Jason Pargin: "Are we not angry enough?"

Transcript of https://www.tiktok.com/@jasonkpargin/video/7480212126619946270

here's something incredibly important here because the very first replies are people saying things like, that's ridiculous, clearly we're not angry enough about climate change because we're not doing enough about it.

What I'm about to say is going to totally change the life of at least one person watching this. With every strong emotion you can feel, there's two versions of it and most people don't recognize this. There's a fun version of the emotion and there's a real version and it's really easy to tell the difference. I'll give you a ridiculous example. If I see a guy my age who's just totally ripped, I feel envy, but what I feel does not motivate me to start getting up at 5 a.m. to work out for three hours and to eat nothing but egg whites and protein powder all day. When I said to myself, I wish I had this, I didn't really mean it. I did feel the emotion. I saw this and thought, wow, I wish that was me. In other words, the emotion was enough. The emotion satisfied me. It did not motivate me to long-term, tedious, boring action.

I can drive by somebody's house and they've got like a beautiful waterfall and landscaping in the yard and I can say, well, I wish I had that in my house, but it does not motivate me to get down on my knees and pull weeds and plant stuff in the hot sun and lay down these rocks and all that.

When he says the problem is not a lack of anger, it sounds ridiculous because for some of you, your social media feeds are nothing but outrage all the time. But for 99.99% of us, it is not the kind of outrage that would motivate us to go attend a boring city council meeting every single week. That other kind of anger is the fun anger. It is its own reward. It is fun to sit around and imagine one day there being a revolution or imagining terrible things happening to the powerful people you hate. The system does not fear that kind of anger at all. The system is terrified of the kind of anger that will motivate you to tolerate boredom and tedium. The kind of anger that motivates you to spend the rest of your life studying and becoming an expert and making yourself valuable in society so that you have power to affect change. The kind of anger that motivates you to sacrifice fun for discipline.

And to be clear, this is not just about politics. There are people in terrible marriages who are angry every single day, but they are satisfied to stay in the relationship and just feel that anger every day. It does not motivate them to do the difficult work of rebuilding their life. The way you control people in the social media era is by convincing them that just feeling the emotion is the work and never admitting to yourself that what you're actually experiencing is entertainment because affecting real change in your life or in the world is not fun at all.