Outrage Overload

Every day, we're bombarded with "outrage porn," material used to evoke anger, disgust or indignation – online, in the news, political campaigns, gossip, friends venting their frustrations.

I'm making a claim that the outrage machine has been too successful, like the dog that caught the bus. We've been telling ourselves the other side is "evil" and now we believe it. The baseline of constant and chronic outrage, a persistent background level, weighs on us, creating constant stress and anxiety individually and on society as a whole.

It's a journey, my journey. I'll take listeners along as witnesses. I'm not the expert. I don't know everything. I don't even know what I don't know. I have some hypotheses and now with each episode I'll find an expert I can talk to or some research or otherwise that I can talk about that informs these questions, and perhaps leads me to the next step along this journey.