Why Is There So Much Grievance Nowadays?

I did a post yesterday on everything that’s now in some way “currency,” i.e. being busy, being stressed out, being performative, being a hustle-monger, etc. One that I probably missed is “grievances.” The idea of grievances is friggin’ massive these days. Trump basically shaped the current Republican party around grievances related to the 2020 election and the Mueller investigation. The “leftists” have their own grievances, often around semantics and stuff that was tweeted 11 years ago. Modern work has its own share of grievances, especially around appearing in the office vs. not appearing, although you could also argue that’s an “old-school” thing vs. a “new-school” thing, i.e. existing world vs. encroaching world. The battle of old and new obviously creates grievances, though; you could probably argue that most grievances come from “my way of life might be changing too much for me to be comfortable with.” Think of our stereotypes around the old and screaming at clouds from their porch.

Obviously, people have bitched about things and change for generations. Maybe millennia. So none of this is specifically new, nor is the principle of this particular short article. However … does it seem like it’s happening more nowadays in some way? Perhaps. Here are some of the potential arguments towards that end.

(1) COVID: It quite possibly made us stupider and more insular, and when we surround ourselves with like-minded people, the “other side” becomes even less appealing, which means grievances can scale.

(2) Digital Noise: It’s everywhere, and we’re herded into like-minded pens, which can sometimes elevate the smallest molehill battles into “a war for our souls.” That makes people prone to grievance.

(3) The rise of trauma: We’re huge on acknowledging and nodding to trauma these days. Definitely much good can come from that, and people can deal with issues in their life that, 30 years ago, they had to suppress for a full generation. But when trauma becomes currency, everyone has a reason to feel aggrieved.

(4) Trump’s brand of politics: This may well have scaled aggressive male douchebags saying stuff without fact, which is going to lead to grievances. How many times did Trump tweet, or say at a rally, the word “unfair?” It has to be in the tens of thousands. It’s interesting to me because Trump and his people seem to want to reflect a particularly aggressive brand of masculinity around “doing deals” and “grabbing women by the pussy” and whatnot, but at the same time, they constantly talk about how unfair things are and how “COVID let Dementia Joe campaign from his basement,” etc. If you’re an aggressive male who closes deals and grabs the hottest women, do you really care about how “fair” stuff is? Or do you just go get it?

(5) The supposed importance of empathy: We’ve been discussing empathy nonstop in society for about a decade now. I’m not sure people have gotten more empathetic, and again, COVID probably backslid it (we spent time with those similar to us familial-y and geographically). But the problem with constantly discussing empathy is that empathy conceptually does not matter to that many people. Most people, especially in the middle portion of their lives (“Act II”), really only have time to focus on their immediate concerns of work, family, maybe a few friends, and some vague notions of success or purpose. Most people have a very specific emotional and empathy bar they can reach; when they can’t reach it and it feels like everyone (“the fucking woke left, ugh”) is talking about it, it can make certain people aggrieved.

(6) Vocabulary: We’ve let too many words change meaning in the past 10–20 years, and while many of those words needed a different contextual meaning, the shifting of vocabulary and ideas still can aggrieve both ideological sides.

(7) Decline of purpose: As purpose generally declines for people (which is happening in the aggregate, even if your life feels very purposeful), people need something to moor themselves to — and that mooring often comes in the way of identity (or ideology), and there’s a specific subset of most identities that says “You need to be aggrieved about this other thing over here.” That can scale grievances as well.

Takes? Other ideas?