Author: Katy Finnegan
Magical thinking is having a renaissance. My friends, family—and especially me—have all been drawn into purchasing various accoutrements and performing rituals to support a more spiritually engaged perspective on our lives. In my bedside drawer alone, I have two sets of tarot cards, a few chunky fingers of palo santo, and many, many candles. This is, of course, in addition to the many other routines I engage in to support my overall well-being: a psychoanalytic therapist, a dietician, regular exercise, and methodical exposure to extreme temperatures. You could say this pursuit of physical and psychic wellness is keeping a small economy afloat.
“Wellness,” much like magical thinking, can be assessed by the same metric: if you believe in it, then it’s working. Unlike “health,” which has fairly specific markers, being “well” is far more subjective. It’s also, notably, not just about bodily wellness, but about your mental and spiritual state. Not content to sculpt and buff our bodies into oblivion, magical thinking is the next frontier because it tells us we are actually controlling—or at least successfully interpreting—that which is happening beyond us: other people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, the future, the universe itself.
Joan Didion is arguably one of the most astute chroniclers of magical thinking, writing in depth about her experience of grief and the irrational state of mind it provoked:
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative.
Zadie Smith summarized Didion’s conception of magical thinking as “a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotion with general reality, [and] imposes … ‘a narrative line upon disparate images.’” This definition chimes with how many of us relate to our lives today. But what is it about our current moment that makes us so drawn to magical thinking?
Looking to the not-so-distant past, the Victorians were big into occultism. In Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic, Alison Butler suggests it may have become popular because of the rapid pace of technological advances that made anything seem possible with the right instrument.
Today, in an age of AI-ridden communications, parasocial internet relationships, and digitally enhanced epistemological delusions, who among us hasn’t felt the edges of our belief system start to tremble? Our world has thrown the concept of empirical scientific truth into question. Even I find myself wondering: is the non-stick on my pan actually harmful, or is that just a lie to get me to spend more on cast iron cookware?
Ironically, the more this slippage between truth and fantasy occurs, the more we purport to fight against it. We count our macros, track our sleep and menstruation. Whether it’s a juice cleanse or rubbing beef tallow on our skin, we believe in “the science” when the behaviors support our conception of ourselves. We say we care about our health above all. Only, it’s not really health, is it? Or only in a superficial sense. It’s a ritual.
In Todd Haynes’ film Safe, we follow Carol, a housewife played by Julianne Moore, as she becomes consumed by an illness no one can identify—until she finds a new-age community that diagnoses her with “environmental sickness.” She moves into their facility, and by the end, isolated and covered in lesions, she finally seems content. Her initial sickness can be read as a metaphorical reaction to the sterile, emotionally deadening suburban environment she inhabits—and, more broadly, the constraints of bourgeois womanhood. What’s unsettling is that for Carol, retreating further into sickness and delusion is her happy ending.
Like Carol, maybe many of us take strange comfort in evidence that things aren’t all right. Physical symptoms give expression to what cannot be spoken, and in doing so, offer emotional release. This hints at the strange dualism at the heart of the wellness obsession—we wouldn’t be so keen to spend money, engage in strenuous workouts, or eat so many raw carrots drenched in vinegar if we didn’t believe, on some level, that something is wrong with us.
Today, we’re constantly searching for solutions to manufactured problems. I wasn’t really worried about my gut microbiome until 2022, and now it’s one more thing I have to think about. Perhaps, overwhelmed by information about the horrors of the world—war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, economic chaos, climate disaster—we’ve displaced our existential anxiety onto a smaller, more manageable frontier: ourselves.
In 1979, Christopher Lasch wrote:
Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly dancing…
What’s different today is how thoroughly this individualistic mindset has seeped into politics. We’ve become convinced that our psychic worlds—our wellness, our habits—aren’t just personal, but political. The snake has begun to eat its own tail. The things we once did to distract ourselves have become the whole point.
“The personal is political” has evolved—not just to mean that political context shapes our material lives (which it does)—but that the minutiae of our personal lives deserve political attention. A vague discomfort about a trans woman using the same bathroom as a cis woman becomes worthy of a national debate. Pundits who challenge established scientific facts are given airtime as if they’re raising serious questions.
In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein argues that hyper-individualism has led to an unholy alliance of wellness gurus, snake-oil salesmen, and MAHA moms. United by the belief that individual behaviors are the main drivers of health and happiness, these figures help build a world where politics is manipulated through emotions, governments are excused for their failures, and individuals are let off the hook from collective responsibility.
And that brings me back to magical thinking. There’s a reason I check my horoscope every morning and pull a tarot card before bed. There’s a reason I’m addicted to scrolling videos of lymphatic drainage massages, hormone-balancing diets, and nervous system regulation hacks. These actions give me the same feeling: the sense that I’m informed, in tune, and in control.
This is what life is now—a never-ending exercise in introspection to regulate the unbearable anxieties of the modern world. We operate on the belief that when we finally achieve the health, wellness, and peace we seek, we’ll reach some promised nirvana. If only, when we looked in our crystal balls, we were capable of seeing more than our own reflection.
Katy Finnegan is a writer based in Dublin. She writes short fiction and essays about the things she’s obsessed with including sex, relationships, wellness culture and self-actualisation.
@_katy_finnegan (IG) www.katyfinnegan.com