The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

We’re living in what they call the “Information Age,” but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of “boundaries,” failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own.

These misbeliefs came in a range of flavors, from whimsical to warlike, but one thing was certain—our shared grasp on reality had slipped. The only explanation for this mass head trip that made any sense to me had to do with

cognitive biases:I self-deceptive thought patterns that developed due to our brains’ imperfect abilities to process information from the world around us.

The mind has never been perfectly rational, but rather resource-rational—aimed at reconciling our finite time, limited memory storage, and distinct craving for events to feel meaningful.

Faced with a sudden glut of information, cognitive biases cause the modern mind to overthink and underthink the wrong things. We

Mythologizing the world as an attempt to “make sense” of it is a unique

magical thinking works in service of restoring agency. While magical thinking is an age-old quirk, overthinking feels distinct to the modern era—a product of our innate superstitions clashing with information overload, mass loneliness, and a capitalistic pressure to “know” everything under the sun.

In 2014, bell hooks said, “The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies…. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.” To become as aware as we can of the mind’s natural distortions,

The Zen Buddhists have a word, “koan,” which means “unsolvable riddle”: You break the mind in order to reveal deeper truths and reassemble the pieces to create something

Identified in the early twentieth century, the halo effect describes the unconscious tendency to make positive assumptions about a person’s overall character based on our impressions of one single

Today, singling out someone to look up to in life aids in identity formation, and when it comes to picking the right exemplar,

sangfroid

2005 study found that addiction and criminal activity were more strongly connected with celebrity worship than calcium intake with bone mass or lead exposure with children’s IQs.

One study from the mid-2000s found a correlation between celebrity stalking behavior and insecure parent-child attachment.

Glorifying pop stars and athletes predicted the opposite—lower confidence, weaker sense of self. This finding supports the “absorption addiction

after observing that children actually benefit when their mothers fail them in manageable ways. “Even if it were somehow possible to be the perfect mother, the end result would be a delicate, fragile child who couldn’t tolerate

The psychological craving for big events (and big feelings) to have equally big causes is instinctive. It’s called proportionality bias—and while behavioral economists regard this inclination as the driving force behind extreme conspiracy theories like

QAnon, it fools even the most rational minds into overestimating cause-and-effect relationships.

In virtually every context, we cannot seem to rest until we find some intentional force either to fault for our misery or credit for our success. The greater the effect, the greater

I find this flip of the script even more insidious. Most conspiracy theories argue that a mysterious outside evil is trying to control you. By contrast, conspiracy therapy says that the

evil force is your own mind. “Self-healing” is a New Age abstraction that commodifies the Tibetan Buddhist teaching that we all create our own destinies. The original tenet says that we may not be able to

the universal dangers of “trauma,” framed, simplistically, as unhealed wounds from childhood. Certain influencers have overgeneralized

“false news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information. People who share novel information are seen as being in the know,” said Sinan Aral, the study’s coauthor. Conspiracy therapists are

Combine our organic animism with capitalism and tech-powered misinformation spread, and you get conspirituality.

frequency bias. Also known as the “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” frequency bias

so magnificent, they seem to be putting on a show for us. But they aren’t theater—they’re a product of violence and defense. When mighty solar windstorms catapult from the sun toward earth like an electric slingshot, our planet’s upper

Nature just does what it does, and sometimes it’s ruinous, but it doesn’t mean for it to be. It doesn’t “mean” anything at all. Meaning is our job.

ingrained conviction that spending resources you can’t get back—money and time but also emotional resources, like secrets and hope—justifies spending even more. It is this explanation

creative challenge—to weave the many choices we’ve made over the years into a cohesive and flattering story about who we are.

But it comforts me to know that my choices didn’t make me an indefensible numbskull. They made me a social creature, full of hope, who

When presented with a problem, most people naturally think the cause must be that something is missing, rather than that something is gratuitous or out

This inclination is especially hard to resist as consumerists, who are conditioned to believe that in order to fix something, you’ve got to add a gadget, an app, a supplement, a paragraph, a person, instead of stepping

Sylvia Plath, who also worked in the “women’s lifestyle” industry in her twenties for the fashion magazine Mademoiselle.

Zero-sum bias tells us that if another person is succeeding, then you

The researchers labeled this fallacious outlook “win-win denial,” concluding that among humans, it “may be ubiquitous.” Whether we’re talking money or beauty, our zero-sum territorialism

is anchored in millennia of stiff resource competition. When

women are prone to make more upward comparisons and downward identifications.

Chongqing, China, determined that teenagers with TikTok use disorder (compulsions to scroll to the point of negative life interferences) suffered heightened anxiety, depression, stress, and working memory difficulties.

Win-win denial, concluded the Journal of Experimental Psychology, seems above all else heightened by issues in our theory of mind. As naive realists, human beings can’t help but make the perspective-taking error that our own preferences

are ground truth. We neglect the fact that everyone we encounter doesn’t have the same values or reasoning for their decisions.

Recognizing that other people can think and feel differently from us is essential for harmonious relationships. Psychologists have noted that this ability is a key developmental step for two- and three-year-old children.

functioning frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, problem-solving, creativity, communication, and attention. Without flexible, active frontal lobes, our capacity to see things beyond black and white is compromised. We can’t achieve

social harm...

Rather, it is an invitation to consider zero-sum bias’s role in the vicious cycle of ego and trash talk, as well as the promising notion that this cycle can be broken.

“success” is measured: business, fitness, fine art, war. Survivorship bias beckons thinkers to draw incorrect conclusions about “why” something turned out well by fixating too narrowly on the people or objects that made

it past a certain benchmark, while overlooking those that didn’t.

They weren’t thinking about the planes that hadn’t flown home. Survivorship bias pointed the officers in exactly the wrong direction—to protect against the aircraft injuries that expressly weren’t fatal. The military had no idea which bullet holes

This disregard of invisible failures skews our judgment in so many areas of modern life. It emerges when we selectively pay attention to some new workout

Odds-defying narratives may be sparkly, but they falsely imply that with adequate skill and effort, riches are available to anyone, and if you fail, you’re the pitiful exception rather than the invisible norm.

survivorship bias encourages thinkers to read positive causation into patterns where only correlation exists.