I have waited a very long time to voice the content of this article. It all began when I started to notice consistent changes in friends and colleagues of decades, people I never knew but followed and corporations I had no control over. Please be clear before you read: this article is strictly my opinion, born out of concern and written with nothing but love for all who read it. Namaste.
✎ “When did you last feel angry? Where were you when it started?“
The Outrage Machine Nobody Built On Purpose
Here’s a strange truth to sit with: nobody woke up one morning and decided to make you angry. No engineer in Silicon Valley drew a diagram with “rage” at the center. And yet, somehow, here we are – scrolling through our days with a low, persistent hum of irritation that we’ve mistaken for being informed. Social media platforms were built on a single, seductive goal: keep you here as long as possible.
Engagement was the currency. Attention was the product. And what CEOs discovered, almost by accident, through millions of lines of behavioral data, is that nothing – not joy, not inspiration, not even love – keeps a human being glued to a screen quite like anger. Anger makes you click. Anger makes you share. Anger makes you come back. The machine wasn’t built for cruelty. It was built for profit. Those two things just turned out to have a lot in common. And I don’t think any of us – the builders, the users, the people somewhere in between – fully saw it coming.
We Built It With Love
Before we go any further, I want to stop and say something that I mean completely sincerely: social media, at its best, is one of the most beautiful things human beings have ever created.
I mean that. Think about what it was in the beginning – or what it still is, in its quieter corners. A grandmother watching her grandchild’s first steps from two thousand miles away. A teenager in a small town who feels different from everyone around her, finding her people online and realizing she is not alone. A soldier overseas seeing his daughter’s birthday party in real time. A diagnosis that terrified you suddenly connecting you with a community who had walked the same road and survived it.
Social media gave us the ability to close distance. Real, painful, geographic and emotional distance. It let us share our lives, our art, our humor, our grief. It gave voice to people who had never had a platform. It organized communities around causes that mattered. It made the world feel, at its best, like a smaller and more human place.
I am not here to take that from you, or to suggest you’re naive for loving it. This piece isn’t about whether social media is good or bad. It’s about something quieter and more specific. It’s about a question I haven’t been able to shake for several years: what happened to that version of it? And what replaced it without us noticing?
The Algorithm Doesn’t Care If You’re Okay
Let’s be honest with each other for a second, the way we do on this blog. Because this part is uncomfortable – and I want to be clear that I’m sitting in it with you, not standing outside of it pointing in.
When you feel your blood pressure rise at something you saw online – a post, a comment, a headline – that reaction may not be as spontaneous as it feels. A 2021 investigation by The Wall Street Journal ,“The Facebook Files”, revealed that Facebook’s own internal researchers had found their algorithm was amplifying content that provoked strong emotional reactions, because strong emotional reactions kept users on the platform longer. This wasn’t a secret to the people building the system. The feed kept feeding anyway.
I share that not to make you feel manipulated. I share it because understanding how something works is the first step to deciding how much power you want to give it. Your engagement, your reaction, your time – those things have value on a spreadsheet somewhere. That’s just the truth of it. What we do with that truth is entirely up to us.
The Enemy They Chose For You
Think about the last time you felt genuinely, deeply angry at a stranger online. Hold that feeling for a moment. Now ask yourself: did you go looking for that person – or did they find you?
This is something I find myself turning over a lot. Before any of us open our apps in the morning, a system has already sorted through thousands of possible posts and selected the ones most likely to provoke a reaction from someone with our history, our clicks, our scrolling patterns. It’s not personal. It’s mathematical. But the result is that the things most likely to upset you have a way of finding you with remarkable precision.
The most unsettling part, to me, is that it almost never feels like that. It feels like the world. It feels like reality, unfiltered and urgent. That’s worth pausing on – not with blame toward anyone, just with a little curiosity about what we’re actually seeing when we look at our feeds.
The Scroll and the Slow Burn
For the person who lives inside their feed – and there is genuinely no judgment here, I am not pointing a finger in any direction, including at myself – the experience is like standing next to a stove that’s always on. You don’t notice the temperature rising because it rises so slowly. One degree at a time. One post at a time. One “can you believe this” moment at a time.
By the time you sit across from someone you love at dinner, you might already be carrying three arguments you never had, two causes you’re newly furious about, and a low-grade certainty that everything is worse than it was yesterday. It might be. But it becomes genuinely hard to know, because the feed has a way of distorting the lens so gradually that reality and curated content become difficult to separate.
Psychologists call this “mean world syndrome” – a term coined by researcher George Gerbner long before social media existed, describing how heavy media consumption can lead people to perceive the world as more dangerous and hostile than it actually is. Social media didn’t invent the problem. It just accelerated it in ways nobody fully anticipated.
The Quiet Ones Aren’t Immune
Now, to the person who barely touches their phone. Who scrolls once a week, if that. Who has opted out and feels some measure of peace because of it – and honestly, good for you, I mean that.
But here is the thing about secondhand smoke: you don’t have to be the one holding the cigarette.
The people around you are living inside this thing. Your coworker who arrives already irritable. Your family member who steers every conversation toward an argument nobody asked for. Your friend who has slowly become harder to reach – more certain, less curious, somehow both more connected and more alone. The anger that platforms cultivate doesn’t stay on the screen. It walks among us – into rooms of higher education, sitting at dinner tables, overtaking social events. It quietly reshapes the people we love.
Nobody escapes the weather just because they stayed inside.
We Learned to Perform Our Pain
This one is the most tender, so I want to walk into it gently.
Social media didn’t just change how angry we are. It changed what we do with that anger – and with all of our pain, really. Because somewhere along the way, the platforms taught us something: visible suffering and anger gets rewarded. A post where you’re vulnerable and wounded gets likes. A post where you’re publicly wronged gets sympathy, community, belonging. A post where you lash out in anger that may not even have justification creates a bullet train of comments headed straight into a tunnel of blackness. And the human brain – ancient and genuinely hungry for connection, attention – learned the lesson.
I don’t think this makes anyone fake. I don’t think it’s cheap or cynical. I think it’s a deeply human impulse – the need to be witnessed in our pain – meeting a system that learned how to exploit it. Share the wound and you won’t be alone. That’s not a bad instinct. It’s just being used in a way that doesn’t always serve us.
The cost, when I sit with it, is this: when pain or anger becomes content, something private gets lost. The quiet dignity of processing something on your own terms. The intimacy of sharing it only with someone you trust. We may have traded some of that, slowly and without noticing, for the warm rush of a quick notification. I’m not sure that is always a fair exchange.
The Loneliness Loop
Here is perhaps the most heartbreaking piece of all of this, and the one I find myself thinking about most: a lot of the anger isn’t really anger.
It’s loneliness wearing anger’s clothes. Because anger is easier to carry in public. Anger has direction. Anger has community. Find the right cause, the right conversation, the right group of people who are furious about the same thing, and suddenly you belong somewhere. You are seen. You are heard. You are not alone.
But the price of admission to that community can be your continued outrage. Soften, express doubt, show empathy for a different perspective – and the warmth can evaporate. So people stay in it not necessarily because they want to be, but because the alternative feels like being alone again. That cycle, to me, is one of the saddest things social media has quietly produced.
That is not a character flaw in the people living it. That is a human being responding, as humans do, to the environment they’re in. The environment just happens to have been designed to keep them exactly there.
Logging Off Isn’t the Answer – Waking Up Might Be
I’m not going to tell you to delete your apps. I’m not going to hand you a detox plan or a screen time chart. That’s not why this article was written, and honestly, that’s not my place.
These are just things I’ve been noticing. Things I can’t unseen, unhear, unknow. And maybe, if you’ve read this far, they’re things you’ve been noticing too – that low hum, that creeping irritability, that sense that the world is louder and meaner than it used to be. I’m not here to tell you what to do about any of it. I’m just here to say: I see it too.
What I do find myself sitting with is this question: can you tell the difference between an emotion that belongs to you and one that was handed to you? Because there is a difference. The anger that rises from your actual life – your real relationships, your genuine values, the things that have actually hurt you – that belongs to you. It deserves your attention. But the anger that arrived pre-packaged in a feed, engineered to land precisely on your particular nerve – that one might be worth a second look.
You don’t have to answer that out loud. You just have to start asking it. Consciousness isn’t a cure – but it is a flashlight. And a flashlight in a dark room can change everything.
The platforms will keep running. The algorithms will keep learning. The feed will keep finding new and precise ways to get under your skin. None of that is going to stop tomorrow. But you – you get to decide what you do with what it hands you. You can pause at the edge of that slow burn and ask a simple question. Whose fire is this, actually? And is it worth burning for?
Namaste,
Scott ❤️
✎ “When did you last feel angry? Did it really belong to you?“
