This is a linkpost for https://honestliving.substack.com/p/outrage-bonding
Outrage Bonding
5Alexei
3Error
4Jonathan Moregård
3Error
2the gears to ascension
1Jonathan Moregård
2the gears to ascension
1Jonathan Moregård
1Michael Roe
2Shankar Sivarajan
1ErioirE
0Rich D
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I have a personal rule that I tell people when they start bringing this energy into my life: “I’m happy to listen to you for 5 minutes a day on this topic. After that I’m out.”
Well this is relevant to my life. -_- I'm torn between feeling validated that someone else is bothered by this behavior, and annoyed that I didn't post something like this myself.
You even chose almost the same term for it. Mine is "hate bonding", as in "let's hate Team Bad together!", or "Two Minutes Hate" (...which has lasted eight years). It's infected a large enough fraction of my loved ones to be seriously depressing. I spend a lot of time listening to people I love ranting about how other people I love are stupid and terrible.
(Or did. I considered distancing myself from all noticeable partisans, but chose not to because that covered most of the people I'm close to. Instead I blocked the channels where these conversations took place and stopped responding to mail in this category. ...which, at least in the medium term, nearly amounted to the same thing. The last decade has been pretty lonely.)
You note that bringing up the negative consequences is frowned upon, but in my experience it doesn't even take that much. Declining to bond in this way, even implicitly, often makes people angry in and of itself.
My realtime coping mechanism is closest to your "zoning out." I read somewhere that people get uncomfortable quickly if they're talking and not getting verbal acks ("uh huh, sure, yep, okay"), so I just suppress those until they peter out. Works one on one, not so well in a crowd.
This happened a while ago, and I've since migrated my social circles to distinctly non-partisan ones. I still want to help you, and would like to offer some ideas. Some of them might not fit your specific contexts. I trust you to pick the ones that seem promising.
Ideas:
- Say something akin to "I get depressed talking about those people. I've decided to focus on people I like instead. Have you been excited about anything recently?"
- Bring up the negative consequences explicitly. In a highly polarized state, not engaging in the outrage might be interpreted as a sign of betrayal. Explicitly bringing it up might be weird, but it gives you a non-traitor reason for not engaging in outrage
- Look into authentic relating - a bunch of practices for deepening communication & connection. Nonviolent communication & circling are included in this category, as well as general "authentic relating". You get some new tools for relating, and/or new friends.
- Try to get people to reduce time spent on news & social media. Phone-free family gatherings?
- Get people addicted to mobile games, so they spend their time on candy crush instead of culture wars
- Become a hermit, build a log house under an oversized rock
For reference, most of the people I hang out with are involved in the nordic branches of the wider burning man community. They are busy actually doing things, rather than complaining about politics. YMMV, but equivalent spaces where you're located might serve as a source of non-bitter connections.
Oh, finding less-partisan circles isn't the issue. I could do that; what I can't do is find circles pre-populated with people I've known and trusted for 20+ years, or with family. Those aren't relationships I'm eager to migrate away from.
Anyway, I was (perhaps ironically) more venting than looking for suggestions. I've found ways to deal with it, and this, too, shall pass. Thanks though.
Do you mean "alert and active" as in:
- Dealing with group-outrage situations without zoning out?
- Staying up to date with politics and having an influence?
- Shifting your social contexts to become less outrage-oriented?
- Other?
I mean, in situations that are generating outrage because of having influence on an outcome you do in fact care about, how do you select the information that you need in order to have what influence on that outcome is possible for you, without that overwhelming you with emotional bypass of your reasoning or breaking your ability to estimate how much influence is possible to have? To put this another way - is there a possible outrage-avoiding behavior vaguely like this one, but where if everyone took on the behavior, it would make things better instead of making one into a rock with "I cooperate and forfeit this challenge" written on it?
In other words - all of the above, I guess? but always through the lens of treating outrage as information for more integrative processes, likely information to be transformed into a form that doesn't get integrated as "self" necessarily, rather than letting outrage be the mental leader and override your own perspectives. Because if you care about the thing the outrage is about, even if you agree with it, you probably especially don't want to accept the outrage at face value, since it will degrade your response to the situation. Short-term strategic thinking about how to influence a big world pattern usually allows you to have a pretty large positive impact, especially if "you" is a copyable, self-cooperating behavior. Outrage cascades are a copyable, partially-self-cooperating behavior, but typically collapse complexity of thought. When something's urgent I wouldn't want push a social context towards dismissing it, but I'd want to push the social context towards calm, constructive, positive responses to the urgency.
You gave the example of someone getting a bunch of power and folks being concerned about this, but ending up manipulated by the outrage cascades. Your suggestions seem to lean towards simply avoiding circles which are highly charged with opinion about who or what has power; I'm most interested in versions of this advice the highly charged circles could adopt to be healthier and have more constructive responses. It does seem like your suggestions aren't too far from this, hence why it seems at all productive to ask.
Idk, those are some words. Low coherent on quite what it is I'm asking for, but you seem on a good track with this, I guess? maybe we come up with something interesting as a result of this question.
re: cloud react - yeah fair
1If we want to shift group dynamics, I see these things as important shifts:
- conflict theory -> mistake theory
- general complaints -> specific solutions
- overconfidence -> humility
One way to go about this, inspired by Scott Alexander, is to ask for more concreteness: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in
In general, though, I think the info content of the outrage is low. For most people, it mainly means "I read this thing online, and it resonated somehow". I see most outrage group discussions as extensions of newsfeeds, best to be ignored.
For solid discussions, find the people capable of deep analysis, and read their work.
If American citizens who can vote from Trump are arguing over whether hr's a bad guy, there is arguably a point to it .. though I can also the case against.
But Swedish guys ... who arent even allowed to vote for Trump if they want to .. aruing over Trump? What are you doing?
(Presumably, if there is any point at all, the argument is not against Trump specifically but the global phenomenon he is part of, and whoever the Swedish Trump equivalent is).
Do you not have conversations about topics where there's no decision for you to make with tangible material benefits riding on the outcome? Most people do. Sports, for example. Or Game of Thrones, in its heyday. That is what the closest analogues are.
The 'live under a rock' strategy has been quite effective for me. I stopped following most political commentary sources several years ago and I've never regretted it.
I avoid political conversations among my family and coworkers because the overwhelming majority are strongly religious and conservative. With beliefs so different from mine discussion is not likely to be productive nor pleasant.
It's not exactly the same thing, but I've been known to try to explain my lack of outrage/engagement/joiner-ism when it comes to things like this, by saying: "I get why you disagree/why that's awful/whatever, but really, I just can't get that worked up just because somebody's wrong on the internet."
It's a little disingenuous, because the issue isn't really "someone being wrong on the internet", but rather that folks feel that there's something wrong in the world, as reflected by a third-party's opinion. But since we all get our news and opinions delivered by internet these days, this has often (but far from always) worked to shift the topic for me.
To be fair, sometimes it shifts the topic to a meta-discussion about whether "the internet" (or specific media/social media apps) are "the problem", but even that I find to be a more interesting (and less unhealthy) discussion than dancing around the picked-over carcass of some absent opponent's opinion.
The snarkier response might be: "You disagree with someone on the internet? You should blog about it!" But that just piles on the negativity.
Obviously, YMMV.
I stopped following the news back when Trump (first?)[1] got elected. The amount of attention put on a foreign[2] election was staggering, with normal media saccades replaced by Monk-level single-mindedness. Trump was the permanent spotlight for months.
The media’s fixation on Trump had interesting downstream effects. My peer groups — normally a dynamic bunch — turned into a bunch of snide gossipmongers. Every day was Trump-day, with shared outrage being the primary source of connection. People scored points by retelling outrageous news, parroting hot takes and sharing edgy memes.
Focusing on judgment and outrage was unhealthy for me. I got addicted to the drama, allowing outrage to outcompete healthy forms of relating. I felt disconnected from my friends, got irritated more often, and had an increase in pessimistic thought patterns.
Around this time, I had a coworker who was always grumpy — always complaining about this or that. He was also quite old. I used to wonder if he had once been happier — but then practised grumpiness a lot. It takes some repetition to get to his level of mastery.
One day, the situation got too much for me. I decided that I didn’t want to become a bitter old man — and that I needed to disengage from the outrage-bonding going on in my social circles.
Having stopped following the news, the next step wasn’t hard — I made a hard commitment to not put energy into outrage-bonding. Whenever people started complaining together, I responded by:
At first, people didn’t like it. Bringing up the negative consequences of other people’s unhealthy habits is generally frowned upon — even if it’s done indirectly. If done in a judgemental way, it can be seen as a social manoeuvring move — a subtle claim that I’m better (more healthy) than others.
Luckily, I care little for social signalling games. I forged ahead — and managed to shift the group dynamics I interacted with. Sometimes, a strong-headed minority can have a lot of impact.
Now, shit is about to hit the fan. The US elections are scheduled for November, and the drama is already building. The news will turn increasingly single-minded, and you are likely to find yourself in outrage-oriented social contexts. You can choose to hand over your attention and mood to a drama-oriented culture war — or you can do your best to break free.
Come join me living under a rock, it’s cosy here.
I’m joking! I know Trump hasn’t been reelected, yet. I get news through conversations with friends, and know most important things early on — like covid, the Ukraine invasion, the Gaza conflict, etc.
I live in Sweden, even though my online life is weirdly US-centric.