Doom Card: Outrage Isn’t An Accomplishment

You wake in the night and grab your phone. Probably to check the time, but muscle memory opens your socials. There’s some cats and some people behaving badly. Hurting you and yours. Unbelievable. 40 minutes later you’re beat. Gotta get some sleep. An hour later, you’re back at it. Just till you get sleepy.

Welcome to modern life:

A corporate algorithm feeds you enraging content, to keep you scrolling in the grim hope that you’ll click a banner ad. An evolutionary loophole feeds you dopamine whenever you’re outraged, it keeps you scrolling in the grim hope that you’ll gain a survival advantage. You blow a lot of dopamine scrolling instead of sleeping, leaving you tired and unmotivated. Maybe you’re just getting old, you think. Compulsive and exhausted, you zombie through another day. Rinse and repeat.

Many question why we let tech companies do this to us, or if it’s dividing us into warring camps. But the real question is - why does it work? Dopamine is supposed to reward us when we accomplish something. Why do we consider being outraged an accomplishment?

Here’s a hypothesis:

Reciprocation is a survival strategy. Tracking who helps us - and who hurts us - can keep us alive. But the human mind can only track about 150 people. After that we gotta ignore some folks. We overload our brains with the detailed failings of strangers, but never manage to learn anything about our neighbors. Maybe we group people together, assuming they’re all the same, in a desperate attempt to keep track of who hates us.

Or something like that. I dunno man, it’s crazy out there.

Next time you scroll through Reddit, remind yourself that outrage isn’t an accomplishment. See if it makes you less tired. Let’s run an experiment.