The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell - review
1.5/5
I can’t be the only person who finds Amanda Montell hard to love.
This book is fundamentally super readable, full of funny quips and cutesy anecdotes. As a non-fiction book it is simply not very good. The woman contains multitudes.
Montell is a basically competent writer but frankly a pretty terrible researcher. She is a creature of the podcast, a world in which a charismatic speaking voice and chemistry with a guest can paper over slap-dash and shallow research. Montell nails the delivery, but there isn’t a whole lot of cake under this frosting, and that cake is under baked and soggy in the middle, with filling from a can — fine, I’ll stop torturing the metaphor and get on with the review.
I should have seen this coming from her previous book, Cultish. Cultish does have a number of interesting insights, but these overwhelmingly come from the first person testimony of the book’s interviewees. The thesis of the book, that language techniques are the key element by which cult leaders exert control, is unpersuasive. It’s way too ambitious for the available evidence, the argument itself is unfocused, waffling between anecdotes and rarely remembering to gesture at tying them into a thesis. There is no attempt at all to anticipate criticism. The idea that while manipulative or controlling language is widespread in cults, it’s not necessarily definitive of them, and what other elements may be at play, is simply not addressed. This would work for the snappy little podcast that Montell hosts, but in book form it becomes increasingly obvious that she isn’t a cult expert, she’s an entertainer.
The Age of Magical Overthinking has all of the same problems but none of the insights. It is even less of an educational non-fiction book than Cultish — the ‘magical overthinking’ is a compelling title, but it’s mostly an excuse for Montell to investigate the thought fallacies affecting her own life, so the book takes on a memoir-ish tone. The intention is to provide a real life relatable anecdote, but so little justification has been put behind the thesis that we are in an age of magical overthinking that it feels like an excuse.
What characterizes magical overthinking as opposed to regular overthinking? How is our current age different from the anxieties of previous eras? Does anything about our society climate predispose or even force us to magical overthinking? The book isn’t interested in addressing these questions.
The end result is extremely flimsy because it constantly gestures towards a broader scope but never actually engages it. Instead, Montell returns to shallow descriptions of trite logical fallacies we’ve all heard of before. Sunk cost fallacy can cause you to stay in a relationship long after it becomes unsalvagable? You don’t say! There’s nothing to replace what the first person testimony brought to Cultish.
The nadir of the book is surprisingly early on, in its second chapter, which deals with new age wellness conspiracies. We’ve all seen them: Instagram reels talking about seed oils and vaccines as if they’re made with depleted uranium, and The Government as if Kamala Harris was personally sneaking into their houses to drink the oil right out of their backyards. It’s a genuine phenomenon. It’s also an place inclusion; all the other chapters deal with extremely individual fallacies with personal consequences, while this is more of a social movement.
If I didn’t already know this preoccupation ties into Montell’s personal interests (and more importantly, podcast), I’d wonder why it was in here. One out of place chapter isn’t enough to ruin a whole book. The bad part is Montell’s definition of a conspiracy, ‘a narrative that attempts to make sense of a complicated or confusing situation.’ Buddy. My non-fiction author in Christ. That’s just any historical narrative.
Within conspiracy studies as a field there is actually meaningful controversy over how to define a conspiracy due to the breadth of beliefs that are colloquially considered conspiracy theories. How do you account for both COINTELPRO (whose existence is well evidenced through even government documents, though the extent of its activities may never be conclusively demonstrated) and the joke theory that birds aren’t real and instead our skies are patrolled by flapping government surveillance devices (wtf)?
Many conspiracy researchers emphasize the provenance of the belief: it is information that Someone doesn’t want you to know, gained from illicit sources. One criticism might be that this unfairly privileges government and media authorities, which demonstrably do lie and dissemble. A shallow definition obfuscates a genuinely interesting part of the subject: the way that conspiracy theories grow from forbidden knowledge and the political relationship they have with authoritative sources. This is even directly relevant to Montell’s point. New age conspiracies obtain followers who seek alternative information sources because they have become disillusioned or politically opposed to authorities. They reach the extremely justified conclusion that lots of officially sanctioned information is suspect in its contents or provenance, particularly in confusing times such as the COVID pandemic, where the information landscape was troubled by our changing understanding of a novel disease and by swamps of deliberate information. In search of alternate sources of certainty, people end up trusting information specifically because it is unverified and unsanctioned.
The interesting element here is not that social media conspiracists are eager to simplify a complex political and social reality (though that is a meaningful motivation), but their preference for sources specifically because they have been accused of misinformation and conspiracy theories. There is a lot to say about that in a book ostensibly about overthinking. Why is our hunger for certainty and clarity so self-destructive? How does the switch from sanctioned information sources to exclusive unsanctioned ones factor into Montell’s discussion of black and white thinking? Instead, Montell presents an absurdly broad definition that allows her to characterize basically anything as a conspiracy with the right spin. I guess it makes writing clickbait headlines very easy.
Actually, lets talk about that title some more. The first thing we might expect a book called The Age of Magical Overthinking to tell us is what ‘magical overthinking’ is, and, spoilers, this never does. The title is an obvious reference to Joan Didion’s My Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir Didion wrote about the year following the tragic death of her husband and serious illness of her daughter within days of each other. It is about grief, and the illogical beliefs a person picks up to deal with it. We might expect some discussion of grief, an ‘age’ of it would be appropriate considering the pandemic and general degeneration of public life. Magical Overthinking doesn’t go in this direction. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Montell just thought the title had a ring to it. There is so little depth here, and it is frustrating both because the ideas have so much potential and because Montell is so widely lauded for being a thoughtful and critical person. Where is the critical thinking? Where is the thesis? The conclusion?
Ultimately The Age of Magical Overthinking is an enjoyably written book, but what it has in style, it lacks in substance. God I wish this book was better researched, but it comes in somewhere between Buzzfeed listicle and bad video essay. If Montell ever writes a book that she approaches more like a phd thesis than a gossipy podcast, I’ll be all for it. But this ain’t that.
When people bemoan the death of deep critical thought, this book, with its Joan Didion title and cupcake icing content, is the kind of thing they’re talking about.







