Why We Overthink (Amanda Montell)

Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

“Those of us growing up in consumerist society, when confronted with a problem, our tendency is to add a whole bunch of cumbersome variables to the equation. So, if we're experiencing pain in our relationship, I'll speak for myself, every time we were really, really suffering and not doing well. It did not occur to me once to break up. I was like, you know what we need to do? We need to go on another vacation. Or we need to get another cat. Or we need to replace all our furniture.

I don't regret any of my cats. But I was like, we need to add variables to the equation in order to fix this problem. Even though the much more efficient decision would have been maybe to scale back, reassess, take something away. And, I quote a study when talking about that subject, where participants were presented with a spatial puzzle involving colored blocks, and they could either solve the puzzle by adding or taking away colored blocks from this puzzle.

The vast majority of participants opted for the much more overly complicated solution, which was to add a whole bunch of color blocks, whereas the much simpler but less intuitive solution would just be to take one single colored block away. We don't often think to take things away to solve a problem.”

So says Amanda Montell, the author of the New York Times bestseller The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, as well as Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism and Wordslut. Amanda is a linguistics major from NYU and all of her work centers around the way that words—and thoughts—shape our minds, and how our minds are permeable to other factors, whether it’s the halo effect, confirmation bias, or Cult-like sensibilities. Amanda is also the host of a podcast, “Sounds like a Cult.” Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM AMANDA MONTELL:

The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

Follow Amanda on Instagram

Amanda’s Website

Amanda’s Podcast: “Sounds Like a Cult”

Amanda’s Newsletter

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