The Age of Rage: Why Are People Are So Angry? | Hacker News Reader

The Age of Rage: Why Are People Are So Angry?

greyenlightenment.com

64 pointspaulpauper135 comments

Robert Sapolsky found the the most obvious predictor of stress in primate societies (measured via cortisol levels) was inequality. Speaking as a member of a highly inequal primate society, it makes sense to me.

It make sense to me too. Financial strain, limited opportunities, social exclusion and perceived unfairness can all contribute to heightened stress levels and anger towards life...

It might be unfair to focus on this, but that "perceived unfairness" just jumped out at be.

My first reaction was to think "it's not just perceived"... but after a little introspecting, I couldn't help but notice how grim that statement actually is. It means that any mistreatment is fine - as long as the person can be distracted from it.

And thinking about that reminded me how every new tech since the internet/90th has been increasingly distracting. There is a reason we've started calling it the attention economy after all...

Inversely, any difference can become unbearable with enough attention fixated on it.

And get a public figure/politician to drone on and on about it (whether they believe it or not) is an excellent way to fire up a base and get the base to stop thinking things through as thoroughly. That’s the thing that scares me - country size mobs.

Is something still considered an addiction if nobody cares to stop it?

The way many people use the Internet now reminds me of an episode of Star Trek TNG ¹ where everyone is hooked on a game.

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Nex...

A fundamental measurement for this in a modern society is payslope:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...

and it really should be a fundamental aspect of how companies are viewed.

That's the dirty nuance of it.

One can certainly have stress or frustration based on truly perceived unfairness.

Take the case of someone who gets more test time because of a disability and the ADA.

Those who don't know the why, may find it unfair. And there may be people that perceive it as unfair despite it being overall accepted as such.

----

That said your observation is also entirely true in it's own right. You can even distract from the real problem by focusing one's attention on a different unfairness, even if that unfairness impacts them less in the short and/or long term.

“Real stuff” retail logistics is 100% a game of physical statistics; keep enough necessities on shelves people don’t riot.

Everything else about society is conservative political ideology

Just angling for vanity rewards based upon peddling the best story, the best trauma, or best political network connections given contemporary zeitgeist; no Im the best aligned with set of virtues!. Whose family sold the most cars during the auto boom, and why we should still care…

It’s hilariously bad

For those of us less in the loop, would you mind expanding/clarifying a bit on your comment?

Amazon, Kroger, Red Bull… brands… have all the capital, buy up supply, add their markups and fees, etc influence supply and demand through price fixing in abstract math games. Meanwhile the public is shackled to nickel and dime, dollars and sense finance and cannot get ahead, they tread water while also doing all the work to prop up the brands.

We need to keep stuff on shelves or people will riot. But we also need to validate the past rulers for some reason by enabling them to monopolize capital. As we cling to Anglo-babble story about risk taking. When tree trimmer was number one most dangerous job in 2023, and the rest are blue collar jobs… police not on the list, fwiw… the rich investor is using story they won for some reason to avoid real risk of trimming a tree.

But Protestant work ethic and so a generational Ponzi scheme to funnel dads post world war welfare job money and hand it to juniors startups and hedge funds is ongoing.

Same as back in the day when landed gentry paid the church to let their kids avoid work by studying theology

What’s great is since these are social hallucinations and they aren’t real it’s belief in social hallucinations not real stuff; it’s effectively nihilism given it ignores externalities of its resource use, but dressed up in ties, animated pitches that titillate and manipulate oxytocin and dopamine

Come on, you can't be serious. Red Bull is selling caffeinated sugar water. They can't possibly buy up all the supply.

Is human equality lower now than it was in times past?

Perhaps awareness/perception of inequality has increased because of mass media (and social media).

However I’m not totally convinced this is the main factor.

Inequality has clearly increased across the entire world.

How could it not be?

If someone was doing much better than you it would be hard to know or it was more formalized within the social hierarchy itself: nobles, kings, etc.

Now all you have to do is open social media and see dozens of people doing things you could never even dream of doing.

Maybe not the only factor, but a strong contributor. It's at least a few things:

- Broader awareness, as you suggest. Police violence didn't necessarily increase, but the number of videos documenting it did, as did the distribution.

- Highlight-reel effect on social media, so it feels like your peers are richer and happier than you. With previous generations' mass media, it felt like there was a separate "rich and famous" class, but the perception of the average person was a lot like yourself.

- Tribalism from market segmentation and the echo effect. So we learn less tolerance and our convictions get stronger without reasonable, respected counter-arguments.

- Actual increase in inequality through automation and globalization, without sufficient mechanisms (e.g., higher taxes, UBI, etc) to re-distribute the gains.

Seems to me the constant harping about it (both by media and loud voices) is a self-reinforcing story. In the actual meaning of the word "meme".

The world has never been more full of choices and opportunities (as in "things that one might do" - as opposed to a more limited but fashionable "next job one step up"). And extremes in the world are still just as irrelevant to our own lives as they have ever been - whether you envy Jacques Cousteau or Jeff Bezos. In that what they have is not added or removed from your life (although what they achieved added to our lives - if you see the distinction), but you are still free to use them as models and steer your life by them.

What has changed:

- the harping

- the spectrum of actual possibilities in what we can be

- our self-awareness that we fall short of what we might have been

I imagine that it is lower in many western countries than it was in the 90's, but I have no data to back that up.

Figure 3 in [1] suggests the opposite

[1] https://wid.world/document/inequality-trends-in-europe-world...

In the US, yes. Middle class is 50% and continues to decline. The upper class is also getting richer.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/fall-2022/how-the....

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

The actual numbers are surprising though. 1. Most of the decrease in the middle class was driven by MC people moving to the upper class So 2. The ratio of lower class to upper class is actually lower than in the 70s.

Interesting point I never considered. Is the cut off for UC really just 1 million dollars in net worth? Seems implausible given house prices in places like California. Is essentially every home owner UC?

Net worth means after debt is subtracted.

If I convinced the bank to loan me 1 million dollars for a 1 million dollar house, my net worth would remain unchanged.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_worth

I think the bigger inequality we experience is less about individual income, and more an inequality that giant corporations run so much of the world and the people have so little representation & agency.

Watching your epi-pens go from $35 to $700 is a stark & present reminder that the very wealthy corporations are predatory as fuck, and that you are prey. And that nothing will save you. (Short of Linda Khan & the FTC starting actual anti-trust activities again.)

Seen Incorporated on Apple TV?

Sure. The poorest people in the world are as poor as always (starving), while the richest people are richer than our ancestors could have imagined.

This varies by country. The GINI Index for the United States which measures income inequality rose sharply from 1980 to 1993 and then has been fairly flat since.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA

There's a nice video from a psychological experiment that illustrates it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg

I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.

But we also seem hardwired to want to feel superior and special.

Nonsense. A healthy person in a healthy society desires to be valued by their peers above everything else. Only in the absence of this belonging does one pursue the antisocial behaviors you describe. Capitalism is barbarism.

So hammering the nail that sticks out makes sense?

I feel like his point is not homogeneity, but that humans have an inherent need of status through love and admiration. Healthy people will prefer their close circle to satisfy it, less healty people will settle with strangers (fame), and even less healthy people will resort mainly to material wealth.

What is equality other than homogeneity? And how is enforcing equality "from above" (or whatever you want to call it) ever going to work other than "cutting the tall grass" or "hammering down the nail that sticks out"?

The work to improve the bottom of society is about 7 billion times more work than to punish the top, just by numbers. And that is ignoring that shooting someone is a lot easier than the years of mental health help followed by years of training the bottom requires to improve.

To say nothing of the fact that, obviously, a separate class in society needs to be empowered to hammer down those pesky nails ("the KGB"). Which is another way of saying that socialism needs gunpoint-enforced inequality to keep existing. So does capitalism, of course, but since they accept inequality it seems less of a problem. And (mostly democratic/social-) capitalism needs a LOT less violence in practice. I get it, it needs more than zero violence and that sucks. However ...

I would also like to point out that both indigenous primate societies are EXTREMELY hierarchical, frankly nightmarishly hierarchical. Everyone has someone directly in charge of them, and there is someone at the top. There may be groups. There usually are male vs female groups, and a dynamic between them with clear hierarchies in both groups, but not so clear a hierarchy between a given man and a given woman.

Oh and, btw, sex in indigenous human societies is somewhere between prostitution and rape. Meaning sex is either directly transactional (a good meal, as opposed to scraps, for sex), or there is direct use of force. In the most comfortable locations to live women may gather food, in trade for a measure of sexual independence/choice, but that seems to be limited even in the best situations. Furthermore, neighboring human tribes are always at war, and both tribes are growing fast in a limited resource environment: it is a matter of time before they massacre each other (because: preferable to starving to death). Humans may kidnap and rape women from neighboring tribes, or they may massacre them. And yes, when times are really good (halfway between "wars"), they will feed them and return them.

Occasionally a "romeo and juliet" from the same tribe or neighboring tribes may fall in love and run away. If they die, nothing happens, and if they survive, of course, this only results in the creation of a new tribe.

There is NOTHING any human can do in such a primitive human societies that comes anywhere close to delivering the "status and love" that massacring the neighboring tribe during war delivers in terms of status.

Meaning the "love and admiration" essentially translates to violence to get drugs (an orgasm is effectively drugs, after all) for men and prostitution (if they're lucky) for women.

Oh and kids have only one option: scraps, they're abandoned by mothers to mothers can go back to prostitution, as soon as possible. Slightly bigger kids take care of the smaller ones (meaning 6 year olds care for 4 year olds, 4 year olds care for 2 year olds, ...). Occasionally, during very good times, women join the hunt and gain a measure of independence. On the other hand, during bad times everything sucks, there's less sex, and rape is the norm, as are abandoned babies starving to death (they even have "tricks", such as putting a baby, floating, in a river. Probably slowly sinking in the river will cause the kid to lose body heat far faster than it will become hungry, and it will peacefully sleep in and die, before being eaten, and won't cry)

Is this what you mean by "hardwired for equality"? Men are hardwired to fight, using physical violence, for better social position and "love". Women are hardwired to do the same, using less direct means. Also, humans are social animals, and this is nothing special. All social animals have a "total hierarchy", enforced by a form of violence for men, and by accepting transactional and/or forced sex for women. Wolves, gnus, orcas, dolphins ... it doesn't matter. All are variations on this theme.

Most people in every society want to increase their social status. The metrics vary by society — could be dollars or touchdowns or wooly mammoth meat quantity — but this is nearly universal. And in a closed society this is essentially a zero sum game: in order for someone to rise in status someone else must fall. Whether this competition is "healthy" for people or society is irrelevant since it's not going to change.

You'll find a more ready audience for your point if you take out some of antisocial wording.

This point of view is not supported by anthropological evidence.

I'll give an example. In the 90s and 00s, there was a wave of Marxist attempts to cancel anthropologists who had reported on the competition for dominance, competition for status, physical and sexual violence, and overall strife present in primitive societies that were studied. The whole affair about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_in_El_Dorado is the most famous example of this. The accusations were largely discredited, but the damage was done. One consequence is that unsympathetic anthropologists were banned from Venezuela, where there is now nobody allowed to report on the slow, systematic extermination of the country's indigenous peoples.

The reduction of certain evils to economic essentialism is frequently itself a tool to assert ideological superiority--itself an 'antisocial behavior', one done not for money or profit but for the simple desire to feel superior to another, and excuse the evils of their in-group. In an ironic way, the above post is its own counterexample.

It's much simpler to be valued by your peers if it is perceived that you're value has surpassed theirs instead of perfectly balanced.

> It's much simpler to be valued by your peers if it is perceived that you're value has surpassed theirs instead of perfectly balanced.

One flaw in your comment seems to be the assumption that "superiority" is a one-axis quality. You could have a group where everyone is superior, just at different things.

That’s a great point, so I appreciate that first of all. How would you prevent extraordinary or lucky people from encroaching on the “market share” (hate using this metaphor honestly) of their peers?

I am concerned that your (good) point assumes that we can reasonable assume that there’s enough opportunities for individuals to provide value to others to match the number of people looking to do so. What if there’s an imbalance? Which seems inevitable.

I.e. What if it turns out there’s not ways for all the people on earth to distinguish themselves in the way that you describe?

Global income inequality has slightly decreased since 2000 [1] due to globalization. For the same reason, quality of life has greatly equalized across the world. The utility gained from switching between flying coach and flying a private jet is less than the utility gained getting access to electricity or antibiotics. If you want equality, you should want capitalism.

[1] https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-2/#:~:text=In%20effect%2C%....

I see this argument trotted out and it's a huge dodge that implicitly acknowledges the zero-sum nature of capitalism as practiced by modern societies. It's true that global quality of life has increased and the examples you gave are true. But it's critically important to note that in many developed countries quality of life within that country has stagnated or regressed on many key metrics. If the only we way we can make the world richer is by making the rich countries poorer, I don't think it's a shining endorsement of that social system. We already have many other social systems that can do about the same thing.

I've always found this to be a massive flaw in analyzing policy from a Pareto criterion. Economists love to show the very simple arithmetic that a Pareto improvement is strictly better but my intuition was always that the theoretical increase in total surplus didn't actually lead to a better real outcome.

I don't know about that. Some people absolutely, but most people just want to belong to something and be a valued contributor. Like I really don't care about having the biggest house on the block, but some people having huge places and others stuck in tiny studios rankles me quite a bit.

>> I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group.

> But we also seem hardwired to want to feel superior and special.

Both can be true simultaneously!

I would argue agency is a bigger factor.

My problem is that when a corporation does something super shitty to me, I have zero ability to punish them for it.

Give people the ability to punish corporate bad actors, and they would get a lot happier.

It’s partly the late stage effect of the ad supported everything business model. Rage is very effective to generate engagement, tribalism and passion. When major politicians are ready to exploit the us vs them dynamic to their benefit it creates a perfect storm.

Also the Guardian and other news outlets have been driving this where every headline is about how one group or another is outraged it’s getting a bit ridiculous.

Anger can be used to drive engagement

I guess that just beggs the question of why anger is so engaging, and why people haven't adopted behaviors and norms that suit themselves better.

Evolution takes generations. Society might adapt, if given enough time, and assuming that society can survive that long while trillion-dollar companies are incentivized to exploit human emotion in such a destructive way.

Also evolution doesn’t happen due to stimulus unless it affects fitness (just because we don’t like a trait, if people with it keep having babies at the same rate as others, then it won’t go away).

These aren’t conscious decisions people are making. It’s baked into our chemical systems (read thinking fast and slow for some more context).

Millions of years of survival instincts don’t go away overnight. We are wired to pay more attention to negative things so we don’t get eaten. That wiring is exploited at scale in ways we never dreamed of.

Even in the days before the internet, nightly news crews knew: if it bleeds, it leads.

I'd say anger IS a prime engagement mechanism, its purpose is almost to 'engage' ("I must take action to fix this now/it is on ME to engage with this now). The problem is that it can be co-opted and misused to drive up numbers for people sitting in San Francisco, outside of its original purpose in a huntergatherer society.

i'd say emotions are engaging, anger is just the easiest one to evoke by people who want to monetize your attention

This is probably one of the biggest reasons right here. Its the whole reason behind inflammatory clickbait headlines.

It's also one of the reasons I avoid most social media, I don't need that kind of negativity affecting my mental health. If its something important, I will probably hear it from a friend or it might appear here on HN.

But even on HN I have been seeing a lot of inflammatory news on the front page. Makes me wonder if someone has built an AI webapp which shows you only the tech related news on HN.

I try not to trash my mind with it too. If it's important to know it'll get to me

I used it to finally start to communicate my needs more effectively

Yup.

It's something that demagogues have known for centuries.

Get people angry, and you can lead them around.

When we are angry or afraid (and, it's my belief that anger is really just a reaction to fear), our thinking becomes "binary." No time to sweat the details. [Fight|Flight] Pick one. We don't become stupid, but our decisions tend to be rash, and ill-considered.

People make bad decisions when they are stressed, especially when angry.

Works a charm, when you are the hate dealer, and you are the one that benefits from the bad decisions of your customers.

Sample size of one…it feels true to me. Maybe it’s my age or I am somehow blissfully unaware it’s always been like this. It feels very true for me in America that the moment you like or dislike something or even have an opinion that is a shade of gray instead of black or white, that you immediately get dumped into a binary category. In America this seems to be extremely true regardless of ideology.

Even about the stupidest and minor things too, I’ve noticed. A few weeks ago I discussed how I’m not a big fan of dark theme UIs, and the comments here on HN were shockingly nasty and out of place.

It’s not entirely new. I remember some pretty heated, ugly arguments over Xbox v PS2.

That's really just tribalism. Also see anytime Apple enters the discussion.

The comment upthread more applies to how, on certain charged issues, trying to take a more nuanced take or point out that their side is not entirely correct on some minor point is likely to get you virtually shouted down because you're obviously in the pay of the other side. In general, it's better to just close the browser.

Also, on the internet, you can't tell who's a teenager. Social groups in real life are usually divided by age. If a much younger person has an overly extreme or overly argumentative opinion, it's kind of expected.

>That's really just tribalism.

I want to gently push back on this, as I've seen the simple explanation you say itself become a black and white accepted truth meme when reality is more complicated. Yes, tribalism does play a role, but the harder truth is there is legitimate, logical self interest and game theory at play too. Game consoles, or computer OSes, are platforms with a significant network effect economic component. People do not generally buy these just for the thing itself, they buy it because of the software it enables them to run (be it games or something else). The more software it has, the more value it offers for the price. And the more it sells, the more economies of scale allows further pushing down the cost, improving the offering, or both. But the existence of any given piece of software depends on there being a critical mass of buyers. If you're the only one to buy into a given platform, it's not going to be supported long and the value of your purchase will be low, and whatever potential you hoped for will not happen. If 10-20% of the market buys in, then it'll likely go along ok, but a lot of what it gets will be ports or down to luck. If it has 30-50%, it's guaranteed to have solid support, as much as anything else. If it has 80%, it's going to have everything, mainstream stuff will be optimized to the max for it, ultra niche stuff only a few percent of the user base is interested in will still be big enough in absolute numbers to get developed. All of this applies to peripheral hardware as well. None of this even touches "networking" as-in multiple people collaborating, which is a whole further thing of course.

So it's directly in someone's individual short term interest if as many other people buy into their preferred platform as possible. To go back to GGP's example, anyone who liked the Playstation 2 simply got more bang for their buck over the Xbox or GameCube. There were far more games for it, far more peripherals, developers went the extra mile for it's weird baroque architecture and pushed it to the limit. Xbox and GC both got some really cool games as well, but they were never explored to the same extent.

Though platform markets also reveal another aspect related to "short term" above: while within a short period or generation it's good for an individual buyer if their platform dominates, over a medium to longer term it's inevitable that a dominant player will get lazy/greedy and start to abuse what they've got to the detriment of their customers. Further it's not necessarily easy for competition to spring back up. So there's another tension there between short term and medium/long term interests.

Still though, I think "tribalism" has come to get thrown around too much, or perhaps alternatively people forget that "tribes" can work, and remain important. Most big things in the world require groups, not individuals. That necessarily means that how other people think and act directly affects others as well. No human is an island. If you think one option is truly the best one for you, that itself isn't necessarily good enough if you can't get enough others to agree. But nobody agrees 100% of the time. So long term banding together, smoothing over some disagreements with some agreement and placing some value on the group collective power itself is a strategy that is proven to get things done and deliver for people. "Just tribalism" is too shallow by far.

Is this the new "I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux..."?

No, absolutely not. Have you confused HN for Twitter?

I mean that's all true. But if you have a modicum of self-awareness--and are not some big-name influencer in some domain (and probably even then in most cases)--you realize you can't even begin to move the needle on a product's ecosystem. Certainly, if I think Apple blew it on some product design, I'll say so even if, theoretically, that might tip a few people towards not buying one and thereby decreasing the overall strength of the Apple line and their stock by epsilon. (On the other hand, it might discourage people from buying the rare lemon which could lead to them never buying another.)

So, yes, it is just tribalism even if it's mostly not unthinking tribalism for its own sake.

You never know

People seem to have a huge need to defend their preferences and world views, as if something could be taken away from them, should they fail to defended it any turn. If you instead comment that you prefer one thing, but can see the usefulness of another, moderate your own opinion and leave room for the alternatives, then your comment/post/video/tweet the your engagement drops to almost zero. That's no good in an engagement driven economy.

It’s strange because I actually followed this approach exactly. I wrote all about my preferences in the original article I posted, but half the HN commenters couldn’t be bothered to read maybe even a quarter of it and proceeded to be complete dicks in the replies in ways that wouldn’t even make sense had they read the rest of it.

Same in Europe.

During my several decades I would say polarization and tribalism has been a mainstay of American discourse. Think of “communist” as an all-purpose slur in the 50s, the Vietnam and establishment vs. counterculture situation in the 60s/70s, some weak anti-Yuppie stuff in the 80s, etc. But I can’t think of any time this bad.

I personally blame not only the algorithms, but the focus of political parties on activating their more extreme constituents rather than on achieving reasonable compromise and effectively governing. It used to be you could have an actual substantive debate, but now at least one side will be either unable or unwilling to participate.

The Republicans in particular got so good at energizing the extreme “base” as an electoral strategy that it seems the whole party leadership was inadvertently replaced by the “base”, which makes it very hard to make progress.

As I remember it, it wasn't like this in the period before 2000-2003. The 2000 US Presidential election was very acrimonious; I think that died down because 9/11 was a unifying threat; then controversies about the war in Iraq and WMDs etc. reignited it. And this is also when the Internet became relevant to the public discourse and I think Internet social dynamics fanned a lot of the flames.

This is in alignment with my past experiences too. After moving to America, I met a friend who told me she would never share a table with someone who voted Republican. I found this super surprising, but the rest of the group agreed. That was a hard rule for them. From what I've been able to gather, most privileged progressive white-collar circles in American cities tend to run almost exclusively Democrat. Has it always been this way? Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?

Back in Canada, of my three closest friends, one voted LPC, another Green, and another CPC. This next election I imagine it will be different. The amount of tribalism Americans associate with their two parties has always been so fascinating to me.

> From what I've been able to gather, most privileged progressive white-collar circles in American cities tend to run almost exclusively Democrat. Has it always been this way?

No and it's not always true. They just have different shibboleths and areas you'd see them. Rust Belt and Farm belt come to mind here.

> Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?

At least in my lifetime, things started to polarize around the GWB vs Kerry election. Opinions on the war/etc caused some people at my college to change some friendships based on political affiliations... most people would just avoid talking politics though (touching on your previous question, someone in collage from a fairly well off family kinda got the wrong message from American dad, yet he just made sure to stop talking about how pretty Ann Coulter was in front of left wing people.)

The elections after that amplified the split however. Obama's second election was, in my head, less 'contentious' than the first... but by 2016 I think everything was in full swing.

> Has it always been this way? Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?

Not to the degree we see today. I think it's something that's really taken off in the last 8 to 10 years, and I remember seeing the first signs of it starting in maybe 2008. The Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet movements seemed to be the leading indicators of a much more deepening divide.

It's not really surprising to me though. I think when you frame it as "allowing voting habits to dictate your choice of friends" it sounds superficial, but there are deep ethical and ideological divides. You're framing like people are saying "You voted for X and so we can't be friends", but I think a more accurate framing would be "X is an abhorrent belief and cannot in good conscience have a relationship with anyone who would support X or any politician who is in favor of X".

Believe it or not, this is _very different_ than it was maybe 20 years ago. I used to have good friends who were in the "other" party, and while we had pretty strong disagreements about policy, I never doubted that in the end we all wanted what was best for people, and our views of what the best outcomes would be were pretty aligned even if our ideas of how to get there were very different.

Today, that's not the case. There's almost no common ground to find.

Intolerance of the other's point of view seems to be increasing. And I do think that social media is fueling that intolerance. Its easy to be rude to someone online than it is in person. In short, its easier to be intolerant online than in person.

Also, seeing the world in Black and White requires less effort than viewing it in shades of grey. And the rational mind seeks certainty and clarity, which makes Black and White an attractive option compared to uncertainty of ambiguous shades of grey.

Single Vision, William Blake called it.

Agency. All power has been effervescing up up up, into stratospherically high off C suites.

We no longer see a local world that we have a place in around us; the decisions are all made in far off places & built by production line labor thousands of miles yet further still.

Few about figure out an orientation & poise in the modern "thrownness" of being. Many do adapt & find a way, but

Without agency, we have no core of self to believe in, to fall back in. Every offense grates further. Anger is for the reactive, for the unempowered, those without; those with a sense of self can have affronts big & small roll off, because they have a connection to meaning. They believe in something and their role in that something. Agency & self co-develop, and are the antidote to being easily swayed.

(This is not a total answer. But I believe these conditions form a sizable chunk of the bedrock of our social conditions & experiences, set up what zeitgeists come and go.)

(This belief in human agency is Ppart of the reason I believe so strongly in http://malleable.systems. Technology ought offer us a path to agency, a way to check the Black Iron Prison of consumerdom/control. This is a religious/spiritual calling, of letting people back in to systems, to me.)

My anecdote after working with college students: It’s obvious to me that they’re doing better than my generation in many metrics: Easy access to information that can improve their lives, massively more acceptance of everything from LGTBQ+ to simply being a nerd (which was relatively stigmatized even a few decades ago), significantly more job opportunities, remote work, international travel is common, they drive nice cars, get paid well (CS students in my case) and on and on.

Yet their expectations have advanced faster than their quality of life. Some of the things they tell me are so pie in the sky that it’s hard to even begin to imagine how to return their expectations to reality. For example, many of them have picked up ideas that we should all be working 8-10 hours per week due to societal progress, or that the government could easily institute UBI at levels that had everyone living comfortable middle class lifestyles and made work optional. There is no critical thinking about where the money would come from or how anything would get done if nobody had to work, but they’ve seen it repeated so many times on Reddit that it’s accepted as incontrovertible truth. Every year I hear one student repeat the same argument that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or some other figure could cure global warming, world hunger, or other concerns and still have millions left over. Some people truly believe this.

The other strange angle I’m hearing frequently is the idea that life was so much easier in the past. College students are convinced that I grew up in an era where work was easier and everything was cheap. They don’t believe me when I explain how hard my parents had to work, or the fact that my dad grew up in a house smaller than their college dorm (new construction college dorms are incredibly large and lavish, for some reason). The internet has told them that every prior generation had it easy and they their generation was the first to encounter any financial challenges, so that’s what they believe.

Against impossible expectations like these, no amount of reality could ever be satisfying. I feel like I’m becoming an old man by watching these college students live comfortable lives, secure good job offers (this is what we help with), do work they enjoy, live in nice places, and still be convinced that everything is terrible because it can never reach the level of their expectations about the world.

Note that many of these students are the kinds to turn their nose up at TikTok, have deleted their Instagram years ago, and scoff at people for consuming viral YouTube shorts, like mentioned in the article. Weirdly, the content they consume on their platforms of choice (usually Reddit) is actually worse in many ways. I think we underestimate just how bad and inflammatory the content on Reddit can be.

Are these expectations impossible, or simply accrued to the most privileged in society? It's not the materiality those kids are complaining about, it's the distribution. Big Corp and Big Government really think they can gas light Americans even when we have access to all the data. That's the rage

I don't think this is mutually exclusive, and it depends on the nature of concerns. Should these students be complaining? No. Could it be and has it been much worse? Yes. Should we still hope for a society where advances in technology and productivity filter into leisure time for the masses? I think so. Is global warming , and reduction in biodiversity an existential threat, and the sort of thing we should be deeply ashamed about as a society, and doing everything we can to slow? Yes.

It seems to me that we are not as good at recognizing tradeoffs as we used to be. We used to have discussions where we would point out that more X is good but it would have the downside of less Y, but now we just yell "More X!" at one another.

We have more than enough wealth here in the US (and most first world societies) to eliminate most child poverty in our nations, and we even demonstrated this ability during the pandemic era. But for some reason we choose not to do this. Yes you can sit back and cherrypick the most innumerate beliefs that 23-year-olds hold, but we’re adults and we need to accept responsibility for the flaws in the society we’re handing them. If we can’t do that, our criticism is hollow and embarrassing.

> But for some reason we choose not to do this.

Let's not pretend the reason is some big mystery. We choose not to do this because corporations and the very wealthy would have to proportionally pay their share for it, and by and large they control politicians and the political processes.

What constitutes "ending child poverty"? Food stamps, free schooling, and section 8 don't?

> significantly more job opportunities

There are significantly less job opportunities that offer acceptable levels of decency, compared to past decades.

> Some of the things they tell me are so pie in the sky that it’s hard to even begin to imagine how to return their expectations to reality. For example, many of them have picked up ideas that we should all be working 8-10 hours per week due to societal progress, or that the government could easily institute UBI at levels that had everyone living comfortable middle class lifestyles and made work optional.

IMO they should be applauded for being able to even imagine such a world--and encouraged to go make it happen before all the "status quo advocates" beat it out of them. The world has so much surplus to offer, yet that surplus is captured by so few. Good for these kids who, at least for the moment, haven't yet resigned themselves to the "fact" that this can't be changed.

New college graduates are overestimating their starting salaries by $30,000, report finds

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/09/college-graduates-are-overes...

> Every year I hear one student repeat the same argument that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or some other figure could cure global warming, world hunger, or other concerns and still have millions left over. Some people truly believe this.

The annual cost to eliminate world hunger is estimated to be $6 billion - $23 billion. A US treasury level return on the combined fortunes of Bezos and Gates would be around the higher number. The rough math checks out on the two of them combined ending world hunger forever. Even if they keep millions.

Those cost estimates are nonsense, way too low by orders of magnitude. Since the invention of the Haber-Bosch process (nitrogen fertilizer), major world famines haven't been caused by a lack of food or even money for food. The actual causes have always been political: incompetence, corruption, and violence.

For example, during the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia which killed 1.2M people there was a drought, but the primary cause was war. The combatants used hunger as a weapon, and stole food from civilians and foreign aid supplies.

How much would it cost to intervene in every conflict zone and impose peace? Look what happened in Afghanistan recently. The cost would be in the trillions if it's even possible at all.

Those numbers don't take into account the cost of achieving world peace. The plans admit that people will still starve in wars. However, those numbers include things like creating more conflict-resilient infrastructure so fewer people starve in that case.

Currently people are starving from lack of immediate money for food, for infrastructure to deliver it, etc. The interest off of the combined fortunes of Bezos and Gates would be enough to fix all the non-violent causes.

Obviously, their fortunes are insufficient to fix climate change or achieve world peace. But world hunger is an actual solvable problem.

That's just completely delusional. There is no amount of money that can create conflict-resilient infrastructure. If billionaires want to donate money to hunger relief then great, it will likely do some good. But the reality is that in conflict zones and failed states, most of the money and food aid gets stolen by corrupt local officials or armed groups. Aid workers can't directly distribute food to the hungry because they literally get shot for trying.

World hunger is not a solvable problem. The best we can manage is disaster relief in countries that are still mostly functional.

You can keep just saying it's impossible, but Oxfam and the UN have plans that use those two sums and claim to alleviate all non-violent causes for world hunger. The Oxfam plan also talks about plans to make the food system more resilient to effects like war.

Instead of just saying it's impossible, please look up their plan and respond to it.

Which specific plans are you referring to? Please provide references.

Oxfam and the UN do some good work on hunger relief. But the notion that some sort of plan can overcome extreme levels of corruption, theft, and violence is so ridiculous that it's unworthy of a serious response. The statements that I have seen from Oxfam and the UN on that issue have been so vague as to be meaningless. They essentially require good faith cooperation by the very militant groups that intentionally want to starve their enemies, or profit by embezzling money and stealing supplies.

There is rage, genuine rage; and there is rage as spectacle. Sometimes these overlap, but not necessarily. The spectacular rage is both incendiary and therapeutic. I can not help but remember this Black Mirror episode and see the parallel to it in many media : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

> My thesis has been that America is characterized by low levels of violence but also low social trust.

Low levels of violence? Compared to whom? US ranks high in number of incarcerated citizens per 100k[^1]. There is no other "western" country in that list, for example.

[^1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-th...

The US is kind of like two separate countries overlaid on the same geography. Violent crime is heavily concentrated in a small number of cities.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-ci...

Outside those cities, violent crime is very low and comparable to other "western" countries. It's something that people see on the news but don't personally experience. In my relatively affluent city, the homicide rate most years is zero.

Here's an idea: disconnect from online and reconnect with nature: go outside and proceed for the longest distance comfortable to a park, a tree, a weed by the sidewalk, lichen on a rock; anything growing and not human. [1]

[1] Sophie L. Kjærvik, Brad J. Bushman, A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage?, Clinical Psychology Review, Volume 109, 2024,102414,ISSN 0272-7358,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102414. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273582...

It is absolutely true that you can go touch grass to manage your anger. You'll feel much better.

At the same time, some anger is legitimate, especially if you're talking about anger caused by inequality and injustice. If your solution to that kind of anger is to make it go away by disconnecting and ignoring it, you're only helping to perpetuate the inequality and injustice by pushing it out of your mind. Removing the anger removes some of your motivation for rectifying its cause.

If you have illogical rage issues, like say road rage, yeah. Go ahead and take care of that however works best for you. If you're mad for legitimate reasons, I suggest letting that anger fuel you to act in a way to help bring about real change.

While scrolling through Instagram, I came across a post discussing the practice of saving bacon fat for later use. Although I already do this myself, I was wondering about the benefits or uses of doing so.

However, the top two comments on the post were rather negative and provocative. One commenter dismissed the idea as unoriginal, stating that another community had already been doing it. The other commenter expressed dislike for the taste of bacon-infused broccoli. This led to a lengthy exchange of comments between various users.

I sometimes find myself inclined to getting enraged without considering them from an outside perspective. However, seeing from a third person's POV served as a good reminder to do so.

The reason people are so angry: algorithmic radicalisation aided by short shallow comments like this one.

This again leads me to believe that we as humans have not and may not evolve past the |individual| and breach the theoretical line between what is good for one (me) and what is good for all (everyone).

Only when we as humans evolve our philosophy of existence in a manner which puts our continuity above all else, will we progress to our next universal evolutionary jump.

Until then only modest progress will continue slowly understanding limitations of physical matter (resource depletion and renewing), social strife churning at a snail's pace (the entire world is uneven at many levels socio-economically), war among ourselves will continue (instead of protection from outside or unknown source, we force offensive military campaigns to manage more of the above), and lastly academia has been inundated with the likes of Catholic Hereticism in the likes of Galileo style subjection.

We're nowhere close to evolving as a species on the whole. Combined with the perceived ideology that (right now especially), rigid frustration abounds in various social, work and familial circles simply due to the nature of our current macroeconomics. It's unfathomable to me that the grander picture is always blurred to the current state of existence.

1. Social media's objective function is engagement. Outrage and like buttons are highly engaging.

2. Tribalism + scale + time = two "us vs them" groups. Politically, FPTP voting mathematically implies spoilage; the Ron Paul example doesn't extol some virtue.

3. People are furious due to these (utterly preventable) things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E

Because we have given up the wisdom of expertise and curators to wisdom of the crowds. Guess what? Mob rule is dumb and incendiary.

Mob rule is curated by experts.

No it's self learning due to algorithms

This seems quite shallow, and uses as unalloyed truths many generalisations and absolutes which are simply not as claimed. Carelessly (or worse) using "always" when you don't mean it to make a thus-unsupported contentious point is indeed enough to make me angry!

>Why are we living in an age of anger – is it because of the 50-year rage cycle?

The cycle is 75-100 years. Pretty well documented, and happily increasing.

We are in that post-great depression, pre-world war spot. Or if looking at the previous cycle it's the american civil war or if looking at the previous cycle it's the age of revolution.

>And from CNN in 2022, “American happiness hits record lows.” Or from Gallup in 2024, “The percentage of Americans ‘very’ satisfied with lives near record low”:

Nobody will deny that we live in the age of rage.

>Viral videos on X/Twitter of societal breakdown are algorithmically promoted to millions, such as looting and physical violence, creating the perception by the public that lawlessness reigns and consequently having the effect of making people less trusting of each other.

Overstating the amount of damage to trust that any of these are causing. At best you're pointing at the trend.

>a more atomistic and less trusting society may also mean a less violent one, save for the occasional mass shooting

I own a 22lr cooey that's old enough that it has been to a high school gun range MANY times. Why did we go from a society which could bring guns to school to 'mass shooting' is a key one in understanding what shifted. This has been ongoing since Columbine.

>?Or the post-2010s rise in teen anxiety as documented by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, which he blames on social media.

You literally quote that the problem was identified in the 1990s with bowling alone, thus this blame on social media is just wrong.

>All of this breeds well-earned resentment by the public against policy and business-elites.

People know they are angry, but the reason behind the rage is being censored. You're not allowed to talk about what is causing the rage. But incidentally because you cant talk about it, you cant fix the rage and political polarization.

This is a bit of a contentious opinion perhaps, but I think there is a generational thing going on. Younger generations seem to have a lot of certainty about what is good or bad (but how do they know?) and are unable to hold a conversation that challenges them without feeling offended. The idea of 'hate speech' is ascendent, that it is right to deplatform and marginalise. Mostly forgotten is the idea that people have freedom of speech, and that many and various opinions are fine, and should even be encouraged. If only a narrow (often corporate or governmental) set of opinions are acknowledged, yes many feel marginalised. Which leads to anger. And also leads to a deteriorating social situation where everyone is the poorer, even if they think they are right.

We could turn it around: How do you -know- that freedom of speech is some kind of absolute good? It seems this, like any proposition, should not be simply taken as axiomatic. Maybe reasonable people can disagree.

Support for freedom of speech is indeed decreasing with each generation[1] and it is a pretty clear trend. Specifically, and from an older survey, 40% of Millennials are OK with limiting free speech that is offensive to minorities[2]. The age cohort trend is pretty clear here, too. While we may not agree, the next generations will shape things to come (assuming democracy survives).

1: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/08/30/more-so-t...

2: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/11/20/40-of-mil...

> We could turn it around: How do you -know- that freedom of speech is some kind of absolute good? It seems this, like any proposition, should not be simply taken as axiomatic. Maybe reasonable people can disagree.

Fair enough - but surely you can answer this for yourself?

Do you prefer to be able to speak your mind or not? And if you do speak your mind, are you causing harm? You may then turn around and say 'define harm'. Fair enough again - but I would answer while words might offend, stir trouble, no physical harm is occurring - ie no harm done. And sometimes, what is being suggested, although unpleasant, will be closer to the truth (or at least sincerely believed). Which is a fair basis for social interactions. Sticks and stones and all that.

The alternative is highly conformist and surely satisfies no individual.

In general, people ought to develop themselves, developing a thicker skin perhaps whilst maintaining their sanity, in response to other people's words.

I happen to mostly agree with you, and am kind of just playing devil's advocate here. But if I were the 25 year old with a negative or shaky view of free speech, I might offer this:

Suppose you were a researcher and managed to prove some conclusion about people or the world, that you knew with certainty, would be used to justify something really bad, like genocide, ethnic cleansing, racial supremacy, or similar. Would you publish it? I'd hope only the most dogmatic free speech absolutist would say yes, you have the duty to find and share truth, no matter what it is. Most others hopefully would argue: what is the purpose of your research, if not to benefit humanity? That's an extreme example with an extreme evil outcome--but how mild does the evil have to be in order for one to support publication?

I think we have a different view on what research is capable of.

I think such information already exists, but that it is up to the individual to make that interpretation. And it is fine to interpret things as you like. And it is fine for others to form their own interpretation. No one actually has 'the truth'.

In a way what we are talking about is acknowledging what is called the 'Russell conjugation', where, imo, truth cannot be isolated from the emotional interpretation. An example is:

> I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss over nothing.

Of course, the fusspot 'he' in the example, could say the same in reverse! The personal bias/interpretation is always there. It's very hard (impossible) to see the truth of a thing without the emotional interpretation.

I'm saying this is fine, it's simply a constraint of reality. If one is aware that one's own opinion is just one opinion amongst many (perhaps based in better reasoning than the next person's), make your case. But that no one has 'the truth' - all one can have is a well-reasoned interpretation (or not)...

So no one has the right to limit another's opinions, as no one has the truth - no individual, no organisation. Believing oneself to be right does not give one a right to inflict one's opinions on others, to be treated as fact. In fact, those with the most certainty about the rights and wrongs are almost certainly operating within a highly constrained set of information, and can often be shown to be making erroneous judgements (or acting in bad faith).

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

Before we had spam there was junk mail and yes people complained about it.

People aren't taught to regulate their emotions. Thats why the anger is so obvious, its just childish emotions all day every day.

> People aren't taught to regulate their emotions. And this is very important skill.

Lots of adults don't warrant the title by their behaviour...

"Adulting" licences should not be handled out in full on an 18th (or whichever) birthday, and should be partly revokable for various sorts of bad behaviour. And I'm not saying this claiming to be some sort of saint!

Now everyone gets to try to control everyone else rather than regulate their own emotions (“trigger warnings”), and you have the absolute shit show we have now.

You can’t seriously write an article like this without reckoning with the rise of right wing fear and rage machine in the West. There are no mentions of Murdoch, Fox, or Limbaugh in this article.

I didn't see any mention specifically calling out the left wing fear and rage machine either. So that makes sense! Or did I miss it?

IMHO, it's also the increasing amount of leisure time that we have now, coupled with smartphones.

Social media pushed algorithms designed to enrage so that shareholders could make money on "engagement."

Life is becoming more expensive. Inflation, shrinkflation, greedflation, convenience fees, subscriptions increasing in price and helpfully serving the ads they promised the subscription fee would remove. All of it collectively rising faster than the money a person can bring in if they're a wage-worker and not an investor who can live off of capital and on a megayacht.

People aware that life is worse than they were promised, and going to get worse still, but being gaslighted or shamed if they voice it, and the entrenched players having the means to hijack the conversation and stifle dissent in a way never before seen in history.

A lot of sci-fi demonstrates an oppressive regime by having the lower classes live in sterile boxes containing only what the regime wants and ceaselessly surveilling, meting out "justice" for the slightest infraction without appeal or mercy. Between being surrounded by GenAI phantasmagoria and shadowbanning, we're just building the digital equivalent and hailing it as Progress, Therefore Good. Pot's boiling, lid's locked in place, and it's only a matter of time before it explodes.

1. Any piece that uses Haidt's "Coddling" essay early on as support is questionable because that piece is horseshit

2. I'd be very interested to read something interrogating the Gallup poll quoted early... it seems to have interesting but vague questions like "Are you satisfied with the current size and power of the federal government?" or "Are you satisfied with the influence of organized religion?" ... but since people's different viewpoints would cause conflicting result-based reactions to those questions (if there was zero organized religion I would be VERY satisfied while certainly other people would call that disastrous)... then doesn't the Gallup poll at least partially become not about the direction of the country but how well the powers that be are "selling" the direction of the country?

To address your second point, it is merely about satisfaction, not solutions or best optimal outcomes. The question is neutral to what the current state is or what the future state should be, only on their satisfaction with it.

There isn't really a conflicting result if 50% of the people think we should live in a theocracy and 50% think religion should be outlawed if 0% of them are satisfied with the status quo.

It’s easy to blame the media…so I will.

For older generations, a constant drip of sensational sound bites, delivered at hourly intervals has been psychologically damaging.

For younger generations, it’s different. When someone agrees with a post on social media, they tap “like”. When someone disagrees, they comment. Then, the only comments I pay attention to are the ones I find distasteful.

As a result, it looks like my politically-noisier relatives and I have almost no overlap, even though we are really quite similar.

If you agree, please validate my fragile self-image by upvoting this post. ;)

Agreed but I also comment for validation.

When I'm bored, unfocused, unengaged, I'll comment on a bunch of stuff, stuff that I really shouldn't. On better days in reminded by this quote:

“Ask yourself the three things you must always ask yourself before you say anything.

1) Does this need to be said

2) Does this need to be said by me?

3) Does this need to be said by me now?”

That stops most comments.

The answer to this question cannot be provided because the powers that be refuse to even permit discussion of it and censor it and prevent others from even hearing things that contradict their programming and conditioning.

Social media, the internet, rising cost of living, inept leadership, kafqa esque government bureaucracy , stagnant employment opportunities, and perpetual renters.

A perfect recipe for a French style revolution is brewing and the average elite doesn't realize it.

They do, that's why they're building killer robot dogs that do funny dances on the side.

A mix of serious problems, and a media no longer beholden to carrying water for the elites.

or alternatively, the media indeed carrying water for the corporate elites to make people angry so as to want "less government and less taxes", which doesn't help the angry person but which would please a corporation or wealthy person/family.

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