In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote this about the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne:
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
I remember where I was when I read that line: flipping through books that my friend Dorene had asked me to organize for donation. She had Stage 4 brain cancer and had recently decided to stop chemotherapy, as the side effects made her sicker than the disease.
I was staying with Dorene to help out while her caregiver husband took a much-needed break. A week later, I had finished the book, which was not just a musing on grief but also on the tendency to want things to magically go back to “normal.”
While Didion’s journey ultimately was about making peace with the inevitable, I connected to the parts where she discussed the urge to fight rather than accept reality. Magical thinking was the perfect weapon.
I finally got to Dorene by making the case that she should resume chemo so she could live to see her nine-year-old son graduate. Fifth grade, middle school, and then, who knows, maybe even high school!
When her furious husband came home, he told me, “You have no idea what you’ve done.” A few days later, Dorene called to gently let me down as she and her family had decided no more chemo once and for all.
She died a couple of months later.
What happened between our call and Dorene’s passing is the strongest argument I know against magical thinking — and for finding magic in everyday moments as an antidote to hopelessness.
What is magical thinking?
Simply put, it’s imagining that your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, or actions can affect the outcome of a situation without sharing a causal link. Another definition of magical thinking is denial.
That word can feel like a slap in the face when it’s altogether human to want to wish your way into a better place. Or knock on wood or rub a rabbit’s foot to change your luck.
It’s also natural to want to place blame somewhere else. That’s why during the Black Plague, the search for both relief and meaning led people to believe that marginalized groups, like Jews, witches, and gypsies, were poisoning wells.
Similarly, the 1918 flu, which had its first reported cases in Kansas, was called the “Spanish Flu.” That’s because most countries involved in WWI didn’t accurately report their outbreaks, so they instead scapegoated the neutral Spaniards for reporting the death toll in the press.
All of this shows up in the worldwide response to COVID-19, across all kinds of aisles, including the scientific community, governments, and beyond. From the early days when even experienced infectious disease experts failed to recognize the scope of the virus’ threat to today when herd immunity or vaccines are touted as imminent, magical thinking abounds.
Even the most rational and powerful among us want to believe things aren’t as dire as they seem. And that’s dangerous.
Still, not having scientific evidence before making a call or taking action doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re in a state of denial. Faith can be a source of great strength and clarity — for example, a belief in something greater than oneself has fueled the work of influential change-makers, including Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Physician and author of The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self, Dr. Alex Lickerman frames it this way:
Perhaps, then, a more nuanced definition of magical thinking would be believing in things more strongly than either evidence or experience justifies.
In other words, none of us are immune to the subtle charms of wishful thinking.
Finding resilience in the rational
When it comes to conjuring false hope, expectations have special alchemy. We see it play out all the time now: it’s fall and back-to-school, so colleges reopen without comprehensive testing plans in place. Our science is technologically advanced, so we should have answers by now.
We’re half a year in, so the virus must be running its course — right? Yeah, no.
While it’s understandable to want problems to disappear without sacrificing comfort or facing difficult consequences, it’s not rational. And ultimately, it may make things even worse.
This is where the wisdom of the Stoics comes in handy. Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius advocated for seeing things as they are by peeling off “the legend that encrusts them.” Seneca took it a step further to combat a source of magical thinking — unforeseen circumstances — in his Premeditatio Malorum:
Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.
Considering the Romans faced down much of what we are currently dealing with, including pandemics, natural disasters, plus political and social turmoil, it’s now the perfect time to adopt an attitude of radical acceptance of what is versus what we think it should be.
Making a conscious choice
Here’s where things get tricky from an existential standpoint: how do you define reality?
Deepak Chopra makes the case that science and technology today are like the dogma of ancient times — illusions that we buy into that are actually “unexamined assumptions of reality.”
For example, most people accept that the body has sensations. But philosopher Bertrand Russell in The Analysis of Matter noted that the atoms and molecules that are the building blocks of a body or a brain don’t have sensations.
So, Chopra reasons, it’s a kind of magical thinking to believe that the end result (body, brain) would feel anything:
There is no point in the evolution of the cosmos where anyone can say atoms and molecules started to think, feel, and have sensations, and yet we assume that. There is the riddle, the mystery, the miracle.
The space between mind and matter is a fertile place to bridge the reality gap. For Chopra, it’s about considering “a practical alternative — an experience of reality that is experienced directly.”
In other words, consciousness. Going back to the wisdom of ancient India, there is a silent ocean of pure potential said to underlie everything. Thoughts and feelings are the waves on the surface that rise and fall.
While this may feel difficult to comprehend or accept, there is a kernel of wisdom that helps put a pin in magical thinking: the ever-changing nature of thoughts and feelings.
You can love a new pair of jeans today and tomorrow decide they make you look chunky. Or wear a mask everywhere you go today, and tomorrow choose to go out into the world maskless.
Your body weight doesn’t change in a day, nor does the reality of how the coronavirus is spread. But your ideas about yourself in relation to those things are often in flux.
Choosing to go beyond your thoughts about a situation moves you toward accepting the truth of what is.
Taming your inner unicorn
Ridding yourself of magical thinking has a couple of profound benefits. It helps you make better choices. And it also pushes you to stop hoping for change and start taking meaningful action.
While our experience of life is subjective, we can take strides to be more objective. This requires curiosity and a willingness to question our decision-making criteria.
The good news is that the necessary mindset to fuel worthy inquiry is healthy skepticism — something our generation is all about.
This time, though, the authority you’ve got to question is you. Your biases, your desires, and your susceptibility to blindly accept what others think, which we’re all prone to in this age of mediated experiences.
The key is to give yourself space to process before deciding to act. Mindfulness and meditation can help you move past the distraction of ever-changing expectations, impulses, and ideas to see your options more clearly. And journaling is a great outlet to record your experiences and beliefs, and then question and process accordingly.
Finally, Lickerman advises that you insist on proof whenever possible. If you can hold onto being intellectually “agnostic” when something isn’t proven, you can better resist emotionally driven action.
Everyday magic
I left something out that Dorene told me during our call. Doctors believed that chemotherapy would only prolong her life weeks or, at most, a few months, as the cancer had metastasized. She knew her time was precious, and to waste one more minute of it sick in bed wasn’t worth it to her.
Instead, she and her husband dipped into their savings and bought a sailboat. For those last two months of her life, she and the boys took the boat out most days. It had always been a dream of theirs to spend a leisurely summer sailing, and before Dorene died, she made it happen.
Magical thinking is all about wishing something extraordinary would change things for the better. On the other hand, magical living is about accepting the things you can’t change and instead focusing on making every ordinary instant extraordinary.
