We Don’t Need More Outrage — We Need Smarter Listening

There’s something off about how we talk now — about the country, about each other, about anything with even a hint of tension. Everything feels like an argument waiting to happen, or a stage where we pretend we’re already in one.

But when I step away from the internet, from the clips, from the screens — I don’t see people burning with rage. I see people tired. Cautious. Unsure how to talk without stepping on something that will explode.

I don’t think we hate each other as much as it looks like we do. I think we’ve been trained to perform friction — to treat every interaction as a chance to prove we’re not like “them,” even when “them” is someone we probably shared a sandwich with before all this started.

Social media doesn’t reward curiosity. It rewards certainty. Outrage. A snappy comment that gets claps instead of questions. And politics has followed suit — louder, meaner, optimized for virality instead of resolution. We’re told everything is urgent. But none of it gets fixed.

I’m not saying we should all hold hands. I’m saying disagreement shouldn’t feel like emotional warfare. We don’t need to agree. But we do need to remember that humans aren’t hashtags.

I’ve had real conversations with people I disagree with — not to win, but to learn where their pain started. It didn’t convert me. But it calmed me. It made the noise feel less permanent.

Being intelligent is not the same as being knowledgeable. Many intelligent people do dumb things. We don’t need more noise. We need more pauses. More time to learn and to understand and learning from reputable sources, not some media outlet that sounds more satire than The Mocking Post.