The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

None of us perceives ourself—our attractiveness, our success—accurately. There isn’t even one correct way to perceive the same story about someone else’s delusion.

By contrast, all that’s left from the “good old days” are their highest-quality products, and thus, that’s all we ever see.

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. Much more common are the untold stories of those with commensurate skills and determination, but whose businesses never took off due to factors beyond their control—lack of family wealth and connections, systemic prejudice, bad timing.

the sheer quantity of knowable information has caused the global attention span to shrink.

In 1590, Shakespeare penned, “Was there ever any man thus beaten out of season, When in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason?”—using the rhyme-as-reason effect itself to note the conflation of artistry and accuracy.

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.

Weaponizing delusions of the past is an age-old populist marketing tactic—both a political campaign ploy and capitalist tool.

Where revisionist history is concerned, declinism arguably does its dirtiest work during election seasons, when candidates blur history’s sharp corners to radicalize a restless public and win their votes. Far-right nationalists are known to harken back to their country’s supposed “Golden Age,” hiding xenophobic and exclusionary policies under the promise of restoring the nation to its former glory.

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 have cashed in on the narrative that their nation once enjoyed a time of utopian prosperity and that only their agenda, brutal or not, will work to reinstate it.

For this, we can partially thank 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.

Primed to hyper-fixate on present negativity while glossing over the distant past, we naturally landed at declinism.

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