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October 7 - October 28, 2024
I had to understand how these mental magic tricks we play on ourselves combine with information overload like a chemistry experiment gone haywire—Mentos and Diet Coke.
The mind has never been perfectly rational, but rather resource-rational—aimed at reconciling our finite time, limited memory storage, and distinct craving for events to feel meaningful.
magical thinking works in service of restoring agency.
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.
Commonly depicted wearing a crown of light, angels and saints are bathed in heavenly luster, a symbol of their overall goodness. Judging someone through the lens of the halo effect, our minds cast them in the same one-dimensionally warm glow, telling us to trust them wholesale, when they’ve objectively given us little reason to.
“The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child,” said psychotherapist Mark Epstein.
When the modern mind is starved of nourishment, sometimes it tries to nurse in uncanny places where no milk can be found.
Overanalyze a mortal’s words like biblical scripture, only to find out the interpretations were false, and you can start a crusade.
they risk aggravating anxious followers’ existing concerns about their own minds.
to tell them in certain terms that there was one big, on-purpose reason why they were feeling terrible and the world couldn’t breathe, not a haphazard miscellany of tiny reasons that looked different for everyone.
Big tragedy, big blue eyes, big press treatment, big punishment. Her fate was simply proportional.
the neatly-packaged-for-Instagram version of this principle is that it can lead to an obsessive focus on personal responsibility. A key message of conspiracy therapy centers on the universal dangers of “trauma,” framed, simplistically, as unhealed wounds from childhood.
Furthermore, information transmission research suggests that folks with higher anxiety are quicker to engage with, and slower to disengage from, negative information; so, “as a trait and state,” anxiety itself perpetuates paranoid thinking.
Combine our organic animism with capitalism and tech-powered misinformation spread, and you get conspirituality.
frequency bias is an attention filter that explains the common experience of taking note of something once and then miraculously seeing it again and again.
When you fix your eyes carefully on one corner of a peripheral drift illusion, the psychedelic rippling stills. Only then can you begin to see what your brain didn’t want to at first. Only then can you move on.
My nerves remember the assortment of vowels and consonants, the stress they carried.
Looking back, it’s obvious how cultlike our dynamic was—the over-the-top attention and false promises, the harsh punishments whenever I questioned his opinions or decisions, the withdrawal from my former life.
The bias is tied to loss aversion, humans’ spiritual allergy to facing defeat.
This drive to have the best kind of parable written about you, to be a character others will want in their story,
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.
This inclination is especially hard to resist as consumerists, who are conditioned to believe that in order to fix something, you’ve got to add a gadget, an app, a supplement, a paragraph, a person, instead of stepping back, taking stock of everything in front of you, and considering that the problem might actually be solved by scaling down.
The audiobook of my life played on an internal loop, and it told me I was an adventurer who could thrive under extreme conditions.
Who is this person for whom I’m rewriting my story? Not who were they seven years ago, or who do I hope they’ll be, but who are they right now?
Zero-sum bias tells us that if another person is succeeding, then you must be failing.
Freud’s catharsis hypothesis endorsed shouting or breaking things in order to “release” negativity, but no modern evidence supports the claim that acting bad is a cure for feeling bad.
Mary wanted a photo at brunch that day because it was the first time in months she felt happy. Mary wanted a photo at brunch that day because she thought she looked ugly and wanted to live out a fantasy that she felt beautiful. Mary wanted a photo at brunch that day because her boss told her she needed to post more on Instagram.
How chuck palahniuk
the agony that your life is happening at random, and there’s nothing you can do about
“Lacking optimism is largely an issue of lacking personal agency,” she told me. “It’s when we want life to feel different, but we wake up and do the same thing over and over again. We’re not planning, creating, pausing and saying, ‘I’m going to take control.’ ” There’s a coziness to inertia even when it’s miserable, because the brain knows what to expect.
her dulcet voice a wren’s closing birdsong.
cute cerulean sphere,
In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, artist and technology critic Jenny Odell articulated the driving relationship among attention span, speed, and low-quality news. She lamented that the capitalistic pressure to “colonize the self,” to treat our bodies and minds like productivity machines, is identical to that which colonizes our time with excess news. “Those same means by which we give over our hours and days [to work] are the same with which we assault ourselves with information and misinformation, at a rate that is frankly inhumane,” wrote Odell.
“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
