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October 15 - October 30, 2024
With varying degrees of “success,” 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. Anything to gain some perspective on the mental health exigency I’d been experiencing, and trying to rationalize, for the better part of a decade.
We’re living in what they call the “Information Age,” but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of “boundaries,” failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own. The machine is malfunctioning, and we’re trying to think our way out of it.
The only explanation for this mass head trip that made any sense to me had to do with cognitive biases:I self-deceptive thought patterns that developed due to our brains’ imperfect abilities to process information from the world around us.
Faced with a sudden glut of information, cognitive biases cause the modern mind to overthink and underthink the wrong things.
“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,
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.”
Learning to stomach a sense of irresolution might be the only way to survive this crisis.
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.
When the modern mind is starved of nourishment, sometimes it tries to nurse in uncanny places where no milk can be found.
A stan who paints their idol as a flawless mother figure seems bound for fragility. I wonder if our artistic icons just need to be good enough.
What is a conspiracy theory other than the intuition that some powerful force is out there plotting to sabotage you… or save you? 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.
And while adding more prescriptions won’t singlehandedly fix every modern mental struggle, neither will seeking alternatives in the artificial spaces that inflamed them to begin with.
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.
If we’re primed to think that big effects have big causes, and to hallucinate patterns everywhere we look, then of course we’ll believe the reason why failure no longer follows us is because we learned to control the fate of the universe.
sunk cost fallacy: the deeply ingrained conviction that spending resources you can’t get back—money and time but also emotional resources, like secrets and hope—justifies spending even more.
Protestant capitalism conditions Americans to regard breakups as shameful “failures,” even though spending years with someone who treats your heart like a toilet plunger seems far more tragic to me. It’s
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.
This inclination is especially hard to resist as consumerists, who are conditioned to believe that in order to fix something, you’ve got to add a gadget, an app, a supplement, a paragraph, a person, instead of stepping back, taking stock of everything in front of you, and considering that the problem might actually be solved by scaling down.
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.
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.
At its roots, survivorship bias is like proportionality bias in that it’s powered by a fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect. Similar to the misjudgments that inspire conspiracy theories, survivorship bias encourages thinkers to read positive causation into patterns where only correlation exists.
Hope can only aid a body so much, of course. As Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, once put it, “In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer—any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer.”
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
Not simply to survive but to make the best of our ever-complicating world, we have to remember: When assessing the salience of contemporary concerns, we can’t always trust our attention as the most reliable barometer.
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.
the Dunning-Kruger effect, a pattern where people with the littlest knowledge on a subject consistently prove themselves likeliest to overvalue their expertise.
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.
the illusory truth effect—our penchant to trust a statement as factual simply because we’ve heard it multiple times.
“To replace a previous thought with new information would mean admitting that what you thought before was wrong,”
During election seasons and other moments of cultural uproar, I find it especially vital to remember that political dogmas become dogmas expressly because they are repeated with fervor.
The more I think about the illusory truth effect, the more I think it doesn’t work solely on external information, but also on the internal stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
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
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I’ve embraced evidence that I’m a profoundly good person and dismissed all feedback to the contrary. The stakes might not be Supreme Court–level high, but my zigzag toward rationalization takes a nearly identical shape. This cognitive acrobatic act is known as confirmation bias.
Broadly, the bias is characterized by a universal tendency to favor information that validates our existing views and discard that which refutes them.
facts disproving one’s stance are not only unconvincing, they make a person dig in harder. It’s been termed the “backfire effect.”
This appears to be one of confirmation bias’s greatest threats—it offers the mind blanket permission to oversimplify arguments in an age when arguments are only getting thornier.
My favorite neologism of the century so far is “anemoia,” which describes the feeling of nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.
Maybe the more anxiety-provoking the current moment, the further back in time we feel the need to go. Nostalgia softens an era’s harsh edges, so we can sink back into a warm bath of fantasy. Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Tales from Earthsea, “Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.” Maintaining honesty about the past is so exhausting, many of us opt not to try.
declinism—the false impression that things are worse now than they were in the past, and it’s all downhill from here.
memories of negative emotions dwindle quicker than the positive,II a phenomenon known as the fading affect bias.
Declinism gives us psychological as well as cultural permission to normalize the belief that life was inarguably better or at least more spiritually bearable in the “good old days,” whenever those were.
The brain is perennially odd about time. It defaults to hyper-dramatizing the present, glorifying the past, and devaluing the future.
a deception labeled present bias describes our propensity to blow out of proportion events that are currently happening while undervaluing wha...
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negativity bias—the tendency to assign greater weight to unfavorable events.
while wealth and overall quality of life may be improving, happiness is not.
“You can find that the lack of basic resources… contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources [does] not increase happiness,” said Csikszentmihalyi.
nostalgia helps us tolerate the present in order to warm ourselves up to what’s next. It’s how we cope with what John Koenig called “avenoir,” the impossible desire to see memories in advance.
The propensity to ascribe disproportionately high worth to items we helped create is a cognitive bias, known as the IKEA effect.
The world is growing more user-generated.
