I am trying to imagine your mental state as you read this. Perhaps your children are screaming. Perhaps the milk you used to make your coffee was dubiously sour. Did you wake up and look at your phone, which promptly delivered you some of the worst news possible, from indiscriminate locations across the world, instantly from the palm of your hand to your retinas? Perhaps you clicked off news websites and looked at emails that you shouldn’t read until Monday morning. Perhaps you quickly opened Instagram, to look at the stories of people you don’t like, purely to scratch an itch. And then X (Twitter), where you read apoplectic or sarcastic takes about the news stories you just heard about five minutes ago. How are you feeling? Yes, bad.
Or not just bad. Pissed off, perhaps, or filled with rage. We are in the midst of a rage epidemic, after all. It doesn’t just feel like everyone is angrier than they used to be: they are. The world is a rage-fuelled and rage-filled place. Last year, polling company Gallup published the Global Emotions Report to take the temperature on the positive and negative emotional and mental health of people around the world. The picture they painted was sobering: anger around the world has been on the rise, they found, since 2016. In fact nearly a quarter of their respondents (23 per cent) reported feeling angry every day. Although anger was understandably highest in areas of war, genocide, extreme poverty and civil unrest, even in supposedly peaceful and prosperous countries, levels of rage were simmering. In the UK, 17 per cent of people reported daily anger. In the US, 18 per cent said the same.
It’s not just us normies stoking the fires of fury. Last month on the Call Her Daddy podcast, mercurial and divisive pop star Chappell Roan played up to her persona of being mercurial and divisive by complaining baldly about aspects of her own life (“How can these girls tour, write, perform, interview, sleep, eat, and f***ing work out? How can they do it all and lead a team and be a boss and pay people?”), her past (“I still hate those bitches from high school”), her friends who have children (“I literally have not met anyone [with young kids] who’s happy – anyone who has like light in their eyes, anyone who has slept”) and the expectation for famous people to be political. “Why the f*** are you looking to me for some political answer?” she said. “You think I have the f***ing answer? Like, I’m a pop star. I wish I had the answers. I wish the president was a pop star, but she’s not.” Unsurprisingly, her annoyance made everyone else annoyed at her even more so. In comment sections across the internet, her fans fought it out with posters who argued she was entitled, and nobody won except perhaps Alex Cooper, who hosts the podcast in question.
But why do we let ourselves get so caught up in these kinds of arguments, which are essentially arguments over nothing? Why are we so annoyed? What are we angry about? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s different for different demographics. And perhaps more unsurprisingly, it’s young men who are leading the charge on our rage epidemic. Ryan Martin, a researcher and author of Why We Get Mad and How to Deal with Angry People, has been charting rising male rage on his Substack and website The Anger Project for the past four years. This January, he revealed some of his findings – that men get angry much more often than women. Over half of all of the men he surveyed (60 per cent) reported getting angry at least once a day – and 40 per cent of those men said it happened multiple times over the same day – compared to just 38 per cent of women. When he delved into the reasons for it, he found it came down to three main areas: I get angry when I experience or witness injustice, I get angry when I am treated poorly, and I get angry when I can’t get something I want. It’s worth noting, by the way, that men polled higher than women in only the latter two of those provocations.
Usually the main arena where we see rage spill out and spill over is the online world. Poisonous figures in the so-called manosphere, like Andrew Tate, have made their own army, fuelled by misogyny, out of alienated and frustrated young men. Alongside the manosphere, “rage-baiting” has become a dominant feature of online life. A genre of content has emerged inspired by and defined by rage – videos and posts intended to rile up the reader or the viewer, to invoke outrage purely for traffic, engagement, revenue, and attention. Rage-baiting is increasingly a calling card of the online right, who use it to inject irony into statements that would otherwise be blatantly racist, homophobic, transphobic or classist. “You can’t get angry,” this mentality says. “I was only joking. If you get angry, you lose.” The result is that we’re all more guarded and more adversarial, online and off.
Gallup’s revelation that rage has been growing since 2016 is telling – it’s tempting to point to that particular year as the one in which we became more politically divided than ever, thanks to Trump and Brexit, and the one which saw us retreat into our own echo chambers on social media, free to speculate and fume to people who agreed with us and attack those who didn’t. Four years later the pandemic saw us further isolated. Shut inside our homes, frustrated and scared, we retreated further into our phones, feeding the algorithms with those fears and frustrations and gobbling up the explanations for our ennui that it spat back out at us.
Sometimes, the rage-baiting algorithmic machine is more bizarre and silly than flat-out violent and poisonous. The morning routine video of fitness influencer Ashton Hall – which saw him rise at around 4am, his mouth taped shut, and repeatedly dunk his face in ice water before faffing around for the next six hours – is the most recent example of viral rage-baiting, and yet most of the backlash to his video was pointing out how silly he was. The rage-bait was so obvious it made us laugh rather than descend into fury, but that’s not often the case. Often, we’re already too pissed off to find the funny in even the most obvious, ridiculous attempts at rage-bait. As one viral post puts it, it works on us because we were already angry, even before we encountered it.
Ashton Hall is the exception rather than the rule, however. Most rage-baiters want us to descend into fury, not chuckle indulgently. And occasionally the rage that’s stoked by populist rage-baiters, and those who seek to divide and incite us, spills over into real life. Anger doesn’t just stay within the confines of the internet. More and more often, videos of people having rage-fuelled meltdowns in public go viral online, from road-rage incidents to one particularly bad example of a man screaming in the face of a young woman on the London Underground for several minutes, while fellow passengers ignore them rather than intervening. And even though these kinds of videos might be posted with the intention of shaming the person having a rage meltdown, seeing them happen again and again only adds to a general sense of growing, rage-fuelled ennui, online and IRL.
Sometimes rage goes even further. Without all the answers but filled with righteous, impotent anger, people spill out into the streets to burn and attack and destroy. They target women, immigrants, anyone they believe is the enemy, the source of their rage. The police move in to subdue and arrest, politicians give statements in which they toe a careful line between condemning violence or understanding frustration, and eventually the boiling eye of the rage storm passes. Those angry people simmer down and stew and rage into their phones and laptops once again, waiting for the next time they can explode.
Perhaps the best way to look at rage is not as an epidemic but as a cultural addiction. And like all addictions, unless we find a way to manage it, it will eat away at us, leaving less and less of ourselves behind a growing societal red mist. The only problem with the “boil over to simmer” cycle is that it leaves us with nowhere to go. If everyone is already angry, all the time, every day, forever, then what comes after the rage? “Gentle outrage” is one potential answer. That’s marketing speak for a move away from outright rage-baiting. Instead it’s all about creating enough annoyance for a click, a reaction, a response, but not enough for an explosion, or getting you cancelled. If that’s not enough to replace your latent feelings of rage with overwhelming feelings of ennui, I don’t know what is.