If you spend 45 minutes a day angry at strangers online, you’ll give them about 270 hours this year. That’s nearly seven full 40-hour work weeks, handed to people you’ll never meet, about events you can’t change.
I used to spend at least that. For about two years, I woke up, grabbed my phone, and read something that made me furious. By 7:30 I had posted a reply. By lunch I had checked the replies a dozen times. I told myself I cared.
Then I read a study that made me feel stupid. In 2014, Kirk Kristofferson, Katherine White and John Peloza ran a series of experiments on what they called slacktivism. People who showed public, low-cost support for a cause, such as joining a Facebook group or wearing a pin, were no more likely to give time or money to that cause later than people who did nothing. People who showed their support in private were more likely to help.
When I posted, reposted, reshared, and sought out my anger, I felt like I was helping without helping anyone.
So I quit.
I quit, and I don’t miss it.
I quit, and I’m not a worse person for it.
I quit, and I’m calmer, and the world hasn’t changed one jot.
I’ve laid out the 14-day process I used below.
You can set it up in about 15 minutes and start tonight.
First, score yourself
Answer yes or no:
Do you open a news or social app within 10 minutes of waking up?
Have you written an angry reply to a stranger in the last week?
Have you reread the replies to one of your posts more than three times?
Have you lost sleep over something a person you’ve never met said online?
Can you name an account you follow mainly because it makes you angry?
If you answered yes to three or more…well.
Why you can’t stop
You didn’t build this habit alone.
In 2017, William Brady and his colleagues at NYU studied more than 500,000 tweets about gun control, same-sex marriage, and climate change. Users shared a tweet about 20 percent more for each moral or emotional word it contained. In 2021, Brady, Molly Crockett, and their team at Yale found that people who got more likes for an outraged post went on to post more outrage. Their followers trained them.
The people who build your feeds rank posts by how much you engage with them, and you engage most when you’re angry. When you feel the urge to reply, remember that a product team planned for that urge.
Venting won’t calm you down, either. In 2002, the psychologist Brad Bushman had students hit a punching bag while they thought about someone who had insulted them. Those students reported more anger and acted more aggressively than students who sat quietly. Each time you post your fury, you rehearse it.
The 14-day Outrage Fast
Setup (15 minutes, tonight)
Delete every social and news app from your phone. Check from a laptop if you must. You’ll check far less when you have to sit down and log in.
Turn off every news notification. If something truly matters, the people you know will tell you.
Pick one weekly news source you trust, and read it once a week. Tim Ferriss calls this a low-information diet, and he applies a blunt test: will you use this information for something immediate and important?
Start an outrage log in your notes app with four columns: time, source, minutes spent, and what you did about it.
Daily rules (days 1 to 14)
1. Warn yourself before breakfast.
Marcus Aurelius opened Book 2 of his Meditations with a note to himself:
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”
Before you open any app, take 60 seconds and tell yourself: “Today I’ll read something infuriating, written by someone who’s wrong, and I’ve already decided not to answer it.” When you see it, you’ll recognize it as the event you predicted.
2. Set a 10-minute timer. Seneca wrote that the greatest remedy for anger is delay. When something makes you angry, set a timer before you type a word. You’ll usually lose interest before it rings.
3. Wait 24 hours before you publish anything angry. Write it in your notes app, where you can’t send it by accident. Reread it the next morning. You’ll delete most of them.
4. Run the three-question filter. Before you engage, ask:
Can I do anything about this today?
Will anyone I care about be better off if I respond?
Will I remember this in a month?
If you answer no three times, close the tab.
A city councilor in another state called teachers lazy. You can’t vote in that city. Your friends gain nothing from your reply, and he’ll never read it. You won’t remember his name by Friday.
You close the tab, having spent fifteen seconds on him instead of forty minutes.
5. Find the boring explanation. Before you react to a 30-second clip or a cropped screenshot, read the whole article or watch the full video. Write the other side’s best argument in a sentence they’d agree with. Assume people acted out of haste or ignorance before you assume malice. You’ll still find real villains, but far fewer.
6. Log every flash. Each time something you read makes you angry, add a line to the log.
Day 7: Cut your top three
Add up your minutes and sort them by source. You’ll probably find that you spent most of your angry minutes on a handful of accounts or sites. Mute or unfollow your top three that day. Then multiply your daily average by 365 to see what you would have spent this year.
Day 14: Turn anger into one action
Pick the issue that made you angriest over the two weeks. Then do one private, useful thing about it: give money, volunteer an afternoon, call your representative, or help one person it affects. Kristofferson’s team found that people who supported a cause in private went on to help more, and people who supported it for an audience didn’t.
After the fast, do one action like this each month, and run the log for one week every quarter.
“But...”
“Won’t I be uninformed?” You’ll know less about what strangers said yesterday. You’ll still know about the elections, wars, and laws that affect you, because your weekly source and your friends will tell you.
“Isn’t anger how change happens?” Organizers have used anger to win real change, from the civil rights movement to labor strikes. They aimed it at specific targets, with specific demands, alongside people they knew. You can keep that kind of anger during the fast. You’re cutting the kind you spend on strangers at 7 a.m.
“What if I slip?” You will. Log it and keep going.
What changed for me
I care about the same issues I cared about two years ago. I vote, I give money, and I argue in person with friends who disagree with me. I give those causes more of my time now than I did when I spent my mornings in the replies.
Your turn
Start the setup tonight. On Day 7, come back and leave two things in the comments: how many minutes a day you were spending on outrage, and the top source on your list.
I’ll share mine too.
And if you have a friend who sends you infuriating links at 7 a.m., forward this to them.
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place. You can read my AI disclosure here.
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