When you lose a loved one, grief and magical thinking go hand in hand. That is why it's easy to feel completely understood by Joan Didion's book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," after experiencing a loss yourself. Indeed, it's what I turned to when I lost my stepdad a few years ago. Like Didion, I found myself getting tangled up in knots of magical thinking. If I saw a specific sequence of numbers or heard his favorite song, I took it as a sign that he was saying hello from the other side. Admittedly, as time has passed on, so too have these curious occurrences.
Today, magical thinking is no longer reserved for the grieving. In the current culture, it has taken up more space. It has had the ability to influence politics, impact peoples' personal health decisions and even cloud celestial events such as this week's total solar eclipse. We're in what author Amanda Montell calls "the age of magical overthinking," which is appropriately the name of her new book, "The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality."
