Why Are We So Good At Making Ourselves Mad?

How online culture’s obsession with reaction, speed, and spectacle has flattened creativity, and why reclaiming agency, depth, and intentional consumption is the only way out of it.

Reaction Culture

Are we too quick to react online? Yes. Is it killing our ability to interact with each other without immediately, and aimlessly, jumping to argument? Also yes. Every part of the online world now revolves around how quickly we can react to something: how fast you can post a contrarian think-piece, how easily you fold to ragebait.

On this spectrum, there are ragebaiters and reactors, and the parasitic relationship that forms between them: creators feed on time and attention, and audiences feed off the exaggeration of spectacle; the anger, the explosion, and increasingly, the brainrot. Reaction is no longer a by-product of content; it is the product itself.

From turning a president with the capacity for real harm into a meme, to reducing human behaviour to flimsy trend psychology, the same mechanism is at play: reaction culture compresses complexity into something fast, legible, and disposable.

Democratising the Artist

At the centre of this cycle is the creator economy, a nimble middleman working several corners at once. Online activists, ragebaiting podcast clips, the instantly recognisable drawn-out vocal fry dubbed “the influencer voice”, these modes increasingly overlap. The influencer becomes the activist becomes the ragebaiter, and the boundaries collapse. With no central authority guiding how this content evolves, reaction culture is pushed to its limits, and responsibility becomes collective.

@natalyatoryanskiGooduh. Morning. Yew. Guise.

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When creativity becomes content, it shifts from a private practice to a commodity. Content creation is the production of media designed to inform, entertain, educate, or engage a specific audience, and it follows the simplest logic of capitalism: supply and demand.

The creator economy has grown year on year, alongside ever-shifting definitions of what it means to be an influencer in the digital age. Self-authored content offers clear benefits: flexible working, lower barriers to entry, ownable digital ecosystems, and access to worlds that would once have been unreachable. At its most foundational level, the exchange works.

But what begins as democratisation ends as saturation. The internet is a vast, decentralised tangle that has crossed wires with our instinct to compare, covet, and consume. Too much of a good thing curdles quickly.

When Everything Becomes Content

Entertainment has become distorted, and education increasingly misinformed. Under online consumerism, creativity is reshaped by attention, speed, and profit. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because it provides access to those who want to enjoy art without the centuries of elitism attached.

But it is also bad. Popular and profitable art is still shaped by narrow, archaic ideas of what constitutes “Art.” When visibility is governed by biased algorithms, creativity is rewarded not for evolution, but for what reliably performs. In a system where attention is scarce, emotion becomes a metric, and anger travels fastest.

So where does this place us on the reactive scale? If art has progressed, why does everything feel angrier? Why are creators incentivised to provoke rather than deepen understanding? In a landscape driven by real-time trends and an “all press is good press” mentality, anger has become the most viable social currency.

The Parasocial Race to the Middle

This lack of evolution does not mean things are not changing. Anyone who’s read a trend report in the last year knows the pendulum is always swinging. But the inertia stems from a conditioning that keeps us in a constant state of pressure. As Guy Debord argued in The Society of the Spectacle, capitalism turns everything into spectacle in order to numb us to violence and inequality. Content arguably does the same.

It offers a place to consume endlessly: a vast orbit of sensationalised media that distorts the supply and demand of entertainment and information. It’s being disproportionately enraged by Twitter discourse, then scrolling past news of an ongoing genocide sandwiched between posts about Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner in matching orange outfits at a movie premiere.

Because this content consistently taps into our instinct to judge, react, and hate, it becomes difficult to regulate appropriately. We begin to associate ourselves unnecessarily with content that, once you step away from the phone, no longer impacts you. Our emotional barometer gets stuck at a set point, and often the only thing that moves it is reactionary content, no matter how insignificant.

@yas.jd@Tamsin 🍸🐚🕊️🦪 #performativeintellectualism

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Towards Regaining Agency

We want progress, but only if it looks, sounds, and feels the way we expect it to. This is the state of social media: constant motion, no movement. Everyone wants to speak. Contrarianism thrives because disagreement is quicker than nuance. Irony is easy; sincerity is cringe.

It would be naive to ignore the wider disillusionment; a failing economy, political unrest, a growing sense of bleakness. Escapism is inevitable. But for many, the goal isn’t escape so much as regaining self-control.

As Damola Oladapo writes, “The shift to classical [music] is about regaining agency.” That instinct explains the current fixation on the personal curator, the year of analogue, and the experience economy. These ideas may be formless, but they signal a desire to slow down and opt out of reaction as default.

In practice, this looks like creators building evergreen ecosystems rather than chasing outrage, and audiences practising more conscious consumption; engaging deeply, even critically. Reaction will continue as long as it works. But the dissatisfaction of endless scrolling is now impossible to ignore. Interrupting the cycle, however small, is already an act of influence.

Ennie is a Creative Strategist and Writer. You can find her on LinkedIn.