For What It's Worth

The Cost of Inventing Illusions

(10 minute read)

Key Takeaways:

• Accepting mortality dissolves the illusion of control and clarifies what truly matters — how we choose to respond.
• Magical thinking is a natural human impulse that helps us cope with uncertainty.
• Comfort beliefs can harden into distortions when they replace evidence with certainty.
• Control is often an illusion; maturity means accepting limits and unpredictability.
• Unchecked belief systems can distort politics, science, and personal responsibility.
• Intellectual humility is essential to personal growth and social stability.

“It is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment about it. And this you have the power to change.”

–Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations, 8.47”

“The things you think about controls the quality of your mind. You become your thoughts.”

–Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations, 5.16”

“Oh, Rhett. I’m afraid now. I’m afraid of dying and going to hell.”

–Scarlet O’Hara, “Gone With The Wind,” MGM, 1939

“…alternate realities are nothing new in America.”

–Sarah Churchwell, “The Wrath To Come,” Bloomsbury Publishing, UK, 2022

In The Age of Magical Thinking 4, we examined how comfort beliefs arise from a deeply human need to make sense of uncertainty and suffering. We considered how these beliefs can steady us — and how easily they can begin to distort reality. Here, we continue that examination by turning toward a truth no belief system can soften: our limits. To remember that we must die is not morbid. It is clarifying.

Remember You Must Die

Death is an inevitability and the Stoics have a practice for facing it. Called Memento Mori, “remember you must die.” It isn’t an endorsement of morbidity but a way for us to come to terms with uncertainty.

Memento Mori gently reminds us that our lives are finite. Keeping that awareness in view can encourage us to live more attentively and with greater presence. While the phrase is often associated with Stoicism, the practice itself is hardly exclusive to it. Nearly every religious and philosophical tradition, in its own way, wrestles with the reality of death and what it means for how we live now.

What many of these traditions share is a common effort to make sense of the one experience we all inevitably face: death. For example, Maraṇasati is a Buddhist practice of remembering that death can come at any time. Some Islamic sects regularly visit graveyards to confront mortality. The Jewish rite of Rosh Hashana marks a new year, a clean slate, and a time to reflect on how death may arrive at any moment.

Their explanations often serve, at least in part, to bring comfort to our present condition. In that way, how the hereafter is imagined matters less as a literal description of what comes next and more for how it shapes the way we choose to live now.

While these practices invite honest reflection on mortality, they can also be reshaped or ritualized to soften or deny reality. Some systems emphasize busyness, moral striving, or ritual performance so strongly that adherents have little room to face their mortality, and when questioning afterlife narratives is treated as dangerous or immoral, people may suppress fear or curiosity instead of meeting mortality with openness and honesty.

When magical thinking belief systems present highly detailed, unquestionable descriptions of the afterlife, they can reduce the natural mystery of death to something neatly packaged, preventing deeper reflection on mortality itself.

Unforeseen and unpleasant events happen to everyone, often beyond our control. Though we may feel frustrated and powerless to stop them, we aren’t completely helpless. What we can control, our real power if you will, is determining how we think and react to those events.

As Marcus Aurelius reminds us, it is not events themselves that disturb us, but our judgments about them—so our task is not to control circumstances, but to discipline our response. With that we can do one of two things.

First, we can waste energy trying to control events through our own magical thinking. Or, second, we can choose a better strategy: using these events as practice in strengthening our ability to navigate life.

Being an adult means acknowledging that some things will always be beyond our control. That is simply part of life. When these things happen, it can feel like drifting through space without a tether, with nothing solid to reach for or hold onto. Because these feeling seem so raw we often do everything we can to avoid facing it.

The natural inclination is to also complain about the situation. Admittedly it provides temporary relief, like falling down and skinning a knee and yelling, “Ow, that hurt.” But complain too long and it’ll have a negative effect.

We can remain victims or we can change what and how we think. If we commit to doing the right thing and follow through, little else truly matters—we have done what we can. Detaching from outcomes beyond our control is a superpower. Chaos be damned. Sometimes simply knowing we care and have done the right thing, has to be enough.

Look How Far We’ve Come

Magical thinking helps people cope with uncertainty by creating alternate realities that feel safer and more meaningful. While these beliefs can provide emotional protection they can also distort truth, weaken critical thinking, and shape culture in very profound ways.

Ordinary people can easily be seduced by the dark psychology of power. Group dynamics, authority, and ideology can often distort individual morality. The ultimate aim of unchecked power is domination over reality itself—controlling language, perception, and truth. The intoxication of power is not limited to tyrants, but is a persistent human vulnerability that thrives in crowds, systems, and stories we tell ourselves.

Toxic magical thinking distorts political language and reshapes reality to serve power rather than truth. Sacred language, when fused with boundless ambition, can justify authority, blur moral boundaries, and recast power as an end in itself. Intellectual and spiritual maturity is needed to reject manipulative narratives in favor of accountability, clarity, and ethical responsibility.

Our maturity begins when we are willing to give up magical thinking by facing reality, embracing mortality, and rejecting illusions that separate us from one another.

Why This Really Matters

In trying to make sense of circumstances and events, humans have often developed religious and philosophical explanations that reflect the assumptions and needs of their time.

To be fair, many of those traditions have articulated positive moral ideals: compassion, justice, mercy, charity, reciprocity, and self-restraint. That doesn’t mean they have always practiced these ideals,¹ but they do consistently affirm them. Believers can, quite naturally, draw tremendous strength in times of personal pain from these principles.

At best, they help us make sense of the world and guide how we relate to one another—“treat others as you would like to be treated.” Who would argue that treating each other with dignity and respect is harmful?

If we look more carefully, though, we can see that many beliefs risk turning into a kind of magical thinking. They become ideas and stories that often work less as strict, accurate accounts of reality and more as ways of finding meaning, comfort, or self-understanding. This does not mean they are completely false or without insight. It does mean, however, we should clearly separate what is supported by reason or evidence from what we accept mainly because it helps us live or feel better.²

Humans have long been willing to embrace almost anything that seems to promise a better outcome. Myths, superstitions, cognitive biases, and comforting beliefs can all help us feel more in control, supported by the promise of a better outcome.

Some of the more humorous examples are:

• Don’t walk under a ladder, it’ll bring bad luck, guaranteeing better luck.
• Spill the salt shaker? Throw some over your left shoulder to ward off any future bad juju. Keep the good times rolling.
• A black cat crosses your path? Well, just ask the 1969 Chicago Cubs about that one.

If we are willing to accept the little promises, to what extent are we also prepared to trust the larger ones?

The assumptions that we often believe to be true are called comfort beliefs. They are meant to ensure a more favorable outcome and help us feel better by shielding our psyche. We don’t like to think about or accept the fact that bad things can and do happen.

If …we do the magic right.

When we manage the magic just right, it can feel as if we’re gently steering our own fate. But it can also pull us away from what’s actually happening. When we’re uncomfortable with what is, or anxious about what might be, we may try to reshape our experience with charmed attitudes and behaviors. Often, our main reason for creating these softer versions of reality is simply to feel better about ourselves and to find a sense of certainty in a world that can feel very random.

Feeling good about ourselves isn’t necessarily a bad thing—we all need that sometimes. But feeling better about ourselves because of faulty magical thinking? There is something wrong with that.³

When Comfort Becomes Conviction

What happens when the magic fades or the comforting belief proves false?

• “We did everything right. We ate right, exercised, and refused excessive living. Yet my husband was taken away from us at such a young age.”
• “They say that blood is thicker than water. But important members of my family betrayed me at every turn.”
• “I gave years to the company and sacrificed time away from family that I’ll never get back. Now, I’m out of work, estranged from a career and my family.”

The danger in assuming a different choice would have guaranteed a better outcome is that it transforms random hardship into moral failure.

There is a problem with relying on magical thinking: wishing and believing beyond reality is rarely ever healthy. Even when certain hopeful or symbolic beliefs may feel comforting or briefly motivating, they become costly once we depend on them instead of engaging honestly with our circumstances. It requires maturity to recognize this, and learning to think more maturely means facing life as it is rather than how we merely want it to be.

“As a child, I spoke, thought, and reasoned like a child. As an adult, I choose to speak, think, and reason like an adult.” –Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, 13:11

In light of those words, it’s worth remembering that comfort beliefs have been around for a very long time. Under scrutiny most have fallen apart. Still, people keep searching for ways to feel secure—often in really strange ways.

From flat earth to bloodletting, this is stubbornly believing discredited ideas. The more outrageous the claim, the more fiercely believers dig in—they just feel they’re right.

Paging doctors Dunning and Kruger.

Many conspiracy theories and flawed belief systems take root in eroding trust in institutions (“they’ve lied to us or are concealing the truth”). Accepting that premise as fact can create a false sense of empowerment and reinforce confirmation bias built on half-truths.⁴

“Conspiracy theories are now the blood sport of the 21st century; social media platforms that profit off them are the contemporary colosseum where the masses go to watch individuals, nations, religions, and ideas get ripped to shreds. It’s officially sanctioned barbarism. And the crowds love it.”

Skeptic Magazine, Conspiracy Inc.: The New Media Disorder, Ashley Rindsberg, May 3, 2026 (accessed May 26, 2026)

While Rindsberg is specifically addressing conspiracy theories it is not a stretch to see that these theories are being accepted by people who are starving for what many of us want. A desire to belong and that life matters (by extension theirs does, too). These two needs fall under the umbrella of having the very human need of feeling empowered.

She also mentions social media platforms and we’ll address the role it plays in magical thinking in a later article. It turns out, as Amanda Montell has pointed out, the glut of information they provide impacts our magical thinking processes, or what she calls, “magical overthinking.”

At best, some of these religious and philosophical beliefs arose over the centuries as sincere attempts to answer complex questions using the limited information available at that time. As knowledge advanced, and solid evidence emerged, the magical thinking was replaced by more compelling beliefs and approaches.

• Natural phenomenon, like earthquakes, tidal waves, and storms are not caused by supernatural forces
• Diseases are caused by microscopic germs and viruses, not bad air or vindictive gods
• No, we cannot measure the skull of a human therefore determining intellect or confirming racial bigotry (phrenology).
• And, of course, the sun does not revolve around the earth, nor is the earth flat (can’t believe this one has picked up steam over the past decade).

We form comfort beliefs in an effort to impose order on a chaotic world. In doing so, we often end up thinking and behaving in ways that, on reflection, seem quite odd. Looked at more closely, these beliefs are really attempts to control what happens to us. If we can just figure things out and do the right thing, then a good outcome is guaranteed. We live as though these beliefs can somehow shape events in our favor.

¹ Karen Armstrong, “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” (2014). Armstrong suggests that while major religious traditions consistently express ethical ideals such as compassion and justice, their institutions have, in practice, frequently been entangled in violence, coercion, and struggles for power.

² William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902). James differentiates between the psychological significance of religious belief and its objective truth claims, suggesting that beliefs can offer meaning and moral orientation even when their empirical status remains unresolved.

³ Ellen J. Langer, The Illusion of Control, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32, no. 2 (1975): 311–328; Melvin J. Lerner, “The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion” (1980). These works on the illusion of control and just-world beliefs suggests that when individuals regard events as controllable or morally deserved, they may be more inclined to interpret negative outcomes as personal shortcomings rather than as the result of chance or circumstance.

⁴ Karen M. Douglas, Robbie M. Sutton, and Aleksandra Cichocka, The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories, Current Directions in Psychological Science 26, no. 6 (2017): 538–542. Research suggests that conspiracy beliefs are often associated with declining trust in institutions and may serve psychological needs for control, certainty, and distinctiveness, reinforcing patterns of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.