Rage Bait Is Ruining Your Life

I remember my first foray into politics. I must have been about fourteen years old. I didn’t know much besides the talking points in my periphery, obviously. The bits and pieces I gathered from family, friends, my family’s friends, random conversations on the street, and on TV were enough to lay the groundwork for a pseudo-philosophy. For example, I knew what I didn’t agree with and what didn’t sit right with me. I also knew whose opinions I respected and valued. That enabled me to develop a few useful heuristics that snowballed into baby’s first political views. Late in Obama’s second term, I became more seriously invested in politics. I regularly heard adults discussing political issues, and while I knew little about the specifics, I knew what my values were. The discourse that entered my ears at this age struck an indignant rage within me. I thought, “Why isn’t anyone pushing back on this? This is obviously wrong.” Then it hit me: no one was going to push back for me. I had to do it myself. I started researching contentious, hot-button issues that seemed to divide people into polar-opposite camps, desperate to find answers. I was on a quest for ontological truth, but also to understand who I was and what I believed, and whether there was an objective reality. Unsurprisingly, my political views shifted drastically by the time I was eighteen or nineteen. I can’t say this had much to do with a change within me or my values, but rather with a reorientation of the political landscape and adjusting to where I landed within it. Political participation should not come at the expense of your own life. It was as if the ground was moving beneath me, and even if I stood in the same place, the tectonic plates had already split the Earth and drifted me away from where I had previously stood. I don’t think there’s anything unusual about this relationship to politics, especially as you’re coming of age and trying to understand not just who you are, but where you fit into the world around you, how you make sense of reality, truth, and morality. Politics, in this case, is like an introduction to philosophy nested inside practicality. If philosophy is disciplined thinking about first principles, it arguably supersedes politics in scope and importance, but the political system gives these things a physical form that improves accessibility and ease of understanding for a young person. There comes a point, however, when it becomes destabilizing. Political participation should not come at the expense of your own life. The Political Escapism Route: Why Political Activism Won’t Save You Jordan Peterson’s meteoric rise in late 2016 to early 2017 came on the back of a viral video taken on the University of Toronto’s campus. In it, he was famously swarmed by social-justice-minded college students who objected to his stance on legally mandated gender pronouns. While that video went viral for several reasons, not least being an exceptionally stylish Canadian professor with the patience of a saint and Socratic articulation, Peterson’s staying power had everything to do with his follow-up work. Think of how many viral moments involving random people have occurred over the past decade, and think of how many of those people managed to stay relevant for even one year. Peterson was an anomaly because he was uniquely positioned to address the cultural moment we were facing: the male loneliness crisis, the rise in inceldom, disillusionment with social justice identity politics, and young people desperate for meaning, purpose, and guidance. And what was it that struck a chord with people? What was his diagnosis of the moment and his advice? It was that well-meaning young people were overcome by their own rage and turmoil and were desperate to find an avatar to direct it at. That’s what SJWs, as we called them then, or the woke left now, were possessed by: the outsourcing of meaning, order, and moral purpose to politics because their own lives felt unstructured and unmoored. Their lives had descended into chaos to such an extent that living in a 24/7 outrage fantasy was more tolerable than bearing the burden of their own existence. With nothing to anchor their lives to a higher purpose, thanks to the decline of religion , identity politics became their surrogate religion. Something that gave them commandments, cardinal sins, moral guidance, and representations of the dichotomy between good and evil. Though it’s worth pointing out, it has provided few avenues for redemption despite ever-constant demands for repentance. With nothing to anchor their lives to a higher purpose, thanks to the decline of religion, identity politics became their surrogate religion. Peterson identified a problem with the Marxist doctrine, which was rising in popularity among young college students: an intense desire to change the world. Drawing on the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, he described what Piaget identified as the “ messianic stage .” It’s a phase common in late adolescence and early adulthood, marked by the adoption of idealistic, utopian political visions held with zealous certainty but that grossly underestimate real-world complexity, limitations, and consequences. Peterson describes these “revolutionaries” as people with ignorant but narcissistic assuredness of very newly formulated opinions, people who have never had to test their theories and revise their perspectives accordingly. The idea that it’s wrong to try to change the world before cleaning your own room caught on like wildfire in the mid-2010s, partly because it sounded so absurd. But is it really more absurd than attempting to dismantle vast and complex economic structures when you can’t keep your own living quarters in order? Think about what that means: a demonstration that you can’t keep your life in order, but you want to assign yourself the role of world savior. There are a few problems with that. For one, your room is an externalization of your mind , and when your own life is in disarray, you can’t see the world clearly. These influence each other in both directions. The reason you need to clean your room before tackling significant, complex problems is the same reason depressed people can’t overcome all their feelings of hopelessness, tunnel vision, and negativity bias overnight by force of will. They have to start small, within the parameters of things they can control. When depressed people are overwhelmed by the turmoil in their lives, they’re advised to focus on the smallest units of change. That might be basic hygiene, eating regular meals, forming a routine, or tidying up little areas at a time. The goals are as basic as possible but serve as building blocks for agency and control. Escapism & Main Character Syndrome Peterson is rightfully wary of people seeking authority untethered from responsibility. It’s why we feel that people with children have a greater stake in the future than those without. A separate problem is that politics is an all-too-tempting form of escapism for people who don’t want to face their own shortcomings, preferring instead to indulge in the abstract. If not shortcomings, then suffering. I remember being severely depressed in my senior year of high school. Do you know what I did to give myself something to get out of bed in the morning? I became a political junkie. Because if I couldn’t feel happy, at least I could feel angry. At least I could distract myself with supposedly the most important moral issues of our time. I can only guess I was driving everyone around me crazy, constantly word-vomiting about the issue of the day as if my exhausting rambling was going to change anything. I didn’t even do a vibe check first. I just rambled like that incoherent drunk uncle at your Thanksgiving dinner who “tells it like it is.” Politics is an all-too-tempting form of escapism for people who don’t want to face their own shortcomings, preferring instead to indulge in the abstract. Maybe you’re not trying to change the world. You’re just insistent on letting the world’s chaos consume you, shouting into the void day after day at the expense of your relationships, sanity, and well-being. Maybe it’s even driven your boyfriend or girlfriend away. I’ve seen too many heartbreaking stories about an otherwise healthy, loving relationship fraying because one of them fell down an internet rabbit hole filled with miserable losers who view one half of the human species as irredeemably evil. Slowly, they become poisoned against their own partner, planting their allegiance with lonely, resentful online strangers. What’s deceiving about outrage cycles is that they give the participant a sense of artificial purpose and meaning, even satisfaction, in being angry. When anger is righteous, it feels important. And sometimes it is. But we only have so much bandwidth as humans. We weren’t meant to stay perpetually plugged in to news cycles that never end, that only compound in horror, realism, and scope. One minute, Sydney Sweeney’s “ good genes ” cause a moral panic over “white supremacist undertones” in commercial ads, then it’s the Somalis who are either taking over our country or innocent victims of xenophobia, and before you know it, there’s a pseudo-Civil War happening between white women and ICE. And what good did Renee Good and her partner’s defiant attempts to block ICE from conducting a raid in Minneapolis do for anyone besides depriving three kids of their mother? They prefer fantasies of martyrdom and violence because these grand gestures give them the story of being the important hero without having to do the drudgery of boring, thankless work. Did she singlehandedly defeat ICE and change the border policy to open borders? No. Literally nothing was accomplished besides inspiring mass hysteria. There’s a time and a place for life-sacrificing activism. Brave men and women put their lives on the line during the Nazi occupation and the Soviet Union with great cause. But wanting the euphoric valor of standing up to an oppressive, authoritarian regime does not mean you are actually living under one. It’s like being that guy who’s a new dad and performatively masculine, insisting he’d kill millions of people to protect his child. We all roll our eyes. Not because you shouldn’t have such an intense protective instinct, but because we know what it really means. This is the language of someone who can only find value in something that makes them the hero in a melodramatic movie. For people like this, there’s no honor in doing the harder, more banal work: living a normal life, showing up consistently, being a supportive spouse and present father. That kind of responsibility isn’t thrilling. It doesn’t flatter their ego. They prefer fantasies of martyrdom and violence because these grand gestures give them the story of being the important hero without having to do the drudgery of boring, thankless work. The same is true of political activists inventing much more fascistic enemies than those who stand before them. Rage, Rage, Against the Sharing of the Bait Anonymous internet writer and personality Med Gold recently wrote a Substack post about coming to terms with the futility of political outrage and becoming Team Normie. He describes the all-too-familiar experience of getting riled up by the outrage of the day on social media, only to find the topic had vanished by the next morning. “I remembered how important it felt to voice my opinion the day before. Then I realized it was all for nothing.” So what are we even doing? Does this even serve us, or is it as performative as playing with dolls? If you don’t believe me that there’s a fine line between informed political participation and frying your brain on the algorithm’s constant provocations, take it from the Oxford word of the year : rage bait. Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.” Oxford reportedly chose rage bait as the word of the year due to 2025’s news cycle, which was dominated by social unrest, debates over regulating online content, and concerns about digital well-being. President of Oxford Languages, Casper Grathwohl, says , “The fact that the word rage bait exists and has seen such a dramatic surge in usage means we’re increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online. Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions and how we respond.” Comparing it to last year’s word of the year, “brain rot,” which captured the mental drain of endless scrolling, rage bait “shines a light on the content purposefully engineered to spark outrage and drive clicks. Together, they form a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.” The Anti-Political Nihilist Is No Solution, Either If you can be too overzealous about changing the world, you can also be too disinterested. What I’m not advocating is a Clavicular-esque philosophy whose adherence to looksmaxxing prioritizes individual ascension at all costs. Looksmaxxing has led Clavicular down some interesting paths, not limited to sterilizing himself from long-term testosterone use, supporting Gavin Newsom’s presidential bid over J.D. Vance because Vance is “subhuman” while Newsom is a “6'3” Chad” who “mogs him to death,” and gloating over disfigured detransitioners as “just another person to mog.” When asked about the great moral issues of our time, like children being put on life-ruining puberty blockers or geopolitical unrest, his moral compass is calibrated to a single question: “Does it help me mog?" "If so, then good. If no, then I don’t care.” While it’s an amusingly meme-able attitude we might just laugh and roll our eyes at, when this attitude starts to spread to society as a collective, widespread narcissistic nihilism, we’re going to have a problem. Clavicular is motivated by fleeting vanity, and with it, he reduces everyone around him’s moral worth to their physical appearance. He cares not for alleviating suffering or identifying the rightness of actions or policies, only how they contribute to his ability to mog others. For him to succeed as an individual, it benefits him that everyone else fails. His philosophy requires him to submit to dangerous biohacking procedures and regimens that leave him infertile and lead to long-term health complications. That makes him a genetic dead end, as are any of his followers who follow in his footsteps. The logical conclusion to this philosophy is a society of degenerate will-to-power types who aspire to an incredibly fragile source of power. Powered by meth and premature use of testosterone, they’re always just one misstep from becoming botched or severely harmed. What Normiemaxxing Actually Is Peterson’s antidote to overeager zealotry was simple: start locally, within your own domain of competence. To have any domain of competence at all, you begin with yourself, then work outward. He describes the world as a series of puzzles, some of which you’re capable of solving and some of which you’re not. Importantly, he argues you have many puzzles in front of you which you could solve but choose not to. That goes back to the “ clean your room ” advice. It’s about affecting something you have direct control over, starting at the lowest level possible and working your way up. In Peterson’s 2016 message to millennials , he advised people to orient themselves to the good and away from evil, while warning that identifying evil is far easier than identifying what’s “good,” but that a useful heuristic is to identify what’s evil and track its opposite to find what is good. In that wisdom, he advised millennials wanting to change the world the right way to contemplate what the highest possible good would look like for themselves, their family, and for society, and to speak truth in relation to that, to get educated so they can understand what’s at stake, and to shoulder responsibility. You might find that by sorting out your own life, you naturally become less concerned with the noise from the world around you. Peterson’s contention was never that the world is not worth changing. On the contrary, he argued that societies must continually update and improve. The danger lies in attempting to do so so rapidly and with such moral certainty that everything of value is destroyed in the process. The structure of society has to be preserved but updated and improved as it moves forward. Peterson was wary of Marxists because he had a deep distrust of movements whose primary goal is to change other people by dividing people into perpetrators and victims and set about punishing the supposed perpetrators. Drawing on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s insight that “the line between good and evil runs down every human being’s heart,” Peterson argued that tyranny, malevolence, and nihilism cannot be overcome by targeting others alone. They must first be confronted internally. Conquer your own life before conquering the world. These local improvements, doing your best to tackle the problems in front of you, are where real change happens. You might find that by sorting out your own life, you naturally become less concerned with the noise from the world around you. Suddenly, your delusions of grandeur dissipate. You no longer want to block ICE raids with your Honda Pilot SUV. Your room is clean. Your relationship with your children is strong. Your integrity and sense of justice are intact. You don’t foam at the mouth over the issue of the day. Nature would heal, and so would we.