How Rage Bait Became the Internet’s Favorite Drug
This morning while I was waiting for my therapy to start, I enjoyed my five minute LinkedIn allocation. Now there are videos that pop up on there, so I clicked on one that a woman did saying that Gen Z have unrealistic expectations of salaries. She then goes on to say she knows this woman who is 25 years old and making $250,000/year and thinks she’s severely underpaid. The lady goes on to say it’s not unreasonable to wait until you’re 35 to make that kind of money. There were literally thousands of comments on this video.
Unable to help myself, I scrolled through. The woman who made the video responded to most of the comments in some confrontational way, even the people who were agreeing with her!! One person commented “you’re so right, Gen Z is so entitled,” and the lady who made the video responded, “that’s presumptuous of you.”
The whole thread was so absurd, I extended my time limit for another fifteen minutes to keep reading it.
A lot of people said that they were well past 35 years of age and nowhere near making $250,000/year, some people called the woman in the video out of touch with reality. Others said things like she was spreading unrealistic expectations to people online.
Whatever people were saying, she commented back something professional, but also nasty back so that the commenter would comment back again.
The whole thing made me think about how her video had half a million views because she was out there antagonizing people to comment and boost her video with engagement.
Genius or super villain…I’m not really sure.
Congratulations to everyone who commented on that thread, you’ve been rage-baited.
We treat the internet like a landscape, but really it’s a psychological casino, and rage is the loudest slot machine. It dings and flashes then pays out in dopamine that always wants just one more pull in that addictive way it grabs your attention.
This is why today I found myself looking into why outrage spreads like wildfire, why platforms reward it, and why we click even when we don’t want to. The modern mind is being taken advantage of and sculpted into something more reactive, more exhausted, and less peaceful than ever before.
Rage Against the Machine
I like to believe I’m a rational creature, but outrage is evolution’s shortcut to the part of the mind that never grew up. It’s pure reflex, built for a world where information was scarce and threats were physical.
If something made you angry 100,000 years ago, it usually meant your safety was threatened or someone/thing was trying to take your food or steal your wife. Anger was a survival flare for your brain to jump into fight or flight mode.
The problem is that the internet knows this. More accurately though, the algorithms know.
They know that anger is the fastest emotion to trigger, outrage is the easiest to spread, and once you’re mad, you’ll stay online longer, trying to soothe the bruise they just created. Absolutely nothing holds a user captive like a bruise that just won’t stop blooming.
So platforms learned to feed it to us. Our ancient wiring meets machine intelligence trained on billions of clicks, and the result is a culture shaped by the easiest emotion to monetize.
Rage bait is any content designed to make you angry on purpose. It doesn’t need to be fake and it doesn’t even need to be extreme, it just needs to scratch the brain in the general direction of outrage.
At its core, rage bait has one goal, it wants to move you to react in some way. It’s built for acceleration, and oh boy, how fast does it go. The quicker the heartbeat, the longer the scroll and the longer the scroll, the higher the ad revenue. The higher the revenue, the more platforms reward outrage-makers. It’s an economy of indignation created to play off your emotions.
Why It Works So Damn Well
Rage bait works because your body mistakes it for danger. When something enrages you, your sympathetic nervous system shoves you straight into fight mode. Not physically, you’re not suddenly swinging at your phone, but biologically cortisol spikes, adrenaline floods your system as your judgment narrows.
Your brain becomes stuck in a sort of tunnel vision, like a long hallway pointed toward reaction and not easily distracted by anything else.
The lie of all of this is that anger feels powerful, but without realizing it, it’s actually giving your power to someone else. Anger stretches you taller and makes you feel more confident in your decisions and what you believe. It legitimately makes your brain believe you’re acting, even when all you’re doing is thumb-typing into the void.
Platforms love anger because it creates engagement and engagement creates data then data creates profit. So they all feed us content built to provoke the oldest part of the brain. They feed it to us by the gallon, and we slurp it up faster than a sponge that’s been left in the sun for a day or two.
If you want to see how the interwebs works, follow the money. I guess that’s really the rule of everything in life and not unique to the interwebs, but you know what I’m saying.
A platform is a machine that takes as much of your attention as it can get and turns it into currency. It doesn’t care what emotion delivers that attention, because it doesn’t care about you or your wellbeing even a little, only that it can capture your attention predictably, and in massive quantities.
No emotion drives engagement faster than anger.
“The Spread of Emotion via Social Networks” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2011
by Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler show that anger is more contagious than happiness or fear. Outrage makes people share content five times more often and negative emotions spread faster and a lot farther than positive ones. The brain releases a dopamine hit every time you let out some of that moral outrage you’ve been carrying around with you online. I can summarize that giant paper for you in just three words: rage is addictive.
It makes you feel morally awake in a world where most of us feel powerless.
So you comment then stitch the video or send it to a friend to tell them how absurd it is.
You post about how wrong it was and then fuel the system that hurt you. You become part of the machine every time you do those things.
Then the machine thanks you by showing you more.
“Fake Outrage Trends”
Some rage bait doesn’t even involve real people.
Creators have learned that inventing a fake trend like “Gen Z is boiling their socks to save money,” “women are eating glue to get better skin,” “high schoolers are doing XYZ challenge”, will go viral not because people believe it…but because people think that other people believe it.
This is second-order outrage, anger not at the act, but at the perceived stupidity of strangers. It’s easy to spread anger when the target is imaginary and the situation never even happened.
The tragedy of rage bait isn’t the anger itself even though that’s bad enough, it’s more what we become when we normalize living in a constant hum of low-grade outrage. Over time, rage bait changes you by diminishing curiosity and reducing empathy. Rage bait conditions you to expect the worst from strangers while training your nervous system to stay on alert all the time just in case you need to shove your own thoughts down someone else’s throat and correct their wrong assumption.
We were never ever meant to metabolize 100,000 micro-conflicts a day. Our physiology hasn’t evolved for it and my spirit definitely hasn’t either. It feels impossible to live in a constant state of being baited and remain open-hearted. You just can’t be open-minded when you believe everyone else around you is out to get you or wrong.
Refusing to Be Manipulated
There’s something radical about resisting the temptation to be outraged about X Y and Z that probably doesn’t change anything in my own life
It’s really just some self-preservation, and if you ever experienced anger toward strangers on the interwebs, it just means you can still care deeply about the world and refuse to let a stranger’s algorithm dictate your emotions.
You can still be awake without being enraged. The revolution, strangely enough, might begin with a single moment of choosing not to click, because rage bait thrives on attention.
Starve it, and it dies.
Outrage builds quickly and burns slowly, and what lingers, long after the video ends, is a kind of spiritual hangover: why did that get to me? why can’t I stop thinking about it? why do I feel tired and wired at the same time?
Because your brain has no closure and outrage has no easy fix, it’s designed only to activate you, not heal you. Living online becomes a cycle of incomplete emotional arcs, it’s really no wonder people feel exhausted, anxious, and hopeless.
Rage bait doesn’t disappear when you avoid it, but it loses its power over you.
And that is the quiet miracle of awareness: your mind becomes your own again.
Not a home.
Other Reads You Might Enjoy:
The Brain That Forgot How to Wander: Why Short Videos Might Be Our Newest Addiction
Why We Romanticize Burnout: The Toxic Myth of Glorious Exhaustion
Your Brain Is Lying to You: Everyday Ways Your Mind Betrays You (And How to Outsmart It)
The Science of Awe: What Happens When Wonder Floods the Brain
Why Do I Cry When I’m Tired? The Science of Overwhelm, Sleep Deprivation, and Softness
The Strange Light Over Arizona: What We See When We Look to the Sky
Why We Get Scared When Change Starts Working (or We Backslide)
