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.
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