Age Of Magical Overthinking: Notes On Modern Irrationality - Amanda Montell

Culture & Sociology

Rating: 7.5/10

“What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?” Toni Morrison

Magical thinking can be broadly defined as the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world. Think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty, stave off cancer with positive vibes, thwart that voice inside ourselves that challenges us.

Magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, the author argues that in the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our heightened irrationality has caused our grasp on reality to slip.

Our brains have always played tricks on us, often as a form of self-preservation. Those mental magic tricks can go horribly wrong when combined with too much access to data and too many point of view. With information only a few clicks away, we think that everything is knowable. That we have the power to make sense of the senseless. That we can quiet the cacophony within ourselves when in fact we are only exacerbating it. It feeds a dangerous illusion of self-control.

We cling to the hope that we can find one truth that explains everything. Everything we are thinking. Everything we are feeling.

The author illuminates her premise by delving into the cultural and cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, paired with personal antidotes that enrich the narrative.

Book Pairing(s): Cultish by Amanda Montell, Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt