The Wow Effect

There is a fish in the Indian Ocean that lunges at anything that glitters. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s food, a hook, or a piece of plastic. The shine triggers something inside it that moves faster than judgment. And the fish bites.

Don’t laugh at the fish.

Because you do the same thing. So do I. We all do.

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The moment

You’re looking for something. It doesn’t matter what: a way out, an answer, a direction. You’ve been turning it over for a while, talking to people, weighing options. And then something appears that fits. A phrase, a video, a person who speaks exactly to what you need. Something that says, without saying it directly: what you’re looking for is here.

Your shoulders drop. Your jaw loosens. And somewhere inside you, something lights up and says: this is it.

That’s the WOW Effect.

It’s not a minor emotion or a passing whim. It’s a real response that fires before the mind has time to weigh in. Something in you receives a signal that seems to resolve a tension that’s been sitting there for a while, and reacts accordingly. For a while, sometimes quite a long while, you feel like something has shifted. Like you’re not quite the same person you were before you saw that thing.

That feeling is real. What’s less certain is what caused it.

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What you think you’re seeing

Here’s the central issue: in the moment of WOW, you’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing.

You’re seeing a mix. Part of it is what’s actually there. The other part is what you brought: your expectations, your needs, the opinion of someone you trust, the idea you’d already formed before you arrived. All of that blends together in an instant and produces something that looks like a clear picture but is really a collage.

The glitter usually wasn’t put there by anyone else. You put it there yourself.

And this isn’t a flaw in you. It’s how perception works. The problem isn’t that it happens. It’s that almost no one realizes it while it’s happening.

Think of someone who goes to get a haircut because it looked incredible on a friend. They’re not going to see a hairdresser. They’re going to find the result they already have in their head. And when they leave the salon without it, it’s not that anyone let them down: it’s that they never went for what was real, only for what they’d imagined. Or someone who goes to see a film that’s been sold to them as the experience of the year, with the bar already set impossibly high before they walk in. The film might be good. It might have genuinely moving moments. But it can’t compete with what expectation already built, and they walk out with a strange sense that something failed, without quite knowing what.

Small examples. Enormous mechanism.

Now raise the stakes. Imagine the same mechanism applied to a real decision: a spiritual path, an investment, a relationship, a life change. Same dynamic, completely different consequences.

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The world that only sells majestic landscapes

Something else makes this harder, and it’s that we live in a moment where everything, absolutely everything, is presented with maximum spectacle.

Not because there are more lies than before. But because the way people present themselves in the world, especially on social media, has raised the level of shine to the point where it’s just the standard. If you don’t shine, you don’t exist. If you don’t land in the first three seconds, they’ve already scrolled past. The result is that we’re surrounded by majestic landscapes painted in full detail, and when you get there, you find two patches of grass.

Which might be incredible patches of grass. Which might offer something real. But the gap between what you saw and what’s there is so wide that it doesn’t matter anymore: the disappointment arrives before the experience does.

This happens everywhere. The latest phone model that was going to change your life and a month later is just a phone. The course that promised to transform you and turned out to be information that was already available in another format. The spiritual experience someone described as an absolute revelation, that you lived in a completely different way, neither better nor worse, just different.

The more the packaging shines, the more worth it is to ask what’s actually inside. Not as a posture of systematic distrust, but as a basic hygiene habit before deciding anything.

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The opinion that isn’t yours

Sometimes the WOW arrives on its own. You see something, read it, hear it, and something inside you ignites without anyone having set the stage. That’s also the WOW Effect, and in that case the glitter is entirely yours.

But often it comes attached to something someone said.

This changed my life. You have to try it. You have no idea what you’re missing.

And the problem isn’t that this person is lying. The problem is that they’re telling the truth: their truth. What they experienced was real for them. What they felt was genuine. But someone else’s experience isn’t transferable. It doesn’t come in the package. And when it arrives from outside with that kind of intensity, it mixes with what you already carried, and the collage becomes even harder to read.

When someone has an experience that strikes them as extraordinary, the intensity of it erases all nuance. They’re not describing what it is: they’re describing what happened to them, with their history, their moment, their starting point. And you receive that as if it were objective information about something, when in reality it’s the account of something completely unrepeatable.

There’s also something that rarely gets mentioned: each person has a completely different threshold of perception. Some people have an enormous inner response to a minimal stimulus. Others barely register anything even with a very intense one. That says nothing about the quality of the experience or the depth of the person. It just says we’re different. What blew someone’s mind might leave you completely cold, and the other way around.

So when someone tells you something was the most incredible thing they’ve ever experienced, they’re giving you information about themselves. Not about what you’re going to experience.

What happened to someone else isn’t necessarily going to happen to you. Something might happen. It might be better, worse, or completely different. But not that. Never exactly that.

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The fantasy you built before you arrived

There’s a moment in the WOW process that is the most dangerous of all, and it happens before the experience itself.

It’s the moment when your mind starts building.

Someone told you about something with a lot of enthusiasm. You saw it presented with a lot of shine. It fit what you were looking for. And without noticing, before you’ve done anything at all, you already have a complete film in your head: what it’s going to be like, what you’re going to feel, who you’re going to become afterward. The expectation grows on its own, fed by every new reference you find, every testimony that confirms what you already wanted to believe.

And then the real experience arrives.

Which might be good. Which might have genuine value. But which cannot compete with the film you built, because that film had no limits and reality always does. The gap between the two wasn’t created by anyone else: you created it, layer by layer, before you even got there.

And when that gap shows up, it leaves a mark. Sometimes it closes doors that should never have been closed. The disappointment isn’t about the thing itself. It’s about the collision with reality. The person who walks away disappointed not because the experience was bad, but because what they expected was unreachable. And from there to never trying again is a very short step.

The WOW doesn’t lie. It just doesn’t see.

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Before you bite

This isn’t about distrusting everything or going through life with the brakes on. It’s about learning to tell the difference between when you’re seeing something and when you’re seeing what you want to see.

The first thing worth asking yourself is what you actually want to get out of it. Not in the abstract: specifically. Because the WOW always promises in the abstract, and you need to know whether what’s in front of you can give you the concrete thing you’re after. That question alone filters out a lot.

The second is to look for references that aren’t contaminated by enthusiasm. Not someone who lived it and wants you to live it too, but also not someone who had a bad experience and wants to save you from it. Different people, different contexts, different experiences with the same thing. The more varied the map, the more real the picture.

And when something grabs your attention hard, stop for a moment. Not forever: a moment. And ask yourself where that pull is coming from. Are you seeing what’s there, or are you seeing what you need to be there? Are you evaluating it yourself, or processing someone else’s emotion? Are you looking at it as it is, or through the gap you’re trying to fill?

There are no guarantees. There never are. But there’s an enormous difference between walking into something with your eyes open and walking in with a film already playing in your head.

The fish in the Indian Ocean doesn’t have that option. You do.

Use it.