Tom, Dick and Mary, I personally don’t buy into it, not wholesale anyway, the pop concept of confirmation bias. I do think minds are often given to swinging between underdetermination and overdetermination, but I think it an essential dithering (tech sense) involved in learning, and resolving.
So, if I go looking for something that happens to be red, chances are I am going to see some other red things before I find the red thing I’m looking for.