The psychology of magic: Where do we look for meaning in life? | Derren Brown | Big Think

We live in a world now where we’ve comfortably dispensed with most myth and superstition for the last few hundred years. That’s the enlightenment project, you know. We have embraced a very rational approach to life, and that’s wonderful. It has brought us many great things, but it’s also left us with a sort of a meaning gap.

So, for example, we’ve removed any meaning around the idea of death. Particularly morbid superstitions are the first things that we sort of got rid of. If death now doesn’t really have any meaning, it means we don’t live comfortably with the idea of death. Death is an unwelcome, absurd, terrifying, and alienating sort of stranger when it comes, rather than a companion to life. That’s something that’s present and in the background that we sort of make our peace with, which plenty of other cultures do.

And then when it happens, we really struggle for a narrative. The only narrative we have really is the brave battle that someone is fighting. That’s sort of our cultural narrative around death, which is really not helpful. It’s not helpful for the person that’s dying; it just adds failure to another list of problems that they’ve already got. It’s more helpful for the people around them.

And that’s sort of the problem: our need for narrative and meaning at that point has been, well, it’s there, but the narrative, our sense of authorship has been jettisoned, and the people around us are making the decisions. They’re taking authorship of this point in our life when we need maximum authorship really. We start to feel like, or can start to feel like, a cameo part while the doctors, loved ones, and people are making decisions.

So, there’s an example of meaning and myth being taken out of something where it’s psychologically important. It’s important for us to have some kind of sense of meaning in those times. So, it’s no coincidence that psychics, spiritual mediums, and all of that world come in with a fairly tawdry sense of meaning. They don’t really offer anything useful, but they kind of seem like they do, so they become very popular in our sort of society.

Where we’re desperate for something, we’re desperate for some sort of narrative that just gives us a sense of something bigger. So, I think that’s very important because magic, in a secular way, is promising those kind of things. And we know it’s theatrical; we certainly do with a stage magician. We don’t if it’s a medium, where perhaps we believe in them, maybe.

But I think they’re always going to tap into our need for that element of life, that kind of feeling of wonder, of the thing that’s bigger than ourselves, of transcendence. I mean, that’s what it’s tapping into. And that’s a hugely important thing in life; you only find meaning in life by finding the thing that’s bigger than you and throwing yourself into that thing. That’s how you find meaning.

And meaning is more important than happiness. When people’s lives mean nothing, that’s when they throw themselves off buildings. We all deal with unhappiness all the time, so meaning is the most important. When we lack a sense of transcendence or when we lack a sense of narratives that are bigger than us that we can lose ourselves in, we’re going to try and find it where we can.

Magic, in its silly vaudevillian, often childish way, I think tends to appeal to that.