< 'Magical Overthinking' author says information overload can stoke irrational thoughts

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR, I'm Tonya Mosley. If you want to know about something - really anything - all you have to do is take out your phone and do a quick search. We think almost everything in this world is knowable. But our guest today argues that all of this information at our fingertips has created a society of overanxious overthinkers. In her new book, "The Age Of Magical Overthinking," Amanda Montell writes that our brains are overloaded with a gluttonous stream of constant information that's up against our innate tendencies as humans to believe conspiracy theories and mysticism, like believing that we can manifest our way out of just about anything.

Amanda Montell is a writer, linguist and host of the podcast "Sounds Like A Cult." She's also the author of two other nonfiction books, including "Cultish" and "Wordslut: A Feminist Guide To Taking Back The English Language."

Amanda Montell, welcome to FRESH AIR.

AMANDA MONTELL: Thank you so much for having me.

MOSLEY: So I really love this book. And I can't wait to get into this conversation because you have this quote at the start of the book by the late famed philosopher Frantz Fanon, which says, (reading) each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission and fulfill or betray that mission.

And what you're asserting is that for us, faced with all of this information at our disposal at all times, our mission has to do with our minds.

MONTELL: That's right.

MOSLEY: Yeah. I mean, a crisis of the mind, really. I'm just wondering, when did it become aware to you that this is what we were in the midst of and that you needed to write about it?

MONTELL: Well, over the past few decades, I would say, I've been developing this incredible cognitive dissonance surrounding the idea that we are living in the information age, and yet life only seems to be making less sense. It doesn't seem to be feeling any better. And I could never square those two truths until I started looking into cognitive biases.

So while I was researching my last book, which is about the language of cults from Scientology to SoulCycle, so this wide spectrum of cultish groups, I was investigating the mechanics of cult influence. And I kept coming across all this really fascinating psychology and behavioral economics research that made mention of some of the more well-known biases, like confirmation bias and sunk-cost fallacy. And I couldn't help but notice that not only were these biases explaining cult followers' behavior - you know, the decision to spend 20 years in Scientology, even though the promises that were made to you aren't coming true...

MOSLEY: Aren't being fulfilled, right.

MONTELL: Right, and you know that, and yet you stay anyway. Not only were these biases explaining this cult behavior, but they could also relate directly to choices I had made in my own life that never made sense to me before, like my decision to spend seven years in a cult-of-one sort of romantic relationship that I knew was not serving me. And yet, I doubled down and stuck around for years and years beyond what made sense to anyone else, including me. Or my choice to engineer online enemies based on conflicts I'd invented in my own head. And these biases certainly explained a lot of the irrationalities I was noticing in the zeitgeist at large. So I really wanted to investigate the clash between these innate psychological shortcuts that we've always made to make sense of the world, enough to survive it, and the information age.

MOSLEY: As you say, cognitive biases - essentially, it's a set of imperfect shortcuts in our brains that help us make decisions. I'm thinking about how, by and large, though, in the life of the human species, these biases have actually helped us evolve and survive. Why is more information at this moment causing us to be anxious overthinkers when it comes to this world?

MONTELL: Yeah, so cognitive biases are these deep-rooted mental magic tricks that we play on ourselves. And by the way, this was a term that was coined by the late Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Anyone who's read "Thinking, Fast And Slow" or "Noise" will be familiar.

MOSLEY: Yep.

MONTELL: But cognitive biases developed to help us reconcile our limited time, our limited memory storage, our limited cognitive resources and our distinct craving for events to feel meaningful during a time when most of the problems that we were contending with every single day were physical. They were less abstract, less complex, less disembodied. And that was true for most of human history. And so we developed these shortcuts unconsciously to help us make sense of our environment enough to survive.

But now survival is, for the most part, taken care of. At least, we're not being attacked by saber-toothed tigers anymore in the way that we were when these biases developed. And yet we're still relying on them to confront much more complex and cerebral concerns. And that clash is causing a great deal of existential pain. I really think that our innate mysticisms are clashing with this onslaught of information, mass loneliness and almost a capitalistic pressure to know everything under the sun. And this is all happening without our conscious awareness.

MOSLEY: So essentially, our brains haven't caught up with where we've evolved to...

MONTELL: That's correct.

MOSLEY: ...Is what you're saying. OK, so another thing that you're saying about this that's so interesting to me is that you say that we are focused on overthinking and underthinking the wrong things...

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Like being obsessed with or giving extreme importance to celebrities. That's one example. And the halo effect is what this is.

MONTELL: Yeah. So the halo effect is our tendency to admire one single quality in a person and then jump to the conclusion that they must be perfect overall. So we see a pop star whose music we enjoy, and we assume that they must also be worldly, kind, nurturing. Maybe they align with our political beliefs. Or we enjoy someone's fashion sense, and we must - and we jump to the conclusion that they're gregarious or, you know, maybe they speak other languages. Like, we jump to these conclusions for which there is little or no evidence. And we do this because it was really helpful to find role models.

Once, you know, when we were living in smaller communities, the halo effect prompted us to make decisions like, you know, seeing someone with large muscles or intact teeth and thinking, oh, that person must be a skilled hunter or a skilled fighter, because they've avoided disfigurement from battle. That would be a great person to align myself with for survival.

But we're now mapping this halo effect onto modern parasocial relationships involving celebrities. And that's setting everyone up for psychological failure because we're uplifting these celebrities onto a pedestal so high up in the sky that we can't perceive their humanity anymore. And yet we also don't know them in person. So we can't sort of mend those conflicts. And so when they post something or behave in a way that contradicts the expectations that we've cultivated of them, we feel the need to dethrone them, to punish them, not unlike the ways that I would, you know, elevate my mother onto a God-like pedestal when I was growing up. And then as soon as I realized she was actually a fallible human being, I felt...

MOSLEY: Yeah (laughter).

MONTELL: ...The need to dethrone her. And there is actually fascinating research connecting parental absence or parent-child attachment to superfan and idol relationships that I document in the book.

MOSLEY: OK, so what's really interesting about this example, using your mother as an example - when then you find out that she's no longer perfect, that comes with you having more information.

MONTELL: Correct.

MOSLEY: It comes with you being older, right?

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: I want to understand, though, what happened between the halo effect being something that was positive for society, for communities - when you saw someone that you admired - to what we're dealing with now in the social age and the information age? You actually trace this back to the early 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan for president.

MONTELL: This is true. So the ways that we've found role models have just changed enormously. They used to be people that we knew in our real lives - parental figures, community leaders. And now with globalization and technology, we can admire a public figure, a politician, an athlete, a celebrity. And as it turns out, the lines separating those different types of public figures have really blurred. And you can really connect that to the Reagan era, our first-ever celebrity president. He was framed as this insurgent outsider. By the 1980s, mass trust in the government and the health care system, these other institutions that had always provided us with support, had really declined. And so we were in the market for a new kind of paragon.

Here come entertainers. And by the Reagan era and following that time, we started to perceive pop stars as folks who were not just here to entertain us. They were here to save us. They were here to guide us politically, spiritually, fiscally, in terms of our morality, our identity. So celebrities have really swerved out of their lane into these other capacities. And yet they are only human. They are only pop stars. But the halo effect is still mapped onto them to uplift them to this station that often, you know, has these really negative consequences for both the star and the stan.

MOSLEY: I mean, what you're also doing here is explaining the rise of Donald Trump.

MONTELL: Correct.

MOSLEY: I'm thinking about how he's been a part of our society and our consciousness for over 40 years. There are books, news reports, TV shows, movies, everything.

MONTELL: Absolutely. I mean, I am endlessly fascinated by the role of celebrities in public life. And I don't have definitive answers about whether or not we should look to entertainers for political role model purposes. Obviously, you know, the range of celebrity paragons is enormous, from Donald Trump to Dolly Parton. But I'm fascinated in the behavioral economics and the psychology of those dynamics and what they say about our longing for role models and relationships during this particular time in history.

MOSLEY: We are seeking intimacy - that is what you're saying here - that cannot be returned from these celebrities. And I'm just thinking about the cost of that for the celebrity - not to feel sorry for a celebrity, but just thinking about the position that puts them in. I'm thinking about Taylor Swift. I'm thinking about Beyonce. They're on such a high pedestal that it's kind of consequential for them. If they make the wrong move, their stans are going to come out, and they're going to be ruthless.

MONTELL: Yeah, and that sets everyone up for disappointment and disillusionment and disconnection. I also want to make the point that I make in the book that women, female public figures, are surrogate mothers in the public sphere, have a much slimmer margin of error. So when we uplift them onto this pedestal, onto this angelic position, they simply have further to fall.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Amanda Montell. We're talking about her new book, "The Age Of Magical Overthinking: Notes On Modern Irrationality." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, we're talking to Amanda Montell, author of the new book "The Age Of Magical Overthinking: Notes On Modern Irrationality." In it, Montell explores this idea of magical overthinking, that our internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world. Montell is the creator and host of the podcast "Sounds Like A Cult," and she's written two other nonfiction books, including "Cultish" and "Wordslut: A Feminist Guide To Taking Back The English Language." Well, as I just mentioned, you're a writer and a researcher, but you're also a linguist. And that just - you know, of course, that means words matter to you. And I want to get into how the use of language plays into your theories. But first, I really want to know what fascinates you about language.

MONTELL: Oh, my gosh. I've been transfixed by language ever since I was a little kid. I'm not sure quite why - some combination of nature, nurture. The fact that I received a thesaurus for my 10th birthday just cracked my world open. I was a total - I was a criminal when it came to using malapropisms, $10 words that didn't belong when I was, you know, cutting my teeth as a writer. But I'm fascinated by the relationship between language, culture, power. And I explored that topic in the context of gender in my first book, "Wordslut," which is kind of a quick and dirty crash course in feminist sociolinguistics. And that sort of planted the seeds for my fascination with language and power in the context of cults, which is the subject of my next book. And, I mean, I will always be fascinated by language. And that manifests in this book, as well, not only just because language is the lens through which I perceive the world but also because there are a few language-specific cognitive biases in the book, like the illusory truth effect, which is our penchant to think that something is true just because we've heard it multiple times.

MOSLEY: This is fascinating.

MONTELL: Oh, it is.

MOSLEY: Give me an example of this.

MONTELL: So we grow up hearing certain legends and myths and lore repeated ad nauseam. And we perceive them as true. We mistake processing fluency as accuracy. It's the reason why - a low-stakes example - I genuinely thought until I was an adult that it took seven years to digest gum. I never interrogated that fun factoid because it was repeated so often over and over again. Or, you know, the idea that if you cross your eyes, they get stuck.

MOSLEY: Get stuck like that.

MONTELL: I was able to disprove that pretty quickly. You just cross your eyes once - you know that's not true. But this cognitive bias also explains why misinformation and disinformation can spread so easily, particularly online. There's fascinating research that's been conducted by the social scientist Lisa Fazio that suggests that there is not a single person alive who can resist the illusory truth effect. If you show someone a headline just once, you know, some people will believe it's true. Some people won't. But if you show that same group that same headline a week later, two weeks later, twice as many participants will believe that it's true just because they've seen it once before.

And this repetition, in combination with other rhetorical strategies like rhyme - we really appreciate rhyme. It's a double-edged sword because on one hand, it makes learning more fun. It makes, you know, discerning true facts more easy because you can, you know, isolate. OK, I've heard that multiple times. I can probably trust that as as an efficient decision making strategy that that's probably true. But in an age when myths and disinformation is being spread so far and wide by folks who have nefarious intentions, the illusory truth effect is proving not so useful.

MOSLEY: Right. That's the thing because I think we all know and understand that if you put something in front of us over time, we're going to think it's good.

MONTELL: Yes.

MOSLEY: That's why there - you know, back in the day, I mean, like, you look back, and you think many people who became celebrities back in the day or many things that we loved back in the day - why did we love that? Well, it was just because it was in front of us...

MONTELL: That's right.

MOSLEY: ...And that we didn't have many choices. The difference now is that we are just being flooded with information from everywhere, and it's repetitious and it's over and over.

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: There is a chapter in the book titled I Swear I Manifested This, and this gets to language for me because right now, the buzzwords that I keep hearing over and over are manifest, trauma, healing wounds. I mean, I guess you could see where my Instagram is - like, it's just all over there.

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: You group this kind of language into something called thought-terminating language.

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: Can you explain this?

MONTELL: Oh, absolutely. I talk about this in my last book, "Cultish," but it sort of dovetails with this particular chapter about manifestation in this book. So a thought-terminating cliche, this is a term that was coined in 1961 by the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, and it describes a sort of stock expression that's easily memorized, easily repeated and aimed at shutting down independent thinking or questioning. And there are a lot of cult-followed grifters online who rely on thought-terminating cliches in their arsenal to put people's cognitive dissonance to bed. So a New Age thought-terminating cliche might sound like something like, well, that's just a victim mindset, or you need to sit with that, or don't let yourself be ruled by fear. And in this book, I write about manifestation in the context of a particular cognitive bias called proportionality bias, which also underlies pretty destructive conspiratorial thinking in addition to ideas of manifestation.

MOSLEY: You're basically saying manifestation is a conspiracy theory.

MONTELL: Is its own kind of conspiracy theory, which is an edgy point to make, but I start that whole chapter by admitting that I, myself, was a conspiracy theorist once. Sometimes, I still am, and that is because a conspiracy theory could be boiled down to a misattribution of cause and effect, which relates to proportionality bias. So we tend to believe, naturally, as humans, that big events or even big feelings must have had a big cause. It just makes proportional sense to us. When something feels out of our control, chaotic, turbulent, unpredictable, we create fictions in order to infuse some kind of cosmic logic into it. So the way that this relates to proportionality bias is, say, a pandemic strikes, this global tragedy. It couldn't have just been caused by a bunch of small, random misfortunes all happening in a row. It had to have been engineered by a government on purpose. That's the only way this makes proportional sense.

Or Princess Diana dying. What a calamity, what an over-the-top, freak tragedy. Couldn't have happened at random. The royal family must have killed her. We admire beautiful proportions. Whether you're talking about current events or personal tragedies or photography, it's one of the reasons why, you know, we crave one, single person to hold accountable for crime. We want it to make proportional sense.

MOSLEY: You know what, though? I went into this chapter skeptical, but I ended it understanding what you're saying because you're talking about big events, but I mean, many people will say to you, like, manifestation is real. Like, what you think about, what you feel, you can make that then your reality in your day-to-day life. When do these affirmations and when does this idea turn into something that is dangerous?

MONTELL: Yeah. Well, I fully believe and know, based on so many of the conversations that I've had with mental health experts that I really trust, that your mindset and your attitude can absolutely affect outcomes. Of course it can. This relates to mindfulness and optimism practices. This is absolutely true. Where manifestation starts to get a little sketchy, a little grifty (ph), a little culty (ph), dare I say, is when public figures on TikTok, on Instagram, project the language of capitalism onto it. When you start to take an absolutist approach to this subject matter and make it an ideology, it gets a little sinister because then, when you start to think about it more surgically, if the fact that you are now gainfully employed and have a romantic partner and - whereas before that was not the case, is because you manifested it, you created a vision board, you bathed your crystals, you know, your mind was in the right place.

Well, the inverse of that is that if you're sick, poor, unemployed, out of love, unlucky in love, well, then it must be your fault. And in the post-pandemic era, during this time of incredible tumult, socio-politically, globally, we're craving someone to tell us how to reclaim some agency. And so I have noticed a generation of grifty manifestation gurus on TikTok and Instagram sweep into the market and promise, actually, I have a bespoke, proprietary manifestation technique, and if you're seeing this on your For You page, then it was meant for you. All you have to do is sign up for my $30-a-month course, and I will impart this manifestation wisdom onto you. It will change your life, and if it doesn't, well, that's your fault.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Amanda Montell. We're talking about her new book, "The Age Of Magical Overthinking: Notes On Modern Irrationality." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF JESSICA WILLIAMS' "YOU'RE DRIVIN' ME CRAZY")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I'm talking to writer Amanda Montell, author of the new book "The Age Of Magical Overthinking: Notes On Modern Irrationality." In the book, Montell explores magical overthinking, which is this idea that our internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world. It's making us overanxious. Montell is the creator and host of the podcast "Sounds Like A Cult," and she's written two other nonfiction books, including "Cultish" and "Wordslut." How does end-of-times vernacular, like the-world-is-burning type of vernacular, or I'm dead or I'm spiraling - because I say those often...

MONTELL: Me too.

MOSLEY: ...In response to, like, crazy news - how does that make us even more anxious overthinkers, I guess?

MONTELL: You know, I actually just wrote an op-ed for Esquire about exactly this called "Is 'Doomslang' Making Us All Numb?" And in that piece, I explored this phenomenon that I'm terming doomslang, which are, you know, casual colloquialisms invoking the apocalypse - everything from terms like doomscrolling and bed-rotting to phrases like, how was your weekend? You know, other than the slow, creeping demise of the planet and all. And I found that this language is really infusing online discourse. It's just polite, casual small talk at this point. It feels politically irresponsible not to at least acknowledge - even in this ironic or blase manner - the many doomy horrors that we're exposed to every day, some of which affect us directly, some of which don't.

MOSLEY: I mean, some people might feel like it makes us more grounded. It makes us more in reality and not delusional...

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Because we're, like, sitting - we're sitting in what is reality...

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...By expressing these types of things.

MONTELL: You know, I go into all of my projects, whether it's a manuscript-length project or an op-ed, feeling a little pessimistic, actually. I was like, is doomslang causing us to catastrophize? Is it desensitizing us to real horrors by applying the same doomslang to, you know, some controversy involving a celebrity as we do to a war? And yet every single project that I embark on, I end up talking to scholars much smarter and better informed than I. And they always infuse me with optimism, because I went in thinking, like, speaking this way is detrimental. And then I spoke to a brilliant lexicographer named Kory Stamper. And I spoke to some social scientists who study catastrophe response and first responders, including Laura Myers and Eddie Ewen (ph). And they all filled me with so much more hope, because Laura Myers, the social scientist at the University of Alabama who studies language and discourse in response to crisis - she was telling me that, you know, it is a form of humorous coping that has always been around.

MOSLEY: Existed, yeah.

MONTELL: That has always existed. There - so first of all, there have always been phrases coined to describe people who were too quick to be the boy who cried apocalypse. So, you know, throughout history there have been phrases like screech owls and doomsayers to refer to these folks who, you know, are very quick to claim that the rapture is coming. And then it doesn't come true. And so then that kind of creates a sense of catastrophe fatigue or ennui. And that is very real.

But I learned from Laura Myers that, you know, first responders - emergency responders, in the face of just the most harrowing, traumatizing tragedy, will often respond by using humor, sometimes making jokes that would sound so disturbing to the outside that you might not believe it. But it's a coping mechanism that helps them get through, that helps them push through that crisis. And in a way, I think that doomslang, while it is problematic because it is causing, you know, the measured action items of crisis communicators to compete in the attention economy with these - you know, This Is Fine dog meme and such...

MOSLEY: Yeah.

MONTELL: I at the same time believe that, you know, we are all just trying to cope. We are trying to connect. Language has always provided a really beautiful social glue. Slang is language - grassroots language from the ground up. We are trying to acknowledge that there are people who are suffering in the world, even though we might be safe at home in our beds. I'm speaking for myself there. And doomslang has emerged to help us reckon with that.

MOSLEY: I'm curious. Amanda, how do you manage your own consumption of information and social media? Because what you do does require you to consume a lot of information, to do a lot of research. I mean, I'm asking for a friend.

MONTELL: (Laughter) Can you see...

MOSLEY: (Laughter).

MONTELL: ...The panic in my eyes? You know, I derived a great piece of wisdom from one of the psychologists that I talked to in the book, Dr. Linda Sanderville, who said that she isolates slices of time not to consume anything at all. And that allows her to engage in her daydreaming self.

MOSLEY: Just sit in silence.

MONTELL: Just sit in silence. Daydreaming is so important. When I think about times in my life when time felt really expansive, you know, when I felt like I was not in this state of overthinky panic, it was because I had taken a moment not to consume but to create, to perhaps journal, to perhaps immerse myself in a feeling of awe by being in nature, to do something with my hands. There's a chapter in this book that talks about the IKEA effect - our tendency to overvalue things that we create with our hands, which has pros and cons but is actually a really beautiful and quaint cognitive bias.

We are meant for a physical world. That's what our brains are wired for. And so being able to take slices of time to expand our sense of time through immersing ourselves in nature or music or in just a DIY activity with our communities - this is easier said than done because, again, these devices are addictive. But I find that my nervous system really thanks me when I'm able to do that.

MOSLEY: You know, I'm thinking about when most of us were able to be in that type of space. And it's when we were children.

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: But we actually just did a show about how young people are now more anxious than ever before. And it's really tied to their devices and being connected all the time. Did you - within any of your research - really find, like, what this might be doing to brain development when you don't have that time to just sit, create, be bored?

MONTELL: Yeah. What I'll say is this. Teen girls in particular are psychologically suffering from TikTok use disorder, which is a described phenomenon now, more than anyone else. And from my research, I attribute that in large part to social comparison. So not only are these devices causing our attention span to shrink - it's not allowing us to daydream, to be bored, as you mentioned - but it's exposing us to more identities than ever to compare ourselves to. And women are found to make more upward social comparisons and downward identifications.

So when a young girl surveys her classroom or scrolls through her feed, she will only clock the other girls who are perceived as superior. And that feels very threatening. And again, this is zero-sum bias, which I talk about in the book. But it stems from generations of stiff resource competition. There truly was once a time in human history when in your small community, you would compete with people in your age group of your same sex for resources, like mates and food. But we're now mapping that now sort of obsolete, zero-sum bias onto currencies like clout, followers, beauty. And that is extremely detrimental to our self-esteem also because, you know, these resources are limitless. And ironically, we are clocking nemeses, enemy figures in the folks that we have the most in common with, aka the people who could actually be our dearest friends. So I do provide a little bit of advice in the book for how to embrace connection as catharsis, but I do think that that sense of social comparison is contributing to so much mental suffering.

MOSLEY: Well, in addition to this book, you wrote an entire book a few years ago on cults and the language of cults. You also have a podcast on cults. You actually have me thinking that I've been a part of several cults and didn't even realize it. Your father is the reason you became interested in this topic. He was actually part of a cult in the '70s.

MONTELL: Yeah, that's true. My dad spent his teenage years against his will in a pretty notorious compound called Synanon, which started as an alternative drug rehabilitation center that devolved, as these places so often do in the '70s.

MOSLEY: And this wasn't a religious cult?

MONTELL: No, it was secular. It was perfectly secular. It was aimed at being a sort of socialist utopian experiment gone haywire.

MOSLEY: Your dad's cult, what phrases were he indoctrinated with? Did he share some of those with you?

MONTELL: Oh, absolutely. I mean, fortunately, he had one eye open going into that group for whatever reason. I actually like to think that one of the reasons why he survived and was able to get out so quickly was because he was tasked, at the age of 15, with running the cult's microbiology lab. The cult wanted to avoid outside medicine whenever possible and so they had their own internal lab. And my dad was interested in science. And so they were like, OK, you test the cult followers' fingertips for tuberculosis microbes. Like, you take care of it.

MOSLEY: Wow.

MONTELL: And so this lab was this critical thinking sanctuary for him on a compound where little made sense. And so, you know, he could recollect a lot of the words and phrases that were used in Synanon. But fortunately, he was kind of able to tap into his critical thinking, also because he escaped every day to go to an outside school, which was also not allowed.

MOSLEY: So he interacted with other people?

MONTELL: He interacted with the outside world, yes. But there was a thought-terminating cliche that was used in Synanon that still sends chills down my spine. It was act as if, act as if. If you question a tenet that came from the top - Chuck Dederich was the name of the leader of Synanon. If you questioned a protocol or a rule or a new, you know, kink in the Ten Commandments of Synanon, so to speak, that seemed to contradict something that you had heard before, you couldn't question Chuck Dederich because he was all-knowing and wise. So they would serve you with the phrase act as if - act as if you believe it and trust it, you will. So it's that sort of fake it till you make it, which is another thought-terminating cliche of sorts that is used in capitalist society.

MOSLEY: I mean, it's what - it's how we all operate, though. If you're part of any system, any group, any team, over time, if you act as if, you're gonna believe it.

MONTELL: Because we're not incentivized to question beliefs that we want to be true. This is the sunk-cost fallacy again, and confirmation bias and all of these cognitive biases happening at once. If you have sunk 10 years into a group that was promised to be lifesaving, that was promised to change the world and you could be a part of that change, you will look for any word or phrase or piece of evidence to put that cognitive dissonance to bed.

MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. Our guest today is writer Amanda Mantell, author of the new book "The Age Of Magical Overthinking: Notes On Modern Irrationality." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF CARL VERHEYEN SONG, "GOOD MORNING JUDGE")

MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley and today I'm talking to writer Amanda Montell, author of the new book "The Age Of Magical Overthinking: Notes On Modern Irrationality." In it, Montell explores magical overthinking, this idea that our internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world. Montell is the creator and host of the podcast "Sounds Like A Cult." And she's also written two other nonfiction books, including "Cultish" and "Wordslut: A Feminist Guide To Taking Back The English Language."

You talk about nostalgia in your book, and you also recently wrote an op-ed about nostalgia. What did you learn about why we seem to be so obsessed in this moment with the past?

MONTELL: Yeah. Well, during times of present pain, we tend to sort of bathe in a warm bath of positive past memories as a coping mechanism. Again, this is one of those things where I approach the subject matter thinking nostalgia, excess nostalgia, is a bad thing. You know, it's what's causing everyone from Disney adults to MAGA zealots to go blackout drunk on nostalgia and have these complete delusions of the past that can be really dangerous. But as I continued talking to nostalgia scholars, I realized that what's called personal nostalgia - or when we romanticize memories from our own life - that's a really positive thing because it helps us generate hope for the future. It's engaging us in imagination.

The future is unpredictable. We don't have any artifacts from that time. We don't have any photos or old clothes or memories that might not have been that positive, but that we think back on with a sense of idealization. We do have relics from the past, and that helps us. We cling to those things in order to imagine a future that could feel that good. At the same time, we're experiencing a glut of this cognitive bias called declinism, which is our proclivity to think that life is just getting irreversibly worse and worse and worse. And it's all downhill from there. And again, that's something that we do naturally. And...

MOSLEY: Yeah, I was just thinking, I mean, it seems like every generation - if I think back when I was a kid, you know, my grandparents saying it's worse than it ever has been...

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: And, like, they heard that from their parents. What is different now, though, is the gluttony of information.

MONTELL: Right.

MOSLEY: And I'm thinking about some of the maybe harmful images that we're seeing and we're interacting with. Like, is it called tradwives, or traditional wives?

MONTELL: Yes.

MOSLEY: This whole thing that we're seeing online where we're romanticizing a past that's not really reality.

MONTELL: Yeah. So I quote this beautiful invented word from "The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows" by John Koenig in the book, this word anemoia, which means nostalgia for a past we've never known. And I engage in this, I did hardcore during the pandemic. It was such an unpredictable time. It felt apocalyptic. It felt like, you know, we will never know the world that we once knew. And so I want to envision a sort of back-to-basics-style world of homesteading and baking my own bread, and so I started acquiring sort of cottagecore tchotchkes. They were everywhere. I mean, the amount of toadstool figurines around my home would truly disturb you, speaking of delulu, and that alone is not nefarious or dangerous.

However, there are plenty of online figures who took that opportunity to perpetuate an ideology that, you know, the future is not working, you know, the present is not working. We need to return to a simpler time before women's rights, but also before iPhones, and women need to go back into the kitchen where they're sort of Laura Ingalls Wilder-coded, hand-dyed tea towels and aprons and bake and serve their husbands, and that will make you feel much more soothed during this time of incredible chaos. And it's not as if everyone would fall prey to that ideology, but certainly, plenty of young people will see that beautiful cottagecore aesthetic as a gateway to engage in this really harmful rhetoric that is, in a way, a sort of backfire effect to the women's movement.

MOSLEY: I know you're not here to solve all of this. As you say in the book, these are notes and observations on what you're seeing in our world. But if we're getting deeper and deeper into the information age, AI is here and...

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...It's only getting better, kids are more anxious than ever, I mean, we're all over thinkers...

MONTELL: Yeah.

MOSLEY: ...Are we doomed?

MONTELL: No. I never - I keep referring to this beautiful James Baldwin quote that I can't say verbatim, but he was like, I have to be an optimist. If I choose not to be an optimist, that's me succumbing to the idea that life is an academic matter. We have to believe that the future is a positive place, and we have to resist this declinism. Because every single scholar that I spoke to for this book, I was like, if there were another time you could choose to live in, would you, and what time would that be? Not a single one said yes. You know, they were like, yes, we are contending with the climate crisis and our phones are making us stressed, but I wouldn't want to live in a time when women didn't have the rights to own a credit card or when we didn't have, you know, medical advancements, when, you know, the cure for cancer was not just around the corner.

MOSLEY: And there are so many positives to knowing more.

MONTELL: Absolutely. Oh, my God, I would not go back to a time when information was not democratized. It's a beautiful thing that we all have access to the information, but it's a grave responsibility, and so I am just sort of encouraging myself and then, you know, in turn, my readers, to be able to stomach that cognitive dissonance of understanding that, like, we will never have all of the knowledge that we need in order to, like, definitively solve this crisis of the mind. And yet, being able to stomach that sense of irresolution, being able to stomach when a public figure doesn't know and can't make a promise, being able to tolerate when we don't know, is really the only way that we'll make it through.

MOSLEY: Amanda Montell, thank you so much for this delightful book and conversation.

MONTELL: Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.

MOSLEY: Amanda Montell is the author of "The Age Of Magical Overthinking: Notes On Modern Irrationality." Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews the new satire by Lionel Shriver called "Mania." This is FRESH AIR.

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