The Mood is Getting so Bad that we need to go to a ‘Rage Room’ and Destroy Stuff

 The Compliance Exchange  April 3, 2018  compliancex  

By Jack J. Kelly

If you’ve been wondering, it’s not just your imagination. According to studies, there has been an alarming rise in frustration, anger, anxiousness, and alienation in our society. Incivility, rudeness, meanness, and impoliteness have now become the new social norms and mores.

If you don’t believe me, just turn on any cable news channel or visit your favorite social media sites. Within seconds, you’ll either be assaulted by or become a bystander to vicious arguments over politics. There is an absence of polite discussion and no one takes the time to hear out someone else’s different point of view. It’s an “us versus them” mentality- a battle of who could yell the loudest and how badly you could embarrass the person with whom you disagree. This is one of the reasons why I keep to LinkedIn and don’t bother with Facebook (the other reason is that I lack a social life, so there is not a lot of interesting stuff for me to post on Facebook).

The news obviously peddles fear and loathing to generate ratings.  The cable news shows offer a not- so- subtle agenda of serving a healthy dose of frightening the hell out of everyone, every minute of every day to enrich themselves.  It’s not a winter snow day, but “the worst snow storm armageddon apocalypse disaster in over 100 years; “ close the schools and hide in your homes and don’t you dare leave! After the stock market rocketed to new record highs, when it drops a few percentage points, the news screams out, “This is just like the beginning stages of the Great Depression!” We are not negotiating trade disagreements, but entering a “trade war” with China. It’s not like we are engaged in enough never-ending wars, so we have to now make up new classifications of war. North Korea will hit us with nuclear weapons, but we also need to wage war on Russia for meddling in our affairs. Let’s give the brave kids from the Florida high school that had the recent shooting a chance to air their views, but of course the media needs to stoke fighting between everyone over their statements.

Maybe these diversion are done on purpose to distract us from possible terrorist acts anywhere or anytime, horrendous daily commutes to work, trains and buses that are overcrowded, constantly breakdown, and extraordinarily late when they do run. The roads are always congested and never-ending construction sites turn a five-minute drive into a two-hour ordeal. Artificial intelligence and technology look like they will replace our jobs. If you have children, you worry how you could afford $200,000 tuition bills on top of saving for your own retirement. This is made more complicated if your job is moved to another state, country, or replaced by technology.

If you are looking for a job, due in part, to the rapid deployment of human resources software systems, the process has become more mechanical than humane. You have to fill out 10 pages, get locked-out, lose the data, start all over again, and are forced to divulge all your personal information to a computer before you are even permitted to submit a resume. If you finally get your resume past the technology screeners, you will be lucky if you receive feedback. You end up feeling like a product and not a person. If you are over 40, you need to start worrying about being called “too old” for the job. If you are a millennial, you will be typecast as “difficult to work with and demanding” just because you want a reasonable work/life balance.

I admit; I am part of the problem myself. Here is an example of what happens: I posted several job postings on LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter. Over the course of the weekend, we received in excess of 100 resumes. The ease in which people can apply to job postings results in Uber drivers and landscapers submitting resumes to Senior Attorney roles (I’m not exaggerating). It becomes impossible to personally respond to each and every person. I acknowledge that it is wrong, but the dilemma is that if we personally respond to everyone then there is no time to help the people who are actually qualified for the job. When we don’t receive feedback from our hiring clients, we literally don’t have anything to say, which is frustrating for everyone involved. This is not an excuse; I am merely sharing with you what goes on in the kitchen that you don’t see. There is a clear trend within the interviewing and hiring process that parallels our current national mood toward incivility, rudeness, and the overall breakdown in polite social interactions.

An entrepreneur, Donna Alexander, is capitalizing on this trend by starting a business called the anger room (also known as the ‘rage room’).

For $25 bucks, you can enter a rage room, grab a weapon such as a bat or golf club, and spend up to 25 minutes releasing your inner anger by breaking stuff like dishes, lamps, and printers.

It’s a brilliant idea for our time given all the pent-up stress in our daily lives, including terrible bosses, long commutes, technology taking over our lives, massive student loan debt, questions as to how we could afford to retire, and strained relationship problems due to these issues.

Given the current climate, maybe we should collectively chip-in and buy a Rage Room franchise? At least we could all make some money off of this toxic environment!

#Career #CareerAdvice #Interview #InterviewAdvice #Resume #Hire #LinkedIn #Jobs #RageRoom