Are You A Rage Reader?
Is This Phenomenon New, or Were We Already Addicted to Outrage?
You may be familiar with rage texting. You know, that moment you grab your phone, launching a missive about whatever person, place, or thing that’s gotten you activated. The need to convey, right now, how furious, offended, or annoyed you are. Not that long about we would have called someone, “Do you have a few minutes for me to vent?”. But why, when we can let our fingers do the walking?
No, what I’m considering today is rage reading. The pull, the adrenaline, the high perhaps, of scrolling until boom, there it is, that person, that account you just know is going to send you straight to the moon. According to Yale News, “…the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage.” This is usually the part when I would dive head-first into the deep end around how social media is ruining us. But, are the bird the book, and the gram actually ruining us? Or, were we already poised as vessels, just waiting to be filled up with bullshit we could then react to? Hear me out. I present for your consideration Exhibit A: The Christmas Letter.
What’s a Christmas letter, you ask? It sounds full of joy and good tidings, right? Back in the olden days, before email if you can imagine, thoughts were expressed and distributed on paper. Well before Facebook was a gleam in Zuckerberg’s eye, or he was even born for that matter, some families, almost always Mom, wrote Christmas letters. Mom would type, copy and mail these missives, just before the holidays to family and friends. Like a Christmas card but instead of a few lines of cheer on cardstock featuring cute kitties or Courier and Ives illustrations, they were a summation of a year’s worth of noteworthy family achievements. Mentions of honor roles, graduations, moves to new cities, and plum job landings were popular. I imagine there are some holdouts, those who still distribute their anachronistic, lengthy, and positively toxic communications. My Mamaw despised Christmas letters. “They moved into their mansion, Kathleen. She actually says mansion! I mean, who calls their house a mansion? Who goes on and on about how wonderful their life is…??” The audacity. Mamaw was activated. She couldn’t take the wonderful mess of it all, the…perfection, year after year. The irony is how she anticipated its mercurial arrival, spied the return address, and, letter opener in hand (Google it), ripped straight into it. Oh, the sweet anticipation of being pissed the hell off. Happy Holidays!
So why do we do it, friends? Why do we keep going back, time and time again, for more? Is it the hope that this year, this post will be different? That the writer, the sharer will get better? Or, are we simply addicted to outrage and indignation? And, is the sum of a stream of social media posts larger than the impact of a single letter?
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram gift us with a never-ending series of Christmas letters, available daily, hourly! Vacations, beautiful meals, picturesque living rooms, perfect children. These visions of enviable perfection are presented alongside clickbaity posts by junior journalist friends protesting against current events and politics. How can content that appears so enviable, so right, be presented alongside proclamations of what is so wrong? Or, are we desperately trying to project a semblance of beauty and control in a world that is chaotic and hard to understand? And, why do we fight against it, so hard, when we’re clearly drawn to it, over and over again?
Motivation expert (and my personal guru) Mel Robbins recently introduced the “let them” theory. Mel posits that we spend so much time and energy trying to control situations and people, and as a result, get emotionally worked up over things that are beyond our control. Instead, we can choose to simply let them. Let them post about politics. Let them post about that thing they did without us. Let them send that Christmas letter or 522nd perfect family post. OR, and in an act of radical self-care, we could simply not open that app or…rip open that letter.