A personal reflection on 'The Age of Magical Overthinking' amidst a household dispute over the speaker's copy. The chapter delves into the book's relevance in addressing modern society's biases and anxiety caused by excessive screen time, offering insights on navigating irrationality.
Raise your hand if you've ever belittled a stranger online, made a decision based on astrology, or, heaven forbid, fallen for a conspiracy theory. No? Well, then, consider yourself lucky. And if your hand is raised, don't feel bad, because it turns out in our Information Age the cognitive biases that kept us alive a few millennia ago now make us susceptible to bouts of extreme irrationality. How this happened, and what we can do about it, is the subject of a brand new book by linguist Amanda Montell called "The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality."