While this memoir-esque essay collection doesn't offer cutting edge, brand new insights, it's certainly smart, entertaining and timely.

I was very excited to get my hands on an advanced copy of this book, as I was a big fan of Cultish. I think Montell did a great job of making this a very approachable commentary of contemporary culture. It seems some people have taken offense at her anecdotal personal additions, but I found them to be funny and an excellent way to explain each concept at hand. I particularly enjoyed the sections on sunk cost fallacy, and the term keeps popping up in my head ever since finishing the book.

I didn't find this quite as compelling as Cultish but still very much enjoyed it. Would aways prefer to read Montell over Gladwell for my social science consumption lol.

I would have preferred to listen to the audio on this one so I might even reread in that format.

Big thank you to NetGalley for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely love Amanda Montell's work. She really has a way to breakdown a topic and make it both relatable and fun. This book is a wonderful example of her work and should be given to everyone who struggles with overthinking. I will be using and sharing what I learned from this work for years to come.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for this ARC!

I was a big fan of Amanda’s other two books Cultish and Wordslut, so I was excited to read her newest book.

I found The Age Of Magical Overthinking to be an enjoyable read, but not my favorite of her books. I did like to see a little insight into Amanda’s personal life through some of her essays. I find her writing to be authentic and clever as hell.

I hope Amanda continues to write in the future because her voice is one we need in nonfiction!

I highly recommend this book on recognizing our biases. By exposing the hidden biases of our human minds, Montell helps us make sense of a world that often doesn't make sense from the outside looking in.

Montell explores common misconceptions about how we think, these "magical" patterns that we mistake for the truth. She writes about the halo effect, the proportionality bias, the sunk cost fallacy, and many more biases. While she doesn't provide simple solutions to overcoming the biases, she does increase our awareness about them, which moves us one step closer towards escaping their influence.

My thanks to NetGalley for the review copy of this book.

Thank you to #NetGalley and #AtriaBooks for a free copy of #TheAgeOfMagicalOverthinking by Amanada Montell. All opinions are my own.

Not as strong as Cultish but still full of interesting information about the biases we have told through the lens of Montell's own lived experiences. If you've listened to her podcasts some of the stories are not new, but still she writes about data driven info in a fun and accessible way.

The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality is a book of essays that explore our culture, the cognitive biases it produces and the way we think about various life situations. Many of the essays tackle our online lives, but also our day to day relationships, and even our hobbies.

I found these essays fascinating. Montell writes candidly about her own life while also being informative and hilarious. This was so easy to read and each essay really made me think. You may already be familiar with many of the biases Montell explores, but she does an excellent job at explaining and relating them to modern life.

Some of my favorite essays include:
-"A Toxic Relationship Is Just a Cult of One" which discusses toxic relationships and breakups
-"Time to Spiral" which discusses the media, algorithms and how when we learn something new, it can feel threatening...even when the knowledge is not actually new and has existed for a long time
-"Nostalgia Porn" which explores how we are nostalgic for the past and view the present as worse than the past
-"The Life-Changing Magic of Becoming a Mediocre Crafter" which is about crafting and labor and the positive emotions it can evoke

I would recommend this to anyone interested in culture, biases, and ways of thinking more generally. I think this is a book everyone can find themselves in. Keep in mind, this is less of a social science book and more of a book about the author and our culture more broadly.

Everyone should read this book. I intend to read it again, and probably read several of the studies cited. Montell writes about cognitive biases from both a personal and scientific perspective. I enjoyed both -- I could relate to her realizing that she had engaged in illogical thinking while being able to reflect honestly and get to the truth. It's an ongoing process, for a lot of reasons, not something to feel bad or guilty about.
Besides that, it's downright interesting to see some of the ways my mind tricks me into finding easier solutions. Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

Amanda Montell shares concepts in such an easily understandable and consumable manner, perfect for the layman. As a psychotherapist, these topics weren’t new to me, but they still felt fresh. It was easy for me to link certain biases she mentioned to corresponding cognitive distortions — irrationality is irrationality after all. One of my favorite parts of the book was when she shared that “Plenty of everyday moods, pair with a respective bias.” Each chapter could have been the topic of its own book, but I really enjoyed how she provided everything is such concise little bites. This was a great follow-up to her book Cultish.

*Thank you to NetGalley for graciously providing an eARC. All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed the Age of Magical Overthinking! I liked the various types of bias inherent in our world. I loved the Sunk Cost Fallacy chapter. I think this was a more personal book for Montell and I appreciated her anecdotes

I thought it was a fascinating look at how I think and how I cope to handle the real world. I tend to become nostalgic or use manifestation as a way to handle my anxiety and it made me think a lot about that. The book didn't preach on whether or not it is bad but the research and stories all point to a collective way of thought.

Amanda Montell has the amazing ability to make non-fiction a page-turning experience. This book is well-researched and really makes the reader think. Drawing from relatable experiences, scientific studies, and social media, Montell hits the nail on the head about society today. Must-read author every time.

4/5

“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.”

Amanda Montell delves into the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in this modern Information Age, arguing that our brain’s coping mechanisms have become so overloaded that our irrationality has become “magical.” “Magical Thinking” is broadly defined as the belief that your internal thoughts affect the external world, even in supposedly unrelated events. In each chapter, Montell goes into cognitive biases and relates them to social phenomena from the 21st century - from how the “Halo Effect” cultivates extreme amounts of worship and hatred in celebrities such as Taylor Swift and how the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” can keep up in not-so-good relationships just because of how much time some believe they may have already invested in it.

“We’re living in what they call the ‘Information Age,’ but life only seems to be making less sense. We’re isolated, listless, burnt out on screens, cutting loved ones out like tumors in the spirit of ‘boundaries,’ failing to understand other people’s choices or even our own.”

I really liked reading this and would catch myself smiling at some parts being like - wow, I’ve done this before. While not the best nonfiction I’ve ever read, this is an easy and interesting read that makes you think about how intricate and weird your mind really is. Montell even used her own experiences in this, making it seem like a personal read at times (kind of like listening to an older sister who majored in psychology haha). I heard people say it’s not as good as Cultish, but I’ve never read that before. All I know is that I want to read more of Montell’s work after finishing this one!

Amanda Montell is one of the most intellectually and linguistically=gifted writers out there, and whereas I'm no slouch in those areas (particularly the latter), I mean it as a compliment when I say that this book was almost too much for me. It was SO smart -- and at its best when examining the ridiculous through that intelligent lens -- that I felt I wasn't getting it some of the time, or that the scope was too much. Maybe the news cycle has finally broken my brain. It's not bad to be humbled now and then, but I do admit that I found her previous books -- Cultish and Wordslut, which I REALLY loved -- more accessible and enjoyable to read. Regardless, she's an intensely gifted and thoughtful cultural commentator, and we could do with more of those these days.

I really loved Amanda Montell’s previous books, so I was a little disappointed by this one. It felt really disjointed and more memoir-esque while trying to be relevant. It felt a bit like pop psychology but in a way that felt more self-serving than enjoyable.

I was not able to review and rate The Age of Magical Overthinking by the publish date but now that I have I gave it 5 stars.

Well that was disappointing. I thought this would be an interesting insight into the world of overthinking, chronically online folks, and possibly some deeper dives on the way that we can overcome overthinking.

What I got was a self serving monolog about human behaviors that the author seems to think are fact with very little to back up their claims.

While I didn't LOVE Cultish, I had a fun time reading it. That was not the case with this book. I had a really hard time working my way through it and was bored for most of the read. The book is a mix between pseudoscience/psychology and memoir, but the combination of the two didn't work for me. Neither was well developed enough. The part that veered more towards textbook didn't seem all that well researched to me, which is also how I felt while reading Cultish. And the memoir snippets were too all over the place for me to get invested in that side of things.

Thank you for the advanced copy of this book! I will be posting my review on social media, to include Instagram, Amazon, Goodreads, and Instagram!