The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

“I think because we have come so far technologically in the past 100 years, we think that everything is knowable. But that’s both so arrogant and so fucking boring,” said Jessica Grose, New York Times

“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.”

When the modern mind is starved of nourishment, sometimes it tries to nurse in uncanny places where no milk can be found.

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.