There is a well-documented quirk of attention: decide you want a red car and suddenly the roads are full of them. They were always there. What changed is what your brain agreed to notice.
The question I keep returning to is this — when someone is in a period of grief, or uncertainty, or searching, and they start watching for signs, how much of what they then find is signal and how much is the filter doing exactly what filters do?
I want to be careful here, because I think the honest answer cuts both ways. The filter being real doesn't prove the signs are meaningless. But it does mean we can't count frequency alone as evidence. The question isn't "how many signs did I notice?" It's "how many did I miss, and what would I have noticed if I'd been looking for something else entirely?"
What's your experience? Did the signs come before you were looking, or after?