The Economy of Outrage

When my kids were young, there were times at the dinner table when their voices would rise with intensity: “I’m right!” “No, I’M right!” You know that moment when every parent wants to throw up their hands and shout above the noise—“Stop it!”

That’s exactly what the world feels like right now.

Scroll through social media, listen to the news, sit in on a coffee shop conversation, or even at a family table—it’s as if we’ve all become those arguing children. Only this time, there is no parent to call us back to ourselves. We are the adults. And yet we keep acting out the same immature script.

I wasn’t immune. When I first joined Facebook in 2007, it felt like a digital block party—reconnecting with cousins I hadn’t seen in decades, laughing over old photos with high school friends, and posting snapshots of bike rides with my kids, backyard meals, and the kind of ordinary joys that stitch life together. It was simple. It was fun.

But the ground shifted. By 2014, algorithms were designed to maximize engagement over connection—feeding me whatever would keep me clicking. By 2016, I was in deeper than I realized: sparring in the comments, jumping into arguments, carrying myself like an internet litigator who needed the last word—turning my thoughts into weapons.

Meanwhile, the platforms were taking notes. Every self-righteous post, every defensive reply—it was all logged, measured, and sold. Companies like Cambridge Analytica turned our division into currency. My “I’m right” perspective became part of their profit margin. My certainty became someone else’s empire-building tool.

It took a wise leader calling me out to shake me awake. He told me my words had grown contentious, that I was giving away opportunities to influence for good just to win arguments. It embarrassed me—because I knew he was right—but it also stayed with me. His feedback cracked something open in me: the truth that every post and comment is a chance to connect—or to wound.

By 2020, social media was primed for the perfect storm. COVID arrived, and every issue—masks, vaccines, lockdowns—became a battleground. And while we were fighting over masks and mandates, political forces across the globe were feasting on the spoils—our data, our divisions, our digital shouting matches—separating us into camps of “for” and “against,” amplifying every fracture, and polarizing entire communities.

Our contempt, our outrage, our certainty—this was protein for their muscle machine. The cycle accelerated: data collection expanded, polarization deepened, and those who benefited from division harvested a bumper crop. Never before in history have empire-builders been given such intimate access—not only to our personal details, but to the pressure points of our communities, the places most easily exploited to turn us against one another.

Divide and conquer has always been the strategy of the ruthless. But now it doesn’t need kings or generals. It has algorithms and data.

Which raises the larger question: who really benefits from all this chaos, contempt, and cruelty? From the endless “I’m right, you’re wrong” battles? From the shaming, the silencing, the rage that spills into our streets and poisons our feeds?

The answer is simple and chilling: those who crave power at any cost—greed above generosity, control above compassion, power above people.

For them, division is gold. Polarization is fuel. Chaos is opportunity. The clearer the separation between “us” and “them,” the easier it is to mobilize armies of the outraged, tighten their grip, and build empires on the rubble of broken trust.

And for the rest of us? It’s loss on repeat. We lose empathy. We lose compassion. We lose connection. We lose the very heartbeat of humanity: love. And when we give in to contempt—when we decide that it’s our job to police the works of others—to punish, cancel, or shame rather than listen—we become unwitting accomplices. We strengthen the very machinery designed to divide us.

The way out is harder than the way in. It demands restraint in a world addicted to reaction. It asks us to resist the easy high of contempt and choose the slower, steadier work of love. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. embodied this ethic. He knew that meeting violence with violence or contempt with contempt would only reinforce the cycle. His strength was not in mirroring hate, but in refusing it. Love, grounded in reason and anchored in compassion, was his strategy for disarming power.

And it’s a powerful strategy that can work for us too.

But here’s the part we rarely name. We don’t hand over our power just because platforms are manipulative—we hand it over because most of us never learned the art of conflict.

Our relational muscles never got stretched, our ability to disagree never matured. So when tension shows up, instead of building strength, we collapse. Disagreement doesn’t deepen understanding; it unravels into contempt, violence, and chaos.

Conflict itself is not the enemy. At its best—whether between friends, colleagues, or nations—it can be the path where understanding grows and relationships deepen. But that only happens when both sides agree on a higher principle: your well-being matters as much as mine. Conflict becomes productive only when we “fight to understand”, not “fight to be right”.

The challenge is that most of us were never taught how to navigate conflict in healthy ways. Without the skills or practice, we easily fall into combat mode. As Terry Real puts it, we shift from our “wise adult” to our “adaptive child.”

The adaptive child is that younger part of us that learned to survive by defending, attacking, or withdrawing. It’s clever and fast, but reactive. It sees conflict as danger and reaches for old survival tools—fight, flight, freeze, or fix. The wise adult, on the other hand, is the mature part of us that can pause, breathe, and remember: the point isn’t to win; it’s to understand, repair, and heal.

The practice of relational maturity is learning to notice when our adaptive child grabs the wheel, to pause, and to re-seat ourselves in the wiser adult part of who we are. And yet even when we want to live from that wiser place, something deeper pulls us back—our biology and our digital environment.

Here’s why this is so sticky. Researchers have found that outrage spreads faster online than joy or gratitude; algorithms amplify it because outrage keeps us engaged. Neuroscience adds the missing piece: four times a second, the nervous system scans for threat. When it senses danger, the amygdala hijacks the brain and the prefrontal cortex dims, that’s the part of our brain capable of empathy, creativity, and long-view thinking.

In plain terms: when we feel attacked, we literally lose access to the part of the brain that holds our mature adult identity—the self that can remember “us”, think long-term, and choose connection over combat.

This is why relational intelligence matters. It isn’t just etiquette; it’s biology. Unless we learn to pause, regulate, and reset, we will keep defaulting to fight, flight, or freeze.

Think of our relationships as a shared biosphere. Every word, every gesture, every post releases something into the air we all breathe. Pollute it with contempt, and that pollution comes back to us as distance, defensiveness, or retaliation. Fill it with empathy and care, and the air becomes clean again—nourishing trust, safety, and connection.

We don’t live outside this system—we are the system. Families, friendships, workplaces, communities: all of them share the same relational atmosphere. And just like the planet, that atmosphere can be poisoned by neglect or sustained by care. Contempt is carbon monoxide—invisible, toxic, and deadly over time. Love is oxygen—also invisible, but the only thing that makes life possible.

The real question is never whether we’re shaping the biosphere. It’s how: are we polluting it, or keeping it alive? And to answer that, we need more than science alone. We need the wisdom traditions that have long reminded us who we are and how deeply we belong to one another.

Wisdom traditions point to the same remedy. Dr. King called love “the strongest power the world has ever seen.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu called it Ubuntu: “I am because we are.” Across cultures, the warning is consistent: pride that forgets our place in the whole—hubris—undoes us.

We do not exist outside one another. Our lives are braided together, and to wound another is to wound ourselves. Choosing compassion when contempt is easier isn’t naiveté—it’s how communities survive.

So how do we start? Not with sweeping gestures, but with small, daily moves that reclaim our agency:

The next time you feel the urge to react—to defend, to prove, to set someone straight—whether at work, at home, or on social media—pause and ask: Am I filling the air with carbon monoxide—criticism, contempt, defensiveness—or with oxygen: empathy, care, and respect?

Until next week,

Jonathan Penner | Co-Founder & Executive Director of LifeApp

LifeApp 3 Day Retreat
Relationship Coaching
What Is LifeApp?