The Age of Magical Overthinking

celebrity worship had increased dramatically since two decades prior.

cognitive biases cause the modern mind to overthink and underthink the wrong things.

equal rights and opportunities to vote, learn, work, mobilize. They were crises of the body.

It’s really no wonder, then, that so many Taylor Swift acolytes slip into the “Borderline-Pathological” category of standom.

parental absence exacerbated participants’ inclinations toward celebrity worship.

In 1961, Marxist philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” Our mission, it seems, has to do with the mind.

In 2014, bell hooks said, “The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies…. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.”

folks with higher anxiety are quicker to engage with, and slower to disengage from, negative information; so, “as a trait and state,” anxiety itself perpetuates paranoid thinking.

early-life isolation may cause emotional deficits that can make someone more likely to focus on “trauma in the virtual world,”