I do not believe in the supernatural, magic, ghosts or anything like that. However, I can be very superstitious about tempting fate and won’t make jokes or flippant remarks that could be interpretted as such.
For example, my partner made a dark joke about how she’d rather have cancer than such and such. I begged her not to say such things, not because the thought of her having cancer upset me (although it did), but because it feels as if saying stuff like that could make it happen.
Why is it that saying something bad will happen will make it happen, but saying something good will happen won’t?
If things are calm at work, not a lot is going on, don’t say QUIET. Never use the fucking Q word at all.
…why
Mind and body are very tightly bound (that is how placebo works) I don’t think you are wrong to be wary of speaking disease into existence. The only sinus infection I have ever had, came after reading a particularly vivid and detailed article about how they start. Like my body was following along.
I do give my work computer enrichment activities to keep it happy. Listen to music so that it can have music, browse occasionally so it doesn’t have only work to work on. I get far fewer problems than my teammates do, so it seems to work even though it’s superstitious nonsense.
Touch Wood
It’s a small superstition that saying some things out loud will jinx it “it’s going to be good weather today” - turns the weather bad - and that then following it with “- touch wood” and finding anything wood to touch will make the jinx cancel out
I get superstitions about being cocky or headstrong. Nearly every time I do, the universe corrects my behavior, typically by me failing in some huge, embarrassing fashion.
This is it for me but for acknowledging good things in my life out loud. I can go weeks with something pleasant and the second I start telling people in my life about it it evaporates within the week.
To the point that get sorta dodgy when bestie asks me for life updates, I’m in my head like is this too good to actually share? Am I ready to let this go?
I just want to share nice things :(
I really think this Earth is alive. Like a consciousness we can’t fully understand. And when we mistreat it more diseases get released.
When its not feeling well were all gonna feel it.
That’s called animism, in a sense.
I believe there’s a connection between conscious minds that is not connected to the senses.
It originates off some legend that a large team of monks gathered to meditate and pray together on a given day. The city’s crime rate drastically fell on that day.
It sometimes seems to manifest in other stories, like family knowing immediately that something bad happened to a family member (before getting a call about it) or animal keepers having an emotional bond with their creatures without being able to communicate.
IMO It’s some pretty dubious stuff, but you may find stuff about The Global Consciousness Project interesting.
It originates off some legend that a large team of monks gathered to meditate and pray together on a given day. The city’s crime rate drastically fell on that day.
Probably the claimed “Maharishi effect” in 1974. The Transcendental Meditation organisation (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) said that the quality of life would noticeably improve if at least the square root of 1% of the population practised the TM technique. They claimed the crime rate fell in some cities in 1974 because of it.
Cloud tax is real.
In astrophotography, when you buy a new piece of equipment you have to pay the cloud tax. That is: after receiving your new gear it will be cloudy so you can’t use it. The number of cloudy days is directly related to the value of the new gear you got. If you buy something expensive it can be months before you can use it.
Similarly with modding your car. The second you do fun work on it, something expensive breaks and you can’t even give it the beans. How catastrophic the new failure is is directly correlated to how excited you were to do the fun mod.
I wonder if that is perhaps frequency bias at play
Oh I’m superstitious about a great many things but I try to make it as useful as possible by being the most superstitious about not practicing regular gratitude. So for instance I’ll “wish” or “bless” someone with something like “a boring shift” because that’s the kind of thing it’s important to remember to be grateful for. Or instead of saying it’s “quiet” (a common bad-luck superstition in healthcare), I’ll comment that “I have been blessed with a good night so far.”
A core component of my spirituality that I’ve reflected on lately is that regardless of what I do or don’t believe cosmologically, spirituality and religion offer a huge amount of emotional / psychological tools that have stood the test of time and appeared across multiple religions in various forms due to sheer usefulness. These include things like community and regular gratitude and mindfulness practices.
They absolutely can and have been analyzed and implemented in other ways, but that requires a lot of research and very careful coordination of a lot of individual components. Meanwhile I’ve found a remarkable amount of success emotionally and psychologically in connecting with a faith community that has all those things built in and which has a LOT of other people who are doing the same thing to support me sticking with it.
I work in 911 dispatch, and there’s definitely something about full moons.
It’s not that we’re busier, or that the calls I get are more serious, but everything is just a little bit off when the moon is full. It’s subtle, I don’t think it would even be reflected in the types of calls we’re entering, but a lot of our callers just get weirder.
Yes there is a correlation, its been studied scientifically I believe. It is also the origin of the word “Lunacy”, because the moon (Lune in French, Luna in Latin) is associated with madness
TIL Lune from Expedition 33 was insane
Way back in the 80s a dispatcher I was dating told me that very often they would see a little burst of activity right during shift changes - like burglar alarms going off. She said during the brief handoff period there was often a slight bit of confusion, or at least not 100% efficiency, and that “the bad guys” knew the schedule and would time their actions to take advantage of this.
I haven’t really noticed a burst of activity, but it’s certainly occured to me if I ever turned to a life of crime that I’d do stuff during that shift change, a couple of the departments we dispatch for definitely take their time with it and there’s often a pretty solid block of time where unless something serious is going down you’re not getting a quick police response.
Some of them handle it more efficiently than others, and the size of the town is a pretty big factor too. I’ve had more than a few callers complain about how long it’s taking because they live right by the station, but usually officers aren’t just hanging around at the station, they’re out on patrol and responding to incidents, shift change is pretty much the one time you’re going to find the station full of cops.
I heard from someone that works in a hospital that the ER gets weirder cases when the moon is full
It’s always funny to me that people have to signal that they don’t believe in magic before declaring that they do, in fact, believe in magic.
And how many people assume the world legitimate revolves around them.
yeah but at least stand for your ideas. I don’t even mind. I just hate the 'please don’t ostracize me ’ packaging.
When I plan a trip and I somehow wake up late and for some reason I just feel so tired. I cancel the trip I take that as a sign something bad is about to happen. That saved me from two incidents. Personally I think it probably is just a coincidence.
Whenever I buy insurance for a device, nothing happens to it. Twice I’ve not had insurance (once it was not offered, second time I foolishly skipped it) and both those times, those devices fucking ate it.
Buying the insurance is a magic spell that protects my technology and nothing can convince me otherwise
Whenever things seem to be going well, don’t let the universe know you’ve noticed, otherwise the universe will make things absolute shit to ‘balance it out’.
Don’t touch anything in production on a Friday
But I’m supposed to be working …!
