The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

We’re living in what they call the “Information Age,” but life only seems to be making less sense.

cognitive biases:I self-deceptive thought patterns that developed due to our brains’ imperfect abilities to process information from the world around us.

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.

Faced with a sudden glut of information, cognitive biases cause the modern mind to overthink and underthink the wrong things.

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.

Natural selection favored a paranoid mindset. For survival, the brain evolved for an environment replete with unseen dangers and hostile intentions.

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.

The original tenet says that we may not be able to control other people or events, but with our own reactions, we can abate suffering.

I was convinced that once I put my misadventures on the record, the story would change from one of an old soul’s extraordinary love to a dumb kid’s choice to tolerate abuse. I didn’t want that to be my story.

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.

During the children’s birthday party game from hell that was the 2016 U.S. presidential election, candidates who promoted populist, anti-trade policies enjoyed extraordinary superfandom across the political spectrum, despite criticism from economists.

Focusing on portraits of millennials who “made it” in everyday ways—buying property, vacationing in Iceland that one summer when it seemed like everyone was in Reykjavík—distorts the reality that the average millennial experience is not so plentiful.

stefan and i in iceland that summer LOL

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.

“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.

Gazing up at a deciduous oak isn’t some enchanted solution to everyone’s problems, of course. But, where the recency illusion is concerned, connecting with the physical world we were made for opens up a tiny mental wormhole, allowing us to recast time for just long enough to remember that a headline in your feed is not a predator in the bushes or crop circle in your backyard.

“Bitch, be humble.” —Kendrick Lamar

The risks of overconfidence extend far past all-you-can-consume comedy skits and skincare routines.

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.

“LMAO I just learned on a podcast that the reason brides carry bouquets is because in Medieval Europe they only bathed once a year!!!!”

We’re the ones who deserve eviction. If you don’t start composting for the sake of future generations, I say do it in loving memory of the dinosaurs.

Declinism explains why one might thumb through old photos of themselves, longing to be nineteen and baby-cheeked again, even if they know that age felt miserable and directionless in the moment.

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.