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April 9 - June 9, 2024
I was doing everything I could think of to defect from the state of overwhelm and consumption that had become my life in the roaring 2020s.
Paradoxically, the more collective progress we made, the more individual malaise we felt. Discourse about our mental unwellness crescendoed.
We’re living in what they call the “Information Age,” but life only seems to be making less sense.
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” Our mission, it seems, has to do with the mind.
Our minds have been fooling themselves since the dawn of human decision-making. The amount of input from the natural world alone was always too much for us to handle; cataloging the precise color and shape of every twig in order to understand it would take more than a lifetime.
We can’t hope to mull over every datapoint as deeply as we might like. So we tend to rely on our ancestors’ clever cheats, which come so naturally to us, we’re almost never aware of them.
Broadly, magical thinking describes the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect external events.
Mythologizing the world as an attempt to “make sense” of it is a unique and curious human habit.
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.
ARE YOU MY MOTHER, TAYLOR SWIFT? A note on the halo effect
The new extremists were called “stans,” a term originated by the rapper Eminem, whose 2000 song “Stan” spins a demented parable about a guy who blows a gasket after his icon won’t answer his fan letters. Conspicuously, the word is also a perfect hybrid of “stalker” and “fan.” The stans all had monastic names, like Barbz and Little Monsters and Beliebers and Swifties.
overall character based on our impressions of one single trait. We meet someone with a witty sense of humor and figure they must also be well-read and observant. Someone good-looking is presumed to be outgoing and confident. We think an artistic person is surely also sensitive and accepting. The term itself invokes the analogy of a halo, the power of good lighting alone to influence perceptions.
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.
Behind the halo effect is a story of survival. Historically, aligning ourselves with a physically strong or attractive person proved a wise adaptive strategy, and it was generally fair to assume that one good quality indicated more. Twenty thousand years ago, if you encountered someone tall and muscular, you’d be reasonable to deduce they’d eaten more meat than average and were therefore likely a good hunter—someone you’d want in your corner. It was equally sensible to assume that a person with a symmetrical face and intact teeth had avoided disfigurement from lost battles and animal attacks,
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Parental figures were the bias’s original subjects. Because our elders care for us and know things we don’t, we figure they must know everything.
The word “fan” stems from the Latin fanaticus, meaning “insanely but divinely inspired.”
This shift in perception was connected to the rise in celebrity activism, which corresponded with Americans’ loss of trust in politicians, traditional religious leaders, and healthcare authorities.
In a New York Times op-ed titled “When Did We Start Taking Famous People Seriously?,” Jessica Grose reported that in 1958, three quarters of Americans “trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.”
In 1980, only about 25 percent of U.S. citizens trusted the government to do the right thing anymore.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan became America’s first celebrity president, pitching himself as an “insurgent outsider.” Hollywood’s collective halo lit up like the burning bush, as the zeitgeist’s new message implied that icons of the stage and screen weren’t just here to entertain us, they were here to save us.
Instagram captions appear like letters from a loved one; direct-to-cam posts seem like FaceTimes from a friend. In the age of magical oversharing, platforms like Tumblr, TikTok, Instagram, and Patreon offer fans exponentially more access to personal information about their heroes, bridging the parasocial gap to make them feel ever more connected. After all, unlike TV, there is a real possibility that Taylor Swift could respond to your Instagram comment herself—the almighty saint answering her believer’s prayer… or demand.
“If motivated enough, stans that congregate on social media actually can change the trajectory of their artist’s path and the life of anyone who stands in the way,” analyzed NPR music reporter Sidney Madden.
Modern fandom falls on a spectrum, ranging from healthy admiration to pathological mania.
A 2014 clinical examination of celebrity worship concluded that high levels of standom are associated with psychological difficulties, including “concerns about body image… greater proneness to cosmetic surgery, sensation-seeking, cognitive rigidity, identity diffusion, and poor interpersonal boundaries.” Among other observed struggles were depression, anxiety, dissociation, narcissistic personality tendencies, thirst for fame, compulsive shopping and gambling, stalking behavior, excessive fantasizing to the point of social dysfunction (this was termed “maladaptive daydreaming”), addiction,
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This 2005 study, published in the Psychology, Crime & Law journal, identified four categories along the celebrity worship continuum: First, there was the “Entertainment Social” level, defined by attitudes like, “My friends and I like to discuss what my favorite celebrity has done.” Then, there was the “Intense Personal” feelings category, classified by statements like “I have frequent thoughts about my favorite celebrity, even when I don’t want to.” Third was the “Borderline-Pathological” level, characterized by delusional thoughts (“My favorite celebrity and I have our own code so we can
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She wrote, “Community, one of our most elemental human pleasures, has been decimated by COVID, politics, technology, capitalism… Swift’s performance might be fixed, perfect, but what happens in the crowd is messy, wild, benevolent, and beautiful.”
This finding supports the “absorption addiction model” of celebrity worship, which suggests that stans pursue parasocial relationships to make up for shortages within their real lives, but in their attempts to establish personal identities through standom, they wind up losing themselves.
As Canadian political columnist Sabrina Maddeaux wrote in 2016, “Women, who are objects of simultaneous worship and disgust in the public eye, become both victim and villain.”
Queer music journalists have noted a sinister misogyny underlying certain gay male consumers’ engagement with female pop icons.
With time, communication, and empathy, Denise and I were able to see one another more completely.
Naturally, we like it when our heroes are a little bit relatable. Daintily human. When a pop star forgets the opening line to her own song and has to start again. When the president sneaks a cigarette. When your mom gets a little tipsy on vacation. Like sea salt on a chocolate chip cookie, the garnish of imperfection brings out their holiness even more. But when it comes to people on pedestals, sometimes the fullness of their humanity feels like it just might kill us.
“good enough mother.”
proportionality bias
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.
Between March 2020 and September 2022, Pew Research data found that 58 percent of adults ages eighteen to twenty-nine had experienced high levels of psychological distress.
The term “conspirituality,” a portmanteau of “conspiracy theory” and “spirituality,”
By The Manifestation Doctor’s rise to fame, trust in the U.S. healthcare establishment, which was supposed to keep us safe from things like deadly plagues, had fractured so severely that plenty of citizens didn’t even want conventional shrinks.
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. Combining mysticism with polysyllabic DSM buzzwords like “dysregulated,” “neural pathways,” “epigenetics,” and “vasovagal response,” these teachings feel like a delicious cross between a tarot reading and a medical diagnosis.
In 2018, MIT found that true stories take six times longer to reach 1,500 people on Twitter than false ones. That’s because “false news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information. People who share novel information are seen as being in the know,” said Sinan Aral, the study’s coauthor.
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.
The blend of medicine and self-marketing is indeed an awkward modern revelation. It defies the “no advertising rule” from the American Medical Association’s original Code of Ethics, which was written in 1847 and remained unchanged for over a century.
In the spirit of trouble, I might as well admit that I think “manifestation” is often little more than a combination of proportionality bias, confirmation bias, and frequency bias.
Also known as the “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” 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.
The bias is tied to loss aversion, humans’ spiritual allergy to facing defeat.
A 2014 study from the Journal of Neuroscience found that our amygdalas make snap conclusions about whether someone appears trustworthy or not before we know who they are or even fully process what they look like.
To appear socially valuable, we’re all incentivized to seem as though we know what we want and always have, that we’re adept at evaluating risks in life and at making good calls along the way. To establish such a reputation, we are each tasked with a creative challenge—to weave the many choices we’ve made over the years into a cohesive and flattering story about who we are. We do this almost automatically. We can’t help ourselves. Come to think of it, I do it throughout this whole book.
In 2021, a pair of University of Virginia psychology researchers presented ninety-one participants with a pattern and asked them to make it symmetrical by either adding or removing colored blocks. They were intrigued to find that only 20 percent of participants opted to solve the problem by taking blocks away—a subtractive approach. This bias toward additive solutions is widespread, and it’s connected to the loss aversion that trapped me in my relationship with Mr. Backpack.
The questions onlookers most frequently ask cult survivors sound just like the ones people asked me about Mr. Backpack: “Why did you ever get involved with him? Didn’t you see the signs?” and then, “Why didn’t you just leave?” I was aiming for True Love. But my youthful, romcom-conditioned optimism made me vulnerable, unable to clock the differences between romance and control, passion and chaos. All I knew was that Mr. Backpack had a sage look in his eyes and lots of promises, and I felt brave for chasing a love others might not.
The term “love-bombing” has since the 1970s described cult leaders’ strategic use of over-the-top affection to lure recruits into the fold. It’s the same sort of campaign that, in predatory relationships, might be labeled “grooming.”
What I would say to my teenage self, though, is that no one in history ever transformed from an asshole to a dreamboat just because their girlfriend really wanted them to. I’d tell her that no one expects you to resign yourself forever to a choice you made in high school. I’d tell her it’s okay to be “disloyal” to someone who’s hurting you. I’d tell her that it is never an unreasonable time to stop and ask of your relationship: 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?
