Chat GTP Is Love Bombing Us
Conspiratorial Thinking, Rage-Baiting, and Touching Grass with Amanda Montell
In many ways, this newsletter is about the strange balancing act between performance of self (as a mother, as an online presence, as a woman) and the pursuit of a life that feels meaningful, joyful, and real in a culture that wants you to focus more on consumption than on living.
As our lives become increasingly isolated; overwhelmed with input, decisions, and stimuli; designed for self-optimization; and primed for content sharing, it’s easy to emotionally check out and say fuck it. We compartmentalize because we must. For me, this looks like online window shopping for the perfect pair of jeans even though the perfect pair of jeans won’t solve the problems of intractable echo chambers, slippery truths, and existential exhaustion. We glibly reference hellscapes because it’s easier than trying to make the hellscape less hellish. We buy “grounding mats” rather than go through the effort to silence the noise in our heads in order to feel the earth beneath our feet.
In, The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, Amanda Montell, the author of Cultish and Wordslut, and the host of Sounds Like a Cult, dives into the cognitive biases informing life in the information age as a way to soothe her own harried brain. The result is not a clean book full of tidy answers, but a funny, personal, deeply researched book that engages with the mess and ends up unearthing hope, insight, and energy. And yes, even a little clarity. If you missed it when it came out in hardcover last year, now’s your chance to grab the paperback, which is fresh off the presses.
It’s been a minute so since Amanda and I last talked, so I emailed her last week to ask how her thinking on magical overthinking has changed (or not) in the last year. Because, you know, a few things have happened since March 2024! Many of which make me feel like our ability to identify and exist within reality is even more endangered than when Amanda’s book first came out.
Sara
Since your book has come out, what worries you and (please!) what gives you hope regarding our cultural propensity to overthink and create magical unrealities?
Amanda
Even since I wrote The Age of Magical Overthinking in 2022 (I finished it in 2023), I do believe that our society—even pockets of it that you wouldn’t ordinarily consider to be conspiratorial—is becoming more paranoid. We’re hunting for hidden meanings in places where deeper meaning just doesn’t exist. Like, in situations as low-stakes as celebrity drama, and as high stakes as mental health conversations with Chat GPT.
Obviously, Chat GPT’s advancement has progressed a lot—even just in the past two years—leading in some cases to suicides as a result of people getting lost in their conversations with Chat GPT. Chat GBT is really a sort of love bomber figure and can help generate bespoke kinds of conspiratorial messaging for individual users that in some cases have led to really tragic outcomes. So that’s one worrisome thing that I have noticed in the years since the book first came out.
But also I have definitely seen phrases like “touch grass” explode. More as a sort of counter-perspective to the Extremely Online and rage-baity culture that has continued to burgeon. There’s been more of move towards an analog way of life. So hopefully, in the future we’ll maybe turn a corner into a more balanced off-line and on-line world. We’ll see!
Sara
So I’m a huge fan of Koa Beck and her book White Feminism - I cited her all over the place in Momfluenced. In your new book, you write that Koa told you she’s “noticed a very hot crucible of white women calling out other white women and that seems to carry some currency in these social spheres. There are incentives now when you critique someone's racial literacy, transphobia, or classism.”
And I was like, shit. There have been times when my cultural criticism of Ballerina Farm (for example) has led people to accuse me of being like, personally obsessed with her, or jealous, or whatever. But, especially for someone like me, who has a significant amount of white privilege, class privilege, and thin privilege, to draw attention to this stuff, it’s relatively safe for me to do this. Whereas it’s less safe for others, you know? Ultimately, though, I wonder - is it me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me? Am I (to quote every Bachelor contestant worth their salt) doing this for the right reasons?
Amanda
No, totally. In times of intense social tumult, there are some women who want to get in front of the narrative and position themselves as on the right side of history, when they know deep down that they may have erred in terms of their own behavior towards marginalized groups. And social media platforms obviously reward the most engaging content, not the most nuanced or generous or collectivist content. It’s the content that is attracting the most eyeballs and the most likes and the most panic and rage.
I can think of very, very specific examples where I have seen white women who were trying to build platforms that were maybe like, semi social justice oriented. Like, calling out other women in comment sections and being closed down to genuine dialogue. Basically, posting the equivalent of like, a joke that you want to go viral, except it was a critique that they wanted to go viral. It’s a marketing exercise essentially.
Sara
For sure. I just think it's helpful to tease out.
Amanda
You're asking the right questions because I do the same thing. My literal podcast job is going around and calling everyone and everything a cult. You have to be willing to throw yourself under the bus first. Something I really try to do throughout this whole book is call myself into question at every turn, even when I most want to call out someone else.
Sara
You write that “worshiping people we know IRL has positive impacts on our wellbeing, while worshiping strangers predicts the opposite and can lead to lower confidence and a weaker sense of self.” Obviously, this stuck out to me when considering how people interact with momfluencers. And it's tricky because I really empathize with people who, for whatever reasons, don't have access to other moms as role models, or who feel isolated and are searching for community or validation. I guess I'm asking how we can dabble with online “worship” in productive ways? Can we?
Amanda
Right? So there's one chapter of the book where I talk about this fascinating cognitive bias called the halo effect, which describes our penchant to admire one quality in a person and then assume that they must be perfect overall. And this bias developed long before the internet as a way to identify role models efficiently for survival purposes. So in our small communities, we would clock someone with big muscles or intact teeth and jump to the conclusion that they were a skilled hunter or had avoided disfigurement from battle and thus would be a good person to align with for survival.
But now we are mapping these quick decision-making tactics onto modern parasocial relationships in a way that is setting everyone up for psychological failure, because there is no feedback from the other side to humanize that role model or to allow us to believe like, oh, this person has a 360 identity. They are flawed. They aren't perfect. When we're engaging in a parasocial relationship, we elevate the person onto this pedestal that's so high it ends up dehumanizing them. And then when they do something to disappoint us or that goes counter to the conclusions about them that we've jumped to, we feel the need to punish them.
And so I don't actually think there's any way to engage in worship in terms of the celebrity admiration spectrum in a way that's healthy. Just because it comes with so many measurable deleterious consequences that have been documented by various studies. I mean, there was one super fascinating 2014 clinical examination of celebrity worship that concluded high levels of standards are associated with concerns about body image, greater proneness to cosmetic surgeries, sensation-seeking cognitive rigidity, identity diffusion, poor boundaries, depression. Anxiety, dissociation, narcissism, thirst for fame, criminality, addiction. I mean, the list goes on and on.
And at the same time, it’s a spectrum. There's a way to sort of do it with a grain of salt or to dip a toe in while at the same time not elevating these people to a godlike status because they are inherently going to disappoint you. I find that these dynamics can also be even more toxic with influencers because the only way you're getting access to influencers is on an inherently addictive device. Even if social media were to disappear tomorrow, we would still have TV, we would still have newspapers, we would know what Taylor Swift was up to. We would know what Beyoncé was up to, but we would not know what Ballerina Farm was up to. And so the marriage of the platforms themselves, their addictive nature, and the worshipfulness that we've cultivated because of the halo effect around these influencers, has just created like a perfect storm of psychological failure.
Sara
Totally. No, and I mean, worship shuts down critical thinking. You write about Taylor Swift, and sure, we can celebrate her for, you know, taking girlhood seriously, but we can also sort of look at the types of girlhood that she holds up as being worthy of celebration. Worship shuts the door on curiosity.
Amanda
And it shuts the door on our ability to process and manage the complexity of another human being. We're able to process and manage our own complexity very well. That's why we don't worship ourselves! We're with ourselves all the time. Like, I look like shit right now. That's good for an accurate self-image. I'm sure you've come across this trend online where some public figure will post something that disappoints their followers, whether it was like, you know, a cancelable offense or just something they disagree with. And that person, that follower who has had this one sided, but very intense parasocial relationship for so long, feels the need to let them know that they're no longer going to be following them. Because it feels anticlimactic to go through a parasocial breakup with no hullabaloo.
Like sometimes I'll see someone something like this on the Sounds Like A Cult Instagram. And it's really fascinating to be able to see this stuff through the lens of cognitive bias now because it doesn't it doesn't hurt me. I'm able to understand it better. This has become a bit of a meme where people will say, This isn't an airport. You don't need to announce your departure.
Sara
Can we talk about proportionality bias?
Amanda
There's a chapter in the book called I Swear I Manifested This where I argue that the same bias underlying really hardcore conspiratorial thinking is also motivating more seemingly innocent ideas of manifestation that might be perpetuated by certain new agey-style influencers. So proportionality bias is our penchant to believe that a big event or even just a big feeling must have had a big cause. It's like a misattribution of cause and effect as an attempt to make sense of the world. The COVID pandemic strikes, it's this mass tragedy, it's totally unpredictable. We can’t identify one single source but we want to because it's too unmanageable for us to think like, oh, this was a product of like, multiple small random tragedies. Instead, it’s No, this is such a big event. It must have been engineered by some elite cabal on purpose. That's the only way that this makes sense. Or Princess Diana could not have died in a random accident. The royal family must have killed her. That's the only way that this big catastrophe makes proportional sense.
We enjoy harmonious proportions as human beings, whether we're talking about photography or current events, right? So manifestation is also powered by a proportionality bias because it's the idea that if you went from having, you know, a shitty job and no romantic partner, to having the job of your dreams and, you know, a new beau, that can't have just been dumb luck. It can't have been like a product of these small steps that you'd been taking for years and years. It must have been because a TikTok manifestation guru looked you in the eye on your For You page and said, You need to make a vision board that contains this element and this element and this element and then all your dreams will come true. It's another misattribution of positive cause and effect with a more positive spin.
But in the pandemic era, in this time of so much unpredictability and information, overwhelm, and turbulence, so much exposure to dramatic news, we are more than willing to claim reductive oversimplified cause and effect equations for our life because it gives us a sense of agency. Like my mind and my vision board alone control my future. And it's so easily weaponized by certain figures who I'm calling conspiracy therapists. They might be therapists with lapsed licenses or they might be life coaches, or they might just be you know, like Bali girlies who decided that mental health rhetoric was really trending and more engaging than anything else. And so they might, seize our inclination towards proportionality bias by communicating a sentiment that seems empowering at first like, you just have to shift your mindset, like that will change the course of your life. And it's compelling because it's rooted in a grain of truth, like our mindsets do influence our outcomes, and mindfulness practices do impact our life satisfaction. But they’ll go on to say, I have a proprietary manifestation technique and if you sign up for my course where for $30 A month or whatever it is, and you can learn it and if it's not working, then that's your fault. And oh, by the way, that manifestation guru also has pastel QAnon connections. Not all of their followers, but a certain subset of their followers will view that style of thinking as a gateway to get involved in much more sinister conspiratorial thinking. So that's the slippery slope.
Sara
And I mean, I do think especially with mothers, there's this implicit belief that if the good mom cares about her kids not sleeping on, like toxic chemicals, she'll also care about doing adequate “research” in terms of you know, the New World Order. If we trust somebody's linen recommendations, we trick ourselves into thinking that trusting their political ideologies is essentially the same. And this is another example of the halo effect, right?
Amanda
We like a person's hand dyed tea towels. And then we jump to this conclusion that they must be worldly, nurturing, educated, that they must care about us as much as we care about them, right? So many biases start to play together at once. Because once we've invested in them by following them and signing up for their e-courses and ascribing to their ideas, then the sunk cost fallacy kicks into gear. Where we're like, Well, I've invested so much time and money and hope and emotional bandwidth into this momfluencer. I can't just turn my back on her now because that will make me look like a loose cannon. That will make me look wishy washy. I mean, the halo effect chapter is called Are You My Mother, Taylor Swift? We are perceiving female celebrities these days, not dissimilarly to the ways that adolescents perceive their mothers when they realize for the first time in their life that their mom is actually not perfect. I am speaking broadly, of course. There are people who grew up with neglectful mothers or abusive mothers but I think the majority of children grow up with the halo effect deeply embedded in them and we apply it to our moms and we think that our moms know best. If our moms are doing this, that something that must be correct.
When we realize that our moms are fallible, that can be really painful. And at least in my experience, I felt the need to, like, punish my mom. Mothers and women in general just have such a slimmer margin for error. We're now applying these exact same biases and dynamics onto parasocial relationships. And we're sort of viewing celebrities and influencers as our surrogate mothers and expecting them to be perfect. They never really humanize that dynamic.
I came across this concept by Dr. Donald Winnicott.
Sara
Oh, the “good enough mother?”
Amanda
Yes! He was basically saying that like, even if in theory, it were somehow possible to be a perfect mother who was infallible in every way - the perfect tea towels, the perfect apron. The perfect emotional availability. If she existed, the end result might be this overly fragile child who couldn't tolerate even the mildest disappointment in their real life. Maybe our celebrity mothers just need to be “good enough.”
Sara
Oh YES. You’ve written about The Class in the past, right? So I actively seek mothering from my teachers in The Class, like via my computer screen. And it really works when you're doing it in a specific way. Like if you want a very specific thing from these online mommies, and you're only asking for that one thing, you can mostly get your needs met.
Amanda
Oh, 100%. Because also there's like a time and place for it, right? Like you're not allowing that suspension of disbelief to follow you into every corner of your life.
Sara
Totally. You write about your algorithm targeting your insecurity with cool Brooklyn author types (after you cleansed the many beauty bloggers populating your feed), and I do think there’s something particularly noxious about feeling drawn to competition with people who are sort of like you but better (or at least in our minds). Can you talk about that?
Amanda
So that will pivot into the chapter on zero sum bias, which is our false perception that another person's gain means your loss. And it really stems from generations of stiff resource competition for a very, very long time in human history. Another person's access to food or mates really did mean that you would have less. And odds were that someone who was most similar to you (age, sex, etc) would be who you’d need to be on guard for. Now, you know, resource competition is not so stiff. And in fact, there are limitless resources essentially, when it comes to followers, clout, or friends - these currencies that aren't physical or survival related, but that deeply ingrained bias is still there.
Studies have found that women in particular are more prone to make upward comparisons. So when we walk into a room or when we scroll through our feeds, women are more likely to clock only the people they perceive as superior and threatening. Whereas men do the opposite. And that really has an extremely detrimental effect on our self esteem and on our ability to make connections. Because obviously, patriarchy really exacerbates zero sum bias in women by leading us to believe that there are only a select few positions in corporate offices or the Supreme Court or whatever for women. Women who we perceive as threats live rent free in our heads when the irony is that people who have the most in common with us would probably make for our dearest friends.
So, yeah, in that chapter, I document how I was working in the beauty industry. I went into my day job being like, Oh, I'm a mole. I'm in drag. These beauty girls aren't going to be able to get to me. And then of course, two years in I'm like super bleach blonde. And have gotten preventative Botox and the whole thing. As soon as I left that job, and the pandemic hit, I grew my roots out and divested from a bunch of it and just felt free. Like, I'm free from social comparison purgatory! Another person's blonde does not personally render me brunette. I think I smugly felt like I knew I wasn’t this girl who feels high-school-insecure about her looks.
But then lo and behold, my Instagram algorithm was like, Oh, you're an author. Now, this is going to be much more of a spiritual and existential threat. Now, you're not going to be comparing yourself to pouty influencers wearing a new Zara outfit every day. Now, you're going to be comparing yourself to be like, Jia Tolentino. Who, by the way, I stan and I have met and who is wonderful and lovely. I've interviewed her on Sounds Like A Cult and I'm fucking obsessed with her. But yeah, when Trick Mirror came out (and this is really me calling myself out and naming names - ha) my impulse was to be like, Oh my God, I need to jump off a bridge because I will never be as cool and smart as this other writer.
Sara
Oh, I know. I know.
Amanda
I'm still working on this everyday, but I’ve found a fix that has really changed my fucking life. Every time I get that impulse to compare . . . and that impulse is so natural! It’s so deeply rooted in our bones. But every time I get that impulse, I'm like, This is zero sum bias. This is the patriarchy setting up this devilish zero sum game for women. I need to remember Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow’s shine theory. Instead of letting that person live rent free in my head as a nemesis, I slide into their DMS. I reach out to make a sincere connection. And that has benefited my life in innumerable ways.
Sara
Yes - I love this! Back to momfluencers. So you write that we “often want human lives to feel like well plotted films,” and I mean, yes, for sure. And really, there's nothing more familiar than the Marriage Plot, which is why I think many momfluencers really have an advantage in the influencer game because they are sticking to a time honored, familiar storyline. Fall in love, have a wedding, have a baby, remodel a kitchen, have another baby.
Amanda
Yeah, actually, in that same survivorship bias chapter, I referenced something that I hear all the time in LA among screenwriters, this idea of “and then” versus “but therefore” in storytelling. I keep thinking about it in the context of my actual life because I think, as a writer, I overly narrativize my life. Which can be romantic, but also detrimental because sometimes it prevents me from living authentically if I'm always trying to shoehorn events into like, Freytag’s Pyramid. But we want our lives to make sense. I think we want them to feel predictable. We want to subscribe to the notion that everything happens for a reason. We've all watched shows where it feels like nothing is connected, right? And thought, what were the writers thinking? What about those plot points that felt like Easter eggs? What about some plant and pay-off? We want well-crafted stories. Did you come across the children’s book Fortunately?
So the description of the book is like, Go on a wonderfully wild adventure with Ned as he takes a journey full of mishaps in this book. So it's like Fortunately, Ned was invited to a surprise party. Unfortunately, the party was 1,000 miles away. Fortunately, a friend loans him an airplane. Unfortunately, the motor exploded. I loved that book as a kid and I love it even more now. Because really, that's how real life is. It’s not perfect.
Sara
Right. But I understand why it leads people to feel dissatisfied with life if it feels random, or if people don’t feel like their goodness is being rewarded by the universe, or if their hard work isn’t leading to a “therefore.”
Amanda
I think we as capitalists and consumerists are very transactionally minded. And also some people in other cultures aren't as psychologically broken as we are in the US. In Italy, you don't need to work out for 30 minutes in the morning to deserve pasta for lunch; you get to have pasta because you're alive.
Sara
Chilling. This quote from your book really horrified me but clarified many things:
In both professional and semi professional settings, from Wall Street to religious religious cults to the PTA, the most adored and respected figures are not necessarily the most competent, but rather the most self possessed.
And then you go on to quote research which finds that fake self-assurance won’t work in the same way. Like the person has to fully believe in their own power/specialness/skillset/whatever. This is all just really illuminating and horrifying. And I think what really strikes me about this is the fact that the people themselves have to believe in their own cults of personality, for this, you know, to work out.
Amanda
The most enraging chapter of this whole book to write was this one about overconfidence bias, which is defined by like, three core tenants. Many of us think about overconfidence as something that isn’t personally applicable. Like, I'm a reasonable person. I hate myself. But actually, we're all overconfident in these three ways. We consistently overvalue our actual skills, express excessive certainty in our evaluations, and over credit ourselves with positive outcomes. We all do this even if we are not business professionals, or working on Wall Street or like leading in a professional environment any way whatsoever.
Even if all we’re doing is like, sitting on the couch watching reality TV, we automatically assume that we are smarter, better, more morally sound than the people that we see out in the world. And I'm so disturbed by this. Even really, really, smart, self-aware people have been found in study after study to overvalue their expertise by a margin of at least 10% - 15%.
A study from Scientific Reports found that overconfidence is promoted by the very act of what's called self-deceptive bluffing. You know, fake it until you make it until you honestly believe it. And so, there's this feedback loop of over promising and overconfidence and over promising and overconfidence. And as long as you really believe it, there's a chance that you will be rewarded. I mean, think of war language, which is so often used to describe people's aspirations. Shoot your shot, crush it, kill it. There are these war game experiments that I quoted in this chapter that show that the winner of a sequence of battles will always be someone who behaved with overconfidence.
Sara
Wow, I hate this.
Amanda
I know - it’s awful. But at the same time, I feel like there is hope. And I think we all have a lot of power because we all expect confidence in our leaders or medical authorities, even our influencers. We expect people to be excessively certain in their convictions. We don’t reward people when they admit to not knowing, or when they say they need more time, or they bring in another person who might be better informed. We don't reward that as a society. So I think when people admit that they are not sure or you're even that they're wrong, we have to reward that or else overconfidence will persist and the consequences can be like really fucked.
Sara
Yes, yes. In the book you define anemoia as “the feeling of nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. Is this responsible for trad content? You also quoted Ursula K. Le Guin as saying, “Past events exist after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.” This is IT.
Amanda
I know. I think weaponized anemoia is responsible for the trad wife movement, because romanticizing the distant past as a way to cope with a painful present is very natural, and I don't think inherently bad. But when populist public figures use that as an opportunity to catastrophize the present in order to pitch a return to the alleged glory days, that's when anemoia gets weaponized and becomes dangerous.
Sara
I recently finished Catherine Newman’s wonderful book Sandwich (which everyone should preorder!), which is about a woman with young adult kids, and throughout, the protagonist reflects on the little kids years, and it made me feel nostalgia for my current life. It seems like it might be a useful and worthwhile experience to sort of cultivate nostalgia for the present.
Amanda
When the current moment feels unpredictable, miserable, whatever, nostalgia is a really useful coping mechanism. And so if we look at the memories that bring up the most nostalgia, maybe we can sort of optimize our life for those kinds of moments, you know? Because then you're able to have honesty and romance and idealization all at the same time.
Great conversation!
This was so good, Sara. Thank you for bringing Amanda Montell onto your Substack, and for such an interesting interview.