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 opinion columnist and author of Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, in 2023.

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.

concept of the “good enough mother.” In 1953, English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined this term after observing that children actually benefit when their mothers fail them in manageable ways.

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.

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.

that trapped me in my relationship with Mr. Backpack. 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. Additive

But sometimes what you actually need to be happy is to take something away.

They might even stop talking to you for a while. But they won’t forget. So often, a person in either a cult or cultlike relationship doesn’t realize that people can see them suffering—that anyone on the outside loves them or cares.

Even if it seems painfully obvious, sometimes you have to say a thing out loud for it to be real.

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...

This kind of scarcity-minded sorrow is rooted in zero-sum bias: the false intuition that another party’s gain directly means your loss. Zero-sum bias tells us that if another person is succeeding, then you must be failing. This

Whether we’re discussing hair color or immigration attitudes, the urge to compare even in the face of unlimited resources intensifies when we feel culturally unmoored.

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.

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.

interactions. Online, people who talk negatively about others—even if what they’re posting is subjective or demonstrably false—are perceived as more in-the-know. More engaging. And thus, algorithmically incentivized to carry on.

“Well, on Instagram or TikTok, those sources of inspiration come to life 24/7,” said psychologist Dr. DiNardo. “Who can resist the urge to go to a playground that’s always open?”

How easy it is to forget that behind others’ real-life choices and social media presences are motivations we could never predict.

“Perhaps we rarely consider what the people we are comparing ourselves to are sacrificing or losing… [like] privacy,” offered DiNardo. “Also, why is it that the average person with a ton of selfies is a narcissist, but someone ‘famous’ doing it is amazing? Both people want the same things, no?”

“If we want children to be present, learn well, make friends, and feel like they belong at school, we should keep smartphones and social media out of the school day for as long as possible,” he said. I’ve wondered: Has too much time on social media stunted the activity and flexibility of my frontal lobe?

Since long before TikTok, psychological turmoil has been tied up in one’s inability to connect with others. “Today it’s widely understood that one of the most important factors in preventing and addressing toxic stress in children is healthy social connection,” wrote former U.S. surgeon general Vivek

Fortunately, though, spontaneous trait transference cuts both ways. Effuse about how creative your new colleague is or how kind your friends, and as long as you mean what you say, you’ll notice yourself start to take on shinier qualities.

“When you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you better… True confidence is infectious.”

Give yourself the chance to make a connection, not an enemy,

With our light combined, we are the Chrysler Building. An undeniable win-win.

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.

Equally skilled in both crisis and celebration,

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.

They weren’t thinking about the planes that hadn’t flown home. Survivorship bias pointed the officers in exactly the wrong direction—to protect against the aircraft injuries that expressly weren’t fatal. The military had no idea which bullet holes hit the worst, because those planes never came back.

When my mother got sick and the dialect of cancer entered my lexicon, I was struck by how naturally people slipped into the language of success and failure to describe life and death. “Losing” one’s “battle” with cancer was a chosen forfeiture; it was “giving up,” “surrendering.” Implicitly, the lesson was to hoard life like gold, and those who “win” it must have deserved it.

Similar to the misjudgments that inspire conspiracy theories, survivorship bias encourages thinkers to read positive causation into patterns where only correlation exists.

Amid the whirlpool of reactions that comes with a grave medical diagnosis is the agony that your life is happening at random, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The first time we spoke, Racheli said that the ability to upload YouTube videos and impact her subscribers for the better made the experience feel less meaningless. “It helped me feel like the hard times were counting for something,” she said, “that they weren’t just happening for no reason.”

And yet, short as their lives were, I was in awe of how they enjoyed them. Shouldn’t pleasure alone count as “success,” even if it can’t be measured the same way?

There’s a coziness to inertia even when it’s miserable, because the brain knows what to expect.

“Everybody on this earth has responsibilities and hardships, but creating optimism means creating pleasurable changes that flow with those day-to-day responsibilities, so we can feel meaning and purpose,”

Ask, then, said Minaa, “How can I make life more pleasurable within my locus of control?”

Once attention itself became a form of currency, online media outlets were incentivized to frame every event as urgent and hazardous as a way to compete for it.

structure into one headline became a demented game. We editors weren’t exploiting readers’ nervous systems on purpose. We didn’t know the neuroscience. But the implicit understanding in that office was that if a problem felt new, it’d feel more serious, and if it felt more serious, it’d likely provoke onlookers’ interest, generating more traffic and revenue for our bosses, and allowing us to keep our jobs.

The brain’s emotional headquarters is much older and more primitive than its rationality department, the prefrontal cortex. The limbic system has been around since human beings’ only two significant concerns were to find food and avoid becoming it. Over the millennia, our sympathetic nervous systems grew expertly good at assuming the worst.

thereafter.” Our nervous systems struggle to sustain agitation for the many crises news platforms serve us, especially when material changes don’t result right away. “The brain is not prepared to be exposed to trauma so very often. It also needs positive feedback to help us step out of survival mode,” added psychotherapist Minaa B.

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things,” Drucker wrote in 1966’s The Effective Executive. “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”

motels. The pandemic swept our brains out to sea, so while time felt grievously sluggish in the moment, when we look back, we wonder where it all went. When you fall in love, the opposite takes place. All that novelty between me and Casey caused us to be thoroughly present, elongating the hours to a hundred times their clock length. This is also why childhood feels so long—because everything was brand-new. Or at least brand-new to you.

Rick Rubin endorses awe as an artistic tool: “As artists, we seek to restore our childlike perception…. Most of what we see in the world holds the potential to inspire astonishment if looked at from a less jaded perspective.” 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.

taking walks in nature elevated mood, decreased stress, and relaxed participants’ sense of time.

emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible.” When a single word has two definitions that counter each other, that’s called a “contronym,” and there are dozens of them in English, including the word “fine” (which can either mean really nice or just adequate), “transparent” (which can either mean invisible or obvious), or the use of “bad” to mean “good” (as in, “Omg, you are baaaaad”).

The hormonal rewards of constantly checking our phones fatigue the mind just as much as the stressors do. Studies of phone addiction have found that the little hits of dopamine that keep users jonesing for notifications come with a tragic side effect—they actually inhibit the amount of dopamine we feel when exposed to real-life novelty. Said another way, phone addiction decreases our ability to enjoy new experiences in the physical world. When you’re hooked on novelty in electronic form, new foods and flowers lose their magic.

day. 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.

American culture provides such mixed messaging on the matter of confidence. Flaunt your accomplishments, but don’t be a narcissist. Be authentic, but also be perfect. Tell the casting director you can tap-dance even if you can’t and someone else is better for the job.

favorite quote from the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson reads, “It’s the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.”

That kind of specialization and collaboration is something at which our species is uniquely skilled. So smooth is our cooperation that we can scarcely discern where another person’s comprehension starts and ours ends.

Studies show that not only do we swiftly forget the information we learn via web search, we actually forget that we forgot it—we confuse the internet’s knowledge for our own. Some refer to this mental hiccup as “the Google effect.” AI language tools like ChatGPT V make the boundaries separating our individual knowledge pools even more porous.