The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

By 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.

"Magical thinking" can be broadly defined as the belief that one's internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world. In all its forms, magical thinking works to restore a sense of 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 has been turned up to 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 celebrity worship to how the "sunk cost fallacy" can keep us in detrimental situations long after we should have left.

Illuminating 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. Key explorations include:

• Celebrity Worship: How the "halo effect" creates larger-than-life idols and villains.
• Relationship Traps: The power of the "sunk cost fallacy" in our personal lives.
• Modern Irrationality: Why it feels so hard to simply exist as a human being right now.

If you have all but lost faith in our ability to reason, Montell aims to make some sense of the senseless. The Age of Magical Overthinking is a guidebook for the era of misinformation and an illuminating reveal of the delusions that underlie our own beliefs.