Reading Notes: The Age of Magical Overthinking (Part 1)

📚 My top highlights and insights

Burnout is no friend to your reading habits. Chronic stress makes it harder to focus on what we’re reading, harder to absorb new information, harder to think critically about its message, and harder to retain any of it long-term.

That’s where Reading Notes comes in. Think of this as Cliff Notes for burnout — if you’re operating at a deficit of time and energy and don’t have it in you to process an entire book, I made the TL;DR version for you.

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Happy Publication Day to

Amanda Montell

and The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality!

I started this year most excited to read THIS book — which I originally got as an advance reader copy through Amanda’s newsletter,

MAGICAL OVERTHINKERS

— and it absolutely did not disappoint. Come for the research-backed hot takes on things like manifesting (a modern conspiracy theory) and toxic relationships (a cult of one), and stay for the vivid imagery (“someone who treats your heart like a toilet plunger”) that proves why Amanda’s bio dubs her a “linguist.”

I’ll be interviewing her about the book for this newsletter next month and would like to include a reader question or two. Submit your questions here!

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Bold text within a block quote indicates my own emphasis, while my own notes and comments appear as italicized bullet points.

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. Purchases made through these links may earn me a small commission.

Make It Make Sense: An intro to magical overthinking

My brain felt like dust. In the last few years, “dread for no reason” became one of my most frequent Google searches, as if the act of typing my feelings to a robot would make them go away. I gorged myself on podcasts about women who’d “snapped,” at once repulsed and tantalized by those who wore their madness on their sleeves. How good it must feel “snap,” I thought.

• This isn’t burnout per se, but damn it sounds a lot like my own pre-burnout stages

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: self-deceptive thought patterns that developed due to our brains’ imperfect abilities to process information from the world around us.

I needed to yank at that thread. I had to understand how these mental magic tricks we play on ourselves combine with information overload like a chemistry experiment gone haywire — Mentos and Diet Coke.

• Love this visual; it really emphasizes how volatile our little brains can be

Our minds have been fooling themselves since the dawn of human decision-making.

The mind has never been perfectly rational, but rather resource-rational — aimed at reconciling our finite time, limited memory storage, and distinct cravings for events to feel meaningful.

Faced with a sudden glut of information, cognitive biases cause the modern mind to overthink and underthink the wrong things. We obsessed unproductively over the same paranoias (Why did Instagram suggest I follow my toxic ex-boss? Does the universe hate me?) but we blitz past complex deliberations that deserve more care.

“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, New York Times opinion columnist, and author of Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, in 2023. I’ve been referring to this era, when we’re so swiftly outpacing the psychological illusions that once served us, as the “Age of Magical Overthinking.“

Mythologizing the world as an attempt to “make sense” of it is a distinct and curious human habit.

• And might be the literal reason that Substack exists!

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.

• The fact that it works in service of restoring agency is why so many of the tools we use for burnout recovery can trend toward magical thinking: blaming mercury retrograde for system outages (Ch. 9), sure, but also manifesting a raise (Ch. 2), or improving performance and productivity by reciting self-affirmations.

To become as aware as we can of the mind’s natural distortions, to see both the beauty and utter folly in them: This, I believe, ought to be part of our shared mission.

If you have all but lost faith in others’ ability to reason, or have made a cornucopia of questionable judgments that you can’t even explain, my hope is for these chapters to make some sense of the senseless. To crack open a window in our minds, and let a warm breeze in. To help quiet the cacophony for a while, or even hear a melody in it.

Chapter 1. Are You Our 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 also a perfect hybrid of “stalker” and “fan.”

From the stans’ perspective, their idol had dangled a new era of progressive activism in front of them only to snatch it back, like a mother betraying a promise to her daughters.

• This section references fans’ disappointment over Taylor Swift’s public stance (or lack thereof) on police brutality in 2020

Identified in the early 20th century, 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.