> There is a real thing going on in the US today, a sort of inchoate rage felt at all of the poorly defined "others". My hunch is that much of it stems from the

> There is a real thing going on in the US today, a sort of inchoate rage felt at all of the poorly defined "others". My hunch is that much of it stems from the rising anxieties of climate change, economic inequality, corporate political control, and even more recently the pandemic. I have this feeling from time to time. I find that it magically disappears when I stop consuming media. I'm not saying "it goes away when I ignore it", either. I do not get the same sense of an "angry society" when I interact with other human beings, and rarely hear anyone express any kind of urgent anxiety about climate change or economic inequality. We face serious issues, sure, but none are the urgent societal threats they're made out to be. The real danger are the anxiety peddlers and the fear-amplifiers among us, who want to influence and then monetize your emotional state, or to transmute it into political capital.