Amanda Montell

From the bestselling author of Cultish and host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, a delicious blend of cultural criticism and personal narrative that explores our cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages, and highlights of magical thinking. Utilizing the linguistic insights of her “witty and brilliant” (Blyth Roberson, author of America the Beautiful?) first book Wordslut and the sociological explorations of her breakout hit Cultish, Amanda Montell now turns her erudite eye to the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in her most personal and electrifying work yet. “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 the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, or transform an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone. In all its forms, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven. In a series of razor sharp, deeply funny chapters, Montell delves into a cornucopia of the cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, from how the “Halo effect” cultivates worship (and hatred) of larger than life celebrities, to how the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” can keep us in detrimental relationships long after we’ve realized they’re not serving us. As she illuminates these concepts with her signature brilliance and wit, Montell’s prevailing message is one of hope, empathy, and ultimately forgiveness for our anxiety-addled human selves. If you have all but lost faith in our ability to reason, Montell aims 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.

Notes on Modern Irrationality

The Age of Magical Overthinking

Omg yes like the fools during the Depp vs. Heard trial?? As if he’s ever played anyone of high moral character besides Edward Scissorhands????

Mari🦇 🤎🗡️

Dr. Paul Offit, […] he analyzed that Americans put their faith because "we think we know them, we see the TV and we assume they are the roles they play" 

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. 

Karolina

In a culture that not only tolerates but actively endorses self-deceptive bluffing, how can we rebrand confidence as something that requires the ability to reevaluate, or even retreat, rather than attack? 

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.

Technology changes faster than the lifespan of a honeybee, but we are the hive.

Rebecca Lum

An elusive nostalgia for the current moment, so precious in its ephemerality that the second you notice it, it’s already slipped away.

The Age of Magical Overthinking quotes

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