The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

As concepts, confirmation bias and the apocalypse are an exquisite pairing. I’ve come to believe the mind is built for doomsday. So many phenomena can feel like “proof” that the sky is falling, from a species-ending asteroid to the threat of imminent layoffs.

2020 paper, German philosopher Uwe Peters noted that one of the bias’s evolutionary benefits might be that “it helps us bring social reality into alignment with our beliefs.” How unsustainably chaotic would it feel if our social reality and beliefs never synced up? When approached with a skeptical wink, “Saturn return” is a lens through which to bond over a shared pattern: the quarter-life crisis.

with ourselves. But what if accuracy is important and timeliness isn’t? Like in political or financial scenarios, or interpersonal dilemmas involving a bevy of emotional variables? This appears to be one of confirmation bias’s greatest threats—it offers the mind blanket permission to oversimplify arguments in an age when arguments are only getting thornier. This blunting of ideas intensifies us-vs.-them divisions in a social climate that demands we learn to tolerate the mental toll of cognitive dissonance, not hydraulic-press it into oblivion, if we don’t want our mental levees to break and our biases to flood in all at once.

sense of social belonging is more valuable than any one given belief. And it’s certainly more valuable than the truth. Confirmation bias works overtime in ideologically bound groups, where questioning a

changing our own minds. A 2021 study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society found that when people trained themselves to notice their own thought processes, they were able to strengthen their defenses against misinformation and dogma.

I have spent thousands in therapy teasing out other people’s confounding choices, futilely attempting to intellectualize my way out of misery, as if the perfect rationalization for why someone acted a certain way would cause their behavior to change and my soul to heal. I will always believe in the material power of words and facts, but I also know there’s a point past which they don’t make you feel any better. The emotional burden of too much information can’t always be quelled by more information.

“looseleft,” the feeling of loss after finishing a good book, or “rubatosis,” the disquieting awareness of your own heartbeat.

Nostalgia is a timeless feeling, though it certainly has its collective spikes, periods when civilization feels like it’s changing too quickly. People get overwhelmed by the present and disappear into the past. Ancient Greece saw the whole Bronze Age. It saw the invention of the city-state, the Olympics, cartography, geometry, philosophy. So much, so fast. I can easily see how the Ancient Greeks,

Maybe the more anxiety-provoking the current moment, the further back in time we feel the need to go. Nostalgia softens an era’s harsh edges, so we can sink back into a warm bath of fantasy.

Envy, for example, is to zero-sum bias as paranoia is to proportionality bias as nostalgia is to declinism—the false impression that things are worse now than they were in the past, and it’s all downhill from here.

Related to declinism, a deception labeled present bias describes our propensity to blow out of proportion events that are currently happening while undervaluing what will come in a few years or

A 2015 UCLA psychology study found that people conceive of their future selves as strangers, which is why we often procrastinate our homework and put off saving for retirement. We find

Romanticizing the past can have an odd tempering effect on art, too. Throughout the sociopolitical upheavals of the late 2010s and early 2020s, Hollywood comfort-fed us a buffet of nostalgic jaunts down memory lane: The casts of Friends and Harry Potter reassembled for tearful reunion specials.

“Nostalgia blunts the politics that produces all art, especially middlebrow art,” wrote Cottom. Would Disneyland still

During the Nazis’ initial rise to power, Hitler used the slogan “Make Germany Great Again,” which sounds familiar, not just because Donald Trump used (and claimed to have invented) it, but because American presidents including Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton also invoked the tagline. For generations, politicians

negativity bias—the tendency to assign greater weight to unfavorable events. We internalize the scorch of rebuke much more powerfully than the warm glow of praise.

An insult in a litany of compliments is today’s rattlesnake in a field of flowers. Learning to ignore a meadow of pleasant magnolias in order to zero in on the deadly snake (even if it turned out just to be a stick) had survival benefits, and evolutionary habits die hard.

Declinism predicts that every generation will remain convinced that life is only getting worse.

Eddie Yuen wrote about “catastrophe fatigue” in the context of climate activism. “The ubiquity of apocalypse in recent decades has led to a banalization of the concept—it is seen as normal, expected, in a sense comfortable,” he said.

“I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.”

that the lack of basic resources… contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources [does] not increase happiness,” said Csikszentmihalyi.

James Davies noted that when our basic human needs for safety, economic stability, loving connection, authenticity, and meaningful work are neglected, materialism is usually offered as a quick, duplicitous fix—“a

Perhaps we shouldn’t begrudge the Disney Adults too much. Maudlin as they may be, nostalgia helps us tolerate the present in order to warm ourselves up to what’s next. It’s how we cope with what John Koenig called “avenoir,” the impossible desire to see memories in advance. “We take it for granted that life moves forward. But you move as a rower moves, facing backwards: you can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going,” Koenig wrote in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. “Your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way.”

To tap into her most radically imaginative self, Sanderville frees up periodic slices of time not to consume any media at all. Not the internet, not television, not even books. “It’s hard to consume and create in the same state,” she told me. “If you value any kind of creativity, and I don’t just mean art, give your brain a break from consuming, because that gives you space to process all that you’ve been reading or watching.” We must afford ourselves this space actively, said Sanderville, because at life’s current pace, it won’t happen by accident. “Ask: How can you figure out a way to be grinding less so that you can be more creative, more influential? How can you spend your energy on the things that deeply matter to you?”

Tempusur /tɛmp'əzɚ/: n. An elusive nostalgia for the current moment, so precious in its ephemerality that the second you notice it, it’s already slipped away.

In the U.S., happiness gradually increased among marginalized populations (albeit with a lag) after the gender and civil rights movements awarded them more liberties. Currently, the demographic with the bleakest outlook is less-than-college-educated white men. According to Carol Graham, a Brookings researcher and public policy professor at the University of Maryland College Park, out-of-work white men are “overrepresented in the crisis of deaths of despair” (suicide, drug overdose, liver disease). Financial hardship does not explain this despair; studies find that when women lose their jobs, they aren’t as negatively affected.

The propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create is a cognitive bias, known as the IKEA effect. Its delightful name is an homage to the Swedish furniture company whose affordable products require assembly.

1947, General Mills launched a new line of Betty Crocker instant cake mixes that tasted nearly indistinguishable from the stuff made from scratch. The product took off at first, but sales eventually slowed to a near halt. In a state of consternation, General Mills solicited the analysis of a Freudian psychologist, who determined that this sales decline was a result of guilt. Homemakers felt that if all they did was add water, the cake was not truly theirs. They couldn’t proudly tell their husbands and children that they’d prepared the fluffy confection with their own two hands. General Mills responded with an unexpected marketing pivot. They relaunched the instant cake mixes with a new slogan, “Add an Egg.” Now, baking was easy but not too easy.

“effectance,” the spiritually satisfying notion that we caused something to happen in the world.

entrepreneurs are out of ideas; it’s because they recognize that brands are “communities” now, and if consumers don’t feel seen and held by their communities, they won’t feel important. They won’t come back. To feel

Like the sunk cost fallacy, the IKEA effect is at its core another effort justification bias. How we love to defend our most expensive, time-consuming, irreversible choices. The

As much as automation and specialization have benefited society, they risk limiting our social engagement. DIY projects offer the chance for more holistic, communal modes of

These imperfections may not be optimized for profit, but they are what make us wince and laugh and spark conversation. Flaws are what give a thing life.

For all its sophistication, a machine can’t guffaw at the absurdity of sewing a bad seat cushion and then showing it off to its friends. That kind of effrontery is an inside joke shared by humans alone.

Combine hyper-advanced technology with humans’ visceral inventiveness, and you get sorcery.

“For me,” she contended, “the real issues of our time are the issues of every time—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse.” It is perhaps no coincidence that Plath wrote this essay the same year she began keeping bees, a craft that inspired many of her most iconic poems. Love, survival, creation by hand. Technology changes faster than the lifespan of a honeybee, but we are the hive.