The Seductive Power of Outrage Addiction
How to know whether you're a woke empath or just a pissed-off pessimist.
Of all the drugs in the world, anger is the cheapest and most accessible.
Just look around.
On any given day there is an endless parade of the heartbreaking and terrifying streaking through our timelines, screaming out from trending lists, running uninvited into our kitchen table conversations.
Our psyches are continually saturated by perversions of justice, assaults on humanity, movements of malice—and it’s been like that for a while.
It’s natural to feel our insides shredding, our fists clenching, and our fury rising to meet it all. In fact, it’s a marker of our humanity to be moved to sickness at such things and we should have a measure of appreciation for that.
And yet, the longer we remain in this state of uninterrupted anger, the more we normalize it: our bodies acclimated to it, our personalities shaped by it, our relationships immersed in it. If we’re not continually guarding against it we can become addicted to outrage, dependent on the easy intoxication of self-righteousness and the temporary high of moral superiority.
This is the precarious space we find ourselves in as people of empathy existing in this place and time: trying to use our afflictive emotions and not be steered by them; transforming them into a productive response and returning to a more sustainable default condition.
Anger as a catalytic moment is often necessary, moving us from complacency or ignorance and propelling us into movement. Over the last few years, we've seen the virtue of outrage in confronting political movements and propelling us into collective action. But as a cultivated condition anger is almost always toxic.
If we sit with that rage too long and nurture it too intently, it slowly begins to pollute us, seeping into our bloodstreams and contaminating the compassionate hearts that caused us to be angry in the first place.
Little by little, we become used to a posture of irritability and defiance. Gradually, we can become more about the fight itself than about anything or anyone we're fighting for. We can begin to live angry.
The two best practices for avoiding or detoxing from outrage addiction are engaging in ruthless self-examination and living in honest accountability communities.
Firstly, we need to continually confront the mirror to make sure we haven’t drifted from the mission: to inventory our actions and test our motives. As experts on our own hearts, we’re the people most qualified to measure them. We usually know if we’re burdened by a world we want to change or we just enjoy complaining.
But it’s also critical to surround ourselves with wise, decent, bullshit-free human beings who love us enough to call us out when we are showing signs of being anger-addled—because as with all addiction, once you’re too far in it’s often difficult to know.
Like you, I don't want to live this life as a perpetually angry person whose bitterness is just a toxic mess for its own sake. I don't want to use my faith as license to do damage and I don’t want to become addicted to outrage because that is the very thing my spirit is so resisting in the world right now.
I know there's a fine line between righteous and self-righteous—and it's me.
So, you may be an engaged, woke empath and all this feeling and fighting is natural and redemptive, but you might also be a pissed-off pessimist who doesn’t feel normal without a heart full of rage and somebody to slug.
Knowing the difference may not save the world but it will alter you as you save what you can.
Here’s to finding a clear and sober anger that fights well.
How have you experienced anger, in both helpful and unhelpful ways? Does the idea of outrage addiction ring true for you? Let me know in the comments.
John, you are spot on again and bring up many good points. I remember well the very popular quote that became part of many social media posts and protest signs during the Trump administration: "If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention". I also recall how easy it would have been to get sucked into that stage of perpetual outrage, but the analytical part of me won the day (I am, after all a left-brained retired engineer), telling myself that there are more productive ways to use my mental and emotional energy. But as you say, the seasonal bouts of outrage did help motivate me to action. Another thing that helps me avoid perpetual outrage is seeing what it does to other people. I know several people that appear nice enough on the surface, but bring up a certain topic and they become different people, transformed by their simmering anger. I don't want to be like that.
This article needs to be widely read and discussed. Thank you.