The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

I think what I really want is to treat life less like a war. Wouldn't we have less Imposter Syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast, and milk our exceptionalism for all it's worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness. In everyday life, if we could not only tolerate the discomfort, but wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace. Then perhaps life might feel, at the very least, less agitating, at most, we might even find peace. How’s this? Let’s stoop below average at 50% of all we do. We’ll relish it, the commonness. Next time we have a question, let’s hold our for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer. It’ll be erotic, like edging before a climax. It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to know

The world can be so humbling, but only if you let it humble you.

I’ve been thinking it might be a comment on nostalgia for the present. We’re still missing a term for that obscure sorrow — a plaintive longing for what’s happening right now, a futile hope that it never ends.

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.

Mistaking an anecdote for an objective fact is dubious, but using a story to breathe life into an objective fact is nothing short of magic.

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 hormonal rewards of constantly checking our phones fatigue the mind just as much as the stressors do. Studies of phone addiction have found 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.

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE An intro to magical overthinking “What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?” —Toni Morrison, Jazz

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.

Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you better… True confidence is infectious.” Building self-esteem improves our treatment of others, because it minimizes the false perception that the mere existence of beautiful, successful, cool people puts our beauty, success, and coolness at risk. It reminds us that their light doesn’t dim ours.

You can’t possibly orient yourself amid everyone you see online, especially since the identities presented there are not really people, they’re holograms.

In 2017, a sequence of experiments conducted out of the University of Michigan found that students living in East Asian countries were significantly more likely than Westerners to value being a “small fish in a large pond.” That is, they would prefer to work a lower-ranking job at a more prestigious company than higher up at a small, no-name firm. Meanwhile, kids who come of age in a society that pushes them to do whatever it takes to capture an enviable title, and not worry who’s ravaged along the way, will likely learn to treat all success-geared activities as zero-sum.

When people try to talk about economics, they have the intuition that the economy as a whole should be a pie we’re all sharing—the more you get, the less I have,” David Ludden, a language psychologist at Georgia Gwinnett College, explained to me. “But we can actually increase the amount there is in the world to share. Or we can negotiate things to a point where we both benefit.

The puzzle of zero-sum bias is typically discussed in the context of economics, in the pervasive suspicion that a transaction cannot possibly benefit both parties equally. Whenever someone profits from an exchange, we tend to assume that the other guy must have gotten ripped off, even though that’s the opposite of how trade actually works, or else no one would do it.

By 2017, Instagram was not just sunsets and brunch porn but an infinite Potemkin village of exotic vacations, trendy unrepeated outfits, and skin the texture of iPhone screens.

A toxic relationship is just a cult of one. While the framing is different, the behaviors are more or less equivalent. And as for the people who stay in these situations longer than anyone else can understand, they’re motivated by irrationalities we all share. Human beings adapted to avoid defeat at all costs, only for society’s relationship narratives to become too disordered too quickly for our judgment to catch up.

When a cult leader requires members to fork over huge sums of money to the group, it’s labeled “financial exploitation”; when a partner consumes or takes control over a partner’s finances without consent, that’s “domestic theft.

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.

A bottomless well of societal factors traps people in toxic partnerships: the American government’s unquestionably pro-marriage policies, our culture’s remaining spinster stereotypes, and our rigid alpha male standards (which encourage men, who experience just as much emotional abuse in relationships as women, to keep their sensitivities in a vault). Romantic movies perpetuate zealous “ride or die” attitudes. Many world religions and even governments condemn divorce; as of 2022, leaving your spouse is still illegal in the Philippines. 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 no wonder we stick by people who hurt us.

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.

Sunk cost fallacy emerges when you feel compelled to finish all nineteen seasons of Grey’s Anatomy even though you lost interest long ago, because you’re two hundred episodes in and already paid the cable bill. Or when you’re sorely losing at poker and decide to say, “Fuck it,” and go all in, because you’ve put so much on the table already and couldn’t live with yourself if you folded. The bias is tied to loss aversion, humans’ spiritual allergy to facing defeat.

How’s this for a healthcare conspiracy: Frequency bias can cause medical doctors to over-diagnose a condition just because they’ve recently read up on it.

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.

Conspiracy therapists are not motivated to share nuanced facts, but rather content that will paint them as supremely wise.

Self-healing” is a New Age abstraction that commodifies the Tibetan Buddhist teaching that we all create our own destinies.

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.

Until recently, I was under the impression that conspiracy theorists were either incels with rattails and UFO obsessions or Facebook-addicted Karens who think essential oils are a personality trait and vaccines make you gay.