The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

by Amanda Montell

“Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it.” —Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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 mentality motivates countless conflicts, from young people’s distress about their grades all the way to public resistance to trade and immigration.