The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

Since the new millennium, humanity had built a megamall full of fun and fresh ways to dissociate: Fringe conspiracy theories had gone mainstream. Celebrity worship reached a hallucinatory zenith. Disney Adults and MAGA zealots were blackout drunk on nostalgia, drowned in chimeras of the past. These misbeliefs came in a range of flavors, from whimsical to warlike, but one thing was certain—our shared grasp on reality had slipped.

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.

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.” To become as aware as we can of the mind’s natural distortions, to see both the beauty and utter folly in them: This, I believe, ought to be part of our era’s shared mission. We can let the cognitive dissonance bring us to our knees, or we can board the dizzying swing between logos and pathos. We can strap in for a lifelong ride. Learning to stomach a sense of irresolution might be the only way to survive this crisis.

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.

conspiracy theory can be defined as a sense-making narrative that offers a satisfying explanation for some confounding turn of events.

While men’s tastes in conspiracy theories often point them in the direction of UFOs and satanic cabals, educated women are more likely than anyone to embrace New Age concepts, like moon bathing, crystal healing, and manifestation techniques, including the law of attractionIII.

Most conspiracy theories argue that a mysterious outside evil is trying to control you. By contrast, conspiracy therapy says that the evil force is your own mind.

Far from Instagram therapy, in certain collectivist indigenous cultures, perceiving intentionality in one’s environment fosters not paranoia about the universe, but rather harmony with it. This perspective, called “animism,” proposes that a tree is not a soulless piece of furniture; it’s more like a roommate, or even a parent. Everything in the world has an innate “personhood,” which is connected to all others, and failing to respect that risks crashing nature’s cosmic economy.

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.

Where gender and social comparison are concerned, research indicates that women are prone to make more upward comparisons and downward identifications. A 2022 study out of Vaud University of Teacher Education in Switzerland found that by elementary school, girls have already learned to compare themselves only to the peers they perceive as superior. By contrast, when men glance around a party or scroll through their feeds, they’re more likely to notice only their less attractive peers. Their impression from there is, Cool, I guess I’m the hottest guy here, and that’s a self-esteem victory. When women survey their circle, they only spy the “threats.”

By DiNardo’s account, the manageable way to piece together an identity is by triangulating among a small set of individuals in the physical world. You can’t possibly orient yourself amid everyone you see online, especially since the identities presented there are not really people, they’re holograms.

As naive realists, human beings can’t help but make the perspective-taking error that our own preferences are ground truth.

some like colored glass, and others like ink and blood.

My mother always told me that when people get sick, they become more extreme versions of themselves. If they’re cynical, they become more cynical; if they’re polite, they become more polite; if they’re funny, they get funnier.

Survivorship bias beckons thinkers to draw incorrect conclusions about “why” something turned out well by fixating too narrowly on the people or objects that made it past a certain benchmark, while overlooking those that didn’t.

“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.

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 Anyone who’s ever responded to an abstract, nonurgent “peril” as if it were about to push them off a cliff can thank this ever-present fallacy, which 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.

How much newness we experience largely defines our sense of time. Without memory, time doesn’t exist, and the borders bookending clockable events are the checkpoints we need to chart its passage.

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.

As unbecoming as bigheadedness may be, it historically had its merits. A 2011 Nature study proposed that natural selection may have favored a swollen ego, as it enhanced resolve and perseverence, made it easier to bluff opponents in conflict, and generated a self-fulfilling prophecy where self-assuredness alone fostered better chances of survival. Political science researchers from Britain, Germany, and Switzerland tested the survival benefits of overconfidence by conducting a series of experimental war games. Participants were asked to assess the weakness of neighboring countries, represented as squares on a grid, and then decide whether or not to attack. The study concluded that while overconfident participants were more likely than anyone else to blitz opponents unprovoked and overall fought more battles, when it came to the end of the war, the victor was always someone who’d behaved overconfidently. The researchers analyzed that even though overconfident parties were expected to lose more wars, they also entered more wars, “effectively ‘buying more lottery tickets’ in the competition for survival.” Sure, some overconfident states reached too far and got clobbered, but by chance, others enjoyed back-to-back wins, receiving positive feedback each time that they really were as great as they thought and should continue with their conquests. So they expanded quickly, growing more powerful from the resources they progressively gained. When you keep winning, what incentive is...

humility is defined by “a low focus on the self, an accurate (not over- or underestimated) sense of one’s accomplishments and worth, and an acknowledgment of one’s limitations, imperfections, mistakes, gaps in knowledge, and so on.”

But I think what I really want is to treat life less like a war. Wouldn’t we have less imposter syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast and milk our exceptionalism for all it’s worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness. In everyday life, if we could not only tolerate the discomfort but wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace. Then perhaps life might feel, at the very least, less agitating. At most, we might even find peace.

We can assign much of the blame to a bias known as the illusory truth effect—our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times. Characterized by the power of repetition to make something false “sound true,” the illusory truth effect has been demonstrated using a bevy of stimuli, from fake news headlines and marketing claims to rumors, trivia, and internet memes.

At the risk of sounding dramatic, repetition very well might be the closest thing we have to a magical spell.

Tom Mould explained that while memorable phrasing might not make information more accurate, it does make it more powerful because of how “transportable” language is. “They say stories transport people into the story world, but also, narratives are incredibly transportable themselves,” he said. You can easily tote along catchy proverbs like “woes unite foes” or “haters are my motivators” and use them in all kinds of situations, like a semantic Swiss Army knife. Stories work the same way. “You can rip a story out of its context and retell it in other places,” said Mould. You can’t do this with stats, graphs, and charts—forms of data often helmed as universally superior. “It’s hard to remember a graph,” Mould continued. “But what if I told you about an experiment in the form of a story?” Mistaking an anecdote for an objective fact is dubious, but using a story to breathe life into an objective fact is nothing short of magic.

One of my favorite books on confirmation bias is 2007’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). In it, authors Tavris and Aronson cite a study from the early 2000s where participants were hooked up to MRIs and presented with data that either emboldened or negated their pre-held views on George W. Bush and John Kerry. Faced with facts they didn’t like, the reasoning areas of participants’ brains went dark, as if the prefrontal cortex stuck its fingers in its ears, shouted lalala, and left the room. By contrast, when shown corroborative information, their minds’ emotional provinces lit up brighter than my smile at the dinosaur exhibit. A canon of studies has replicated this finding that facts disproving one’s stance are not only unconvincing, they make a person dig in harder. It’s been termed the “backfire effect.”

Of course, confirmation bias serves a purpose, or else it wouldn’t exist. In a 2020 paper, German philosopher Uwe Peters noted that one of the bias’s evolutionary benefits might be that “it helps us bring social reality into alignment with our beliefs.” How unsustainably chaotic would it feel if our social reality and beliefs never synced up? When approached with a skeptical wink, “Saturn return” is a lens through which to bond over a shared pattern: the quarter-life crisis. It’s lovely to have excuses to connect with each other, to ignore one another’s differences because you have something in common, even if that something is mostly made-up.

The brain is perennially odd about time. It defaults to hyper-dramatizing the present, glorifying the past, and devaluing the future. Related to declinism, a deception labeled present bias describes our propensity to blow out of proportion events that are currently happening while undervaluing what will come in a few years or even days. A 2015 UCLA psychology study found that people conceive of their future selves as strangers, which is why we often procrastinate our homework and put off saving for retirement. We find it hard to care about those random nobodies, even though they’re our soon-to-be selves.