The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

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.

By all means, let’s have our spiritual lens, but if it’s too opaque, we won’t be able to see what others see.

In his book The Myth of Normal, trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Maté wrote, “We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we becom...

When we find ourselves in the middle of a losing situation—from a toxic relationship or exploitative spiritual group to something as low-stakes as a boring movie—we tend to persevere, telling ourselves that the win we expected is coming any moment now. That way, we don’t have to admit to ourselves that we made a bad bet and lost.

We want others to believe a fairy-tale version of us, and we want to believe it ourselves, too.

I have plenty of “regrets.” 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 wanted a beautiful story to be told about her. Fundamentally, that’s still who I am.

it is never an unreasonable time to stop and ask of your relationship: Who is this person for whom I’m rewriting my story?

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things,” Drucker wrote in 1966’s The Effective Executive. “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”

Sometimes, overconfident delusions give us the nerve to keep gunning for a better world.

We cannot perceive self-doubt as a weakness, and we shouldn’t demand undying certainty even from experts, or they will surely bullshit us in order to meet that expectation.

Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Tales from Earthsea, “Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.”

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 it hard to care about those random nobodies, even though they’re our soon-to-be selves.