Under and Over Thinking
I’m a chronic overthinker. Whenever I think I have a solution to a problem, or a course of action, I start doubting myself. I consider multiple other contingencies or potential outcomes. The result is some kind of neurotic paralysis, or a panicked impulse.
If overthinking means doubting the obvious solution in order to find a more complex (or hidden) answer, a lot of us are guilty. But not without cause. Today, the old adage of “if you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras” has been turned upside down. We’ve been told to doubt the obvious. Not least by mainstream media snafus, telling us not to notice the horses right in front of our eyes.
In Amanda Montell’s new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, she wants to explain what she sees as a chaos of irrationality, driven by the information age. According to Montell, “While magical thinking is an age-old habit, 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.
Belief in authority started to slide in the 1960s, it has reached a new nadir since the Iraq war, the opiod epidemic (and other prescription drug scandals), and covid. Whatever your political stripe you’ve been given reasons for skepticism. And the online realm is full of hucksters ready to play on that:plus charge you a monthly subscription. Part of the problem of course is that what gets called “disinformation” turns out next week to have more than a grain of truth to it.
It was also easier for an educated caste to maintain mystique when there were fewer of them (and they weren’t showing their own idiocy on twitter). Social media is a magic cauldron of belief, the virtual Magic 8-ball of Tiktok or Instagram: every time you visit you can be served a new influencer offering you life guidance. And a video from some random person on instagram can be just as - if not more - convincing than an interview with a medical professional, zooming into CNN from his living room.
She wants to explore “so much of the zeitgeist’s general illogic, like people with master’s degrees basing their social calendars on Mercury’s position in the cosmos, or our neighbors opting not to get vaccinated because a YouTuber in palazzo pants said it would “downgrade their DNA.”
Yet Montell is relunctant to lay this at the feet of postmodern views in education, which allow for “different ways of knowing” and people to have their “own truth”. Indeed, people with Master’s degrees are precisely the target market for many Youtube influencers. The group most likely to be seduced by a message of “you’re not among the moronic masses, falling for the big con. You’re smarter. After all, you were curious enough to come looking for the truth”. And that’s the real lure of some scams, just as it is for cults. The victims are lured in by being told they are smarter than everyone else.
Pop-up ads tell us about this “one simple trick” that will melt belly fat, or cure baldness. That the medical profession is either oblivious to this “cure” (or conniving in hiding it, because they are in cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies), are the explanations for why we are learning about this medical miracle from Tiktok and not Johns Hopkins.
Montell writes about various oddballs, including the “Manifestation Doctor”, who apparently offers paid subscribers life advice. As she notes:
“Manifestation Doctor’s rise to fame, trust in the U.S. healthcare establishment, which was supposed to keep us safe from things like deadly plagues, had fractured so severely that plenty of citizens didn’t even want conventional shrinks. They were sick to death of red tape, insurance policies, and waffling chief medical advisers in $2,000 suits. They wanted a relatable populist who spoke their language, and whom they could access for free on their phones, to tell them in certain terms that there was one big, on-purpose reason why they were feeling terrible”
The “law of attraction” has been around for a long time, at least as far back as Napoleon Hill’s various bestsellers.
It’s the idea that if you just want things hard enough they will come to you. If you put a picture of a Maserati up on your wall, and just believe hard enough, you can get that car. Its an inherently moronic (and narcissistic) worldview, but it comes back each generation in different guises: and has expanded its reach thanks to social media.
After all, we can “manifest” what we want to be thanks to photo editing and filters. We can believe that we are the facetuned and airbrushed person in our pictures. Online communities mean people can live as though the “believing” and “being” phases are one and the same. The downstream effects of this shouldn’t be underestimated.
As Montell reminds us, “In 2022, a Bloomberg survey found that 98 percent of American middle and high schoolers expressed the desire to be internet famous.” This shocking statistic shows how much this world of manifestation and influencers have become our new reality. We may be under, rather than over, thinking how this is damaging both society and our shared sense of reality. These are the kids who are driving less, dating less, in many senses living less than earlier generations.
After all, if you live in an online world where you present yourself in one way, why would you ever wish to be seen in any other? (Huddling inside living on “no contact” doordash deliveries is an option, the accelerated hikikomori of a generation)
It’s a rather disturbing paradox, of teens wanting to “influence” others but at the same time feeling the generational vibe that any unmediated human contact is an affront.
I’m reminded of the Bruce Willis film, Surrogates, where everyone stays at home behind a computer screen while androids of themselves (perfect in appearance and un-aging) go about their daily lives. We’re not at the android stage yet, but we have social media projecting perfection while we hide our imperfect selves at home.