The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

Broadly, magical thinking describes the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect external events.

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.”

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 trait.

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 we desire the cause to be.

sunk cost fallacy: the deeply 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.

Sunk cost fallacy emerges when you feel compelled to finish all nineteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy even though you lost interest long ago, because you’re two hundred episodes in and already paid the cable bill. Or when you’re sorely losing at poker and decide to say, “Fuck it,” and go all in, because you’ve put so much on the table already and couldn’t live with yourself if you folded. The bias is tied to loss aversion, humans’ spiritual allergy to facing defeat.

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 of place.

Whether you’re under the spell of a lover or a leader, it’s never too late to cut your losses. At any time, you can unload the heavy pack from your shoulders, leave it on the mountain, and turn back, because the view you were promised isn’t actually up there, and it’s not worth the climb anymore. It’s okay to forgive yourself (after all, everyone has their baggage) and to build a life that’s so full, and so yours, that you never really sunk any costs at all.

Zero-sum bias tells us that if another person is succeeding, then you must be failing.

In 2017, a sequence of experiments conducted out of the University of Michigan found that students living in East Asian countries were significantly more likely than Westerners to value being a “small fish in a large pond.” That is, they would prefer to work a lower-ranking job at a more prestigious company than higher up at a small, no-name firm. Meanwhile, kids who come of age in a society that pushes them to do whatever it takes to capture an enviable title, and not worry who’s ravaged along the way, will likely learn to treat all success-geared activities as zero-sum.

Indeed, psychologists have established that when we disparage people behind their backs, something called “spontaneous trait transference” occurs, wherein you start to assume the qualities you’re assigning to the subject of discussion. Drone on about your frenemy’s bad jokes or tacky sense of style, and sure enough, your fellow conversationalist may start to think of you as unfunny and tacky. This finding is consistent; the trouble is that it only applies to in-person interactions.

I’ve heard screenwriters discuss the benefits of “but/therefore” storytelling versus “and then” storytelling. Bad movie scripts tack random event onto random event (“and then, and then, and then”). This amounts to an unfulfilling story that doesn’t quite track. By contrast, compelling scripts plant narrative seeds, then create conflicts and resolutions that sprout accordingly (“therefore,” “therefore,” “but,” “therefore”). We crave this structure in ourselves as much as we do in fiction.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s why people in L.A. can be so self-centered: The narcissism isn’t innate, there’s just too much light pollution to see the stars.

Turns out, this objectively nonsensical style of panic sprouts from a deep-rooted cognitive bias called the recency illusion—the tendency to assume that something is objectively new, and thus threatening, simply because it’s new to you.I

dupes us into believing that a thing only just happened because you only just happened to notice it—even if it’s actually been there for hours, months, or thousands of years.

Cognitive biases like the recency illusion encourage us to see the world through a black-and-white, life-or-death filter. “But if we can’t honor the fact that life isn’t either all panic or all contentment, then that just exacerbates feelings of anxiety and depression. It isn’t helpful. We need to honor that multiple truths can exist at once,” said Minaa.

I might categorize reading the news as important but not always critically urgent. How might our news comprehension actually improve if we paused our consumption until tomorrow, or even reserved it all for the end of the week? For me, looking at the stars or holding Casey’s hand might not be timely matters, but they are meaningful. A bout of social media drama might feel urgent, but it’s almost never important. On second thought, it’s not even urgent. It’s “something that should not be done at all.” The more I ponder it, the vast majority of hourly “problems” I encounter are neither urgent nor important enough to require my entire, immediate attention, much less full-throttle panic. Signs point to time being more plentiful than it seems.

Awe is not unlike the Greek understanding of ecstasy, meaning “to stand to the side of reality,” or the flow states described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A person is “in flow” when their attention is so effortlessly consumed by an enjoyable challenge that “time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger.”

The smarter they think they are, the denser they must be. And if you’re wise enough to reference the Dunning-Kruger effect, then it obviously can’t apply to you.

The inclination appears in three key forms: people overvalue their actual skills, express excessive certainty in their evaluations, and overcredit themselves with positive outcomes. Austerely, this trifecta is labeled overconfidence bias.

A 2014 study in Scientific Reports concluded that overconfidence is promoted by the very act of “self-deceptive bluffing,” the kind of deep con where you don’t simply act like you’re better than you are, you honestly believe it. So you have this feedback loop of overpromising and overconfidence, and as long as a person’s bluffing doesn’t stretch all the way to “lemon juice will make me invisible,” these warped self-assessments are stunningly effective.

I wish I knew how much confidence was the “right” amount to have. How much will help you succeed professionally and feel internally content but not cross over into such delirium that you risk causing damage and annoying the living daylights out of everyone?

How’s this: Let’s stoop below average at 50 percent of all we do. We’ll relish it. The commonness. Next time we have a question, let’s hold out for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer. It’ll be erotic. Like edging before a climax. It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to know.

illusory truth effect—our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times.

The late astronomer Carl Sagan was a master of chiseling vivid allegories out of scientific theories: “We’re made of star stuff”; “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

“There are different foundations of truth that you can operate on at different times.”

Ex-evangelical theater kids are some of my favorite people to befriend. Their cinematic hell-themed trauma gives them an absurdist sense of humor that jibes oddly well with my culturally Jewish cynicism.

Broadly, the bias is characterized by a universal tendency to favor information that validates our existing views and discard that which refutes them.

2011 Yale experiment on climate change perceptions concluded that becoming more scientifically literate actually made study subjects less willing to entertain the opposing side. Why? Additional information just made them better at defending their credo. “Cultural polarization actually gets bigger, not smaller, as science literacy and numeracy increase,” concluded the researchers. “As ordinary members of the public learn more about science… they become more skillful in seeking out and making sense of—or if necessary explaining away—empirical evidence relating to their groups’ positions.”

“We’ve lost consensual reality, and I don’t know how we get that back. It’s like a menu now—choose your own reality,” said Mandel.

we often find that the brain is… fickle in its focus, porous in its memory, and inconstant in its efforts.”

My favorite neologism of the century so far is “anemoia,” which describes the feeling of nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.

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

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.

fading affect bias. Because most of us prefer reminiscing about happy times, our cheery revisions grow stronger, while bad memories wither away, leading to a general idealization of the past.

“Nostalgia blunts the politics that produces all art, especially middlebrow art,”

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

She quoted James Baldwin, who declared sixty years earlier, “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.”

“avenoir,” the impossible desire to see memories in advance.

An Ella Fitzgerald song will come on his Spotify, and he’ll cry out from the other room, “I was born in the wrong era!” Then the playlist will serve him a James Blake track, then Childish Gambino, John Mayer, Ariana Grande, Michael Bublé, and he’ll reconsider: “Never mind!” Like that toadstool LED night light, there’s magic in crossing visions of the past and future in a way that could only be possible right now.

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.

Love, survival, creation by hand. Technology changes faster than the lifespan of a honeybee, but we are the hive.