Status Updates From The Age of Magical Overthin...

The IKEA Effect is the perfect cognitive antidote to the hyper-intellectual trap of overthinking.
Coined by behavioral economists, the IKEA Effect is a cognitive bias where we place a disproportionately high value on products we partially created or assembled ourselves.

Amanda Montell (drawing on her linguistics background) created Tempeser to mean nostalgia for the present moment. Tempeser is the ultimate structural antidote to declinism and nostalgia porn.
Nostalgia porn forces you to look backward to find safety, which leaves you completely passive and homesick. Tempeser forces your awareness right back down onto the humus—the ground of the present.

You need space to create. And to process all you intake.

It isn’t feminism that has turned Britney, Paris and Lohan into a resurgence likened to the second coming of the holy trilogy: nostalgia has.

Weaponizing illusions of the past is an age old populist marketing tactic…

Humility breaks that spell by embracing the non-binary truth: You are allowed to be complex, clumsy, and still learning, while simultaneously being entirely qualified to be in the room.

A contronym (also spelled contraonym, and often called a Janus word or auto-antonym) is a single word that has two meanings that are the exact opposites of each other.

The Recency Illusion is a cognitive glitch where our brains notice a word, a phrase, a concept, or a trend for the first time, and our subconscious instantly leaps to a false conclusion: "Wow, this must be brand new! Everyone is suddenly talking about this."

A toxic relationship is just a cult of one. (1)

The Sunk Cost Trap: Staying in toxic, soul-crushing situations because we're terrified of losing our investment.

The core of proportionality bias is our deep-seated psychological need to believe that huge events must have equally huge, intentional causes. Our brains violently resist the idea that massive, catastrophic things can happen due to a fluke, a tiny mistake, or just a chaotic byproduct of a broken system.

It’s that classic binary thinking that anxiety loves. It’s much easier to view the world in black-and-white than to sit with the messy reality that an artist can save your emotional life with a song, while simultaneously being a flawed, hyper-capitalist billionaire who doesn't actually know you exist. The “halo effect” of the step-in-Mother figure.

By turning personal healing into a market commodity, capitalism pulls off a brutal trick: it suggests that if you are suffering from systemic bad luck, illness, or structural poverty, it is fundamentally a failure of your personal mindset. It completely absolves broken macro-systems by turning trauma into an individual product that you either have the "vibrations" to fix or you don't.

There’s interesting stuff in here but her tone gets very judgmental

78% - having a blast and thinking I need to read some of these books she is quoting