The Inability to See Past the Rage

She was an older woman and she had had enough. Sitting in the theater during the pre-show in the drafty ancient building when the temperature outside was a whopping 11 degrees, she was cold. To her bones, she said. She claimed to have been a patron of the establishment for 45 years and had never been so cold waiting for a show to start. So she decided to take her frustration out on a teenager making minimum wage and, in no uncertain terms, read the child the riot act. Her words were catastrophic—this was “torture” and “a threat to her safety.”

The ambiguously non-binary person had their hill to die on in terms of revolutionary acts. They had been inadvertently misgendered by a waiter and demanded to the supervisor that this man be fired immediately. As the manager listened and politely and apologetically deflected , their voice got louder and shriller. Their words were apocalyptic—this was “erasing their existence” and “an act of violence.”

The Midwestern parent of school aged children is apoplectic over the LGBTQ+ reading material his kids are being exposed without a hint of irony that both have iPads and watched John Wick perform a thousand head shots on theoretical people and Challengers multiple times on his Netflix account. His words are hyperbolic—the schools are “grooming” his children and “making them gay.”

The media started this trend with the heavy lean into tragedies and manufactured hysteria. The attention economy thrives on hyperbole. Hyperbole grabs our attention by tapping into our emotions—fear, anger, joy, shock. It forces us to react, and in the attention economy, reactions are the gold standard. Clicks, likes, shares, comments—they’re all measurable, monetizable proof that someone, somewhere, noticed you.

But here’s the problem: the more hyperbole you use, the more it takes to stand out. The bar for what qualifies as “shocking” or “groundbreaking” keeps rising. Yesterday’s “Best Ever!” is today’s “Meh.” We’re caught in an arms race of exaggeration, where everyone is trying to one-up each other with increasingly ridiculous claims.

When everything is framed as an existential crisis, we’re constantly on edge, constantly angry, constantly ready to fight. This isn’t just exhausting—it’s dangerous. It creates a feedback loop where outrage feeds hyperbole, and hyperbole feeds outrage, until we’re all stuck in a perpetual cycle of performative fury.