The Age of Magical Overthinking
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Description
A BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
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.
Book Information
Posts
I really love Amanda Montell. But I do prefer her linguistic works. "The Age of magical Overthinking" is an essay collection about biases e.g. recency bias, Ikea-bias, confirmation bias etc. She starts off each essay by presenting a personal anectode which fits the bias and then continues to tell the reader about the research done in that field. I found most of the chapters hard to follow because Montell doesn't clearly seperate the sections about personal tellings from the ones about facts. I wish she would have structured those chapters more clearly. C
Title ≠ Content
Honestly, this book just wasn’t for me. The title sounded super promising, but the content didn’t match at all. It felt more like a mix of personal stories and random celebrity gossip than an actual exploration of overthinking. I didn’t really get much out of it, and I know the author has written better books. This one just wasn’t it.
I really wanted to like this book :( The content and writing felt all over the place. I must admit that I solely got this book because of its beautiful cover and dove in without reading the blurb - expecting a non-fiction book. I ended up reading a somewhat memoir about someone I knew nothing about and kept reading references to another book. (sometimes it felt like reading an ad for "Cultish")
Description
A BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of 2024
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.
Book Information
Posts
I really love Amanda Montell. But I do prefer her linguistic works. "The Age of magical Overthinking" is an essay collection about biases e.g. recency bias, Ikea-bias, confirmation bias etc. She starts off each essay by presenting a personal anectode which fits the bias and then continues to tell the reader about the research done in that field. I found most of the chapters hard to follow because Montell doesn't clearly seperate the sections about personal tellings from the ones about facts. I wish she would have structured those chapters more clearly. C
Title ≠ Content
Honestly, this book just wasn’t for me. The title sounded super promising, but the content didn’t match at all. It felt more like a mix of personal stories and random celebrity gossip than an actual exploration of overthinking. I didn’t really get much out of it, and I know the author has written better books. This one just wasn’t it.
I really wanted to like this book :( The content and writing felt all over the place. I must admit that I solely got this book because of its beautiful cover and dove in without reading the blurb - expecting a non-fiction book. I ended up reading a somewhat memoir about someone I knew nothing about and kept reading references to another book. (sometimes it felt like reading an ad for "Cultish")