I’m filming this video a few days after Trump’s inauguration and I’m watching my news and social media feeds filling up with information about all the executive orders he’s signing and what they mean and which parts of Project 2025 these things check off and wow is it stressful! Because yeah, I made that video about Project 2025 last year where I talked about why it was important and how no one should believe Republicans when they claimed they knew nothing about it, seeing as it was literally written by Trump’s friends and associates who had helped direct his first administration, bla bla bla, the US elected Trump anyway and now it’s happening.
And there is no schadenfreude. Because to get satisfaction from being right, one would have to not just see the people who ignored you suffer, which is already happening, but one also needs to see the people understanding that they’re suffering because of the choice they made. As an example, if you tell a crab not to climb into a pot of boiling water, there’s no schadenfreude when it does so anyway, because the crab has no understanding of what it’s doing. It just dies a stupid and painful and possibly delicious death. I know, I’m sorry vegan friends, I grew up in crab country and I can’t help it.
And I saw this happen with COVID. Dumbasses claimed it was just a cold, that the vaccines were evil, that ivermectin would protect them, and then they got horribly sick and went on ventilators and died, and I guarantee that the vast majority of them went to their deaths blaming Barack Obama for some reason. DEI did it.
It’s such a huge lesson and I can’t believe I took so long to learn it. I blame films. The most satisfying bad guy deaths involve the bad guy having at least a moment of realization before he dies: Hans Gruber’s shocked face as the watch comes undone and he plummets to his death, or Iosef spending a good 30 minutes running and hiding and cowering and sweating before John Wick finally, dispassionately does him in.
But in real life? Alt-right MAGA degenerate James Woods’s house burned down because of anthropogenic global warming, and as he’s crying on CNN he’s also posting on Xitter that it’s really the fault of, yep, DEI. There is no realization. There is no comeuppance. There is only brain rot.
So yeah, that’s how I’m feeling right now. Just kind of overwhelmed by the news and feeling deeply annoyed by it all, feeling like if someone says the wrong word to me I’ll bite their head off. In fact, yesterday while reading the news my dog was pacing around my desk and whimpering for attention and I actually snapped at him to leave me alone, and apparently I was so sharp with him that he actually did. He left me alone. He walked right out of my office.
So instead of talking about any of the news that’s making me so short-tempered, I figured I’d find a random new study to talk about. Let’s see, here’s one: Irritability and Social Media Use in US Adults. Oh. Huh. Okay.
In this study published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers examined surveys from more than 42,000 American adults, comparing the frequency with which they read or post on social media with markers of irritability, using the “Brief Irritability Test.” In this test, subjects are asked to indicate how often they “have felt or behaved in the following ways, during the past two weeks, including today,” with the statements:
“I have been grumpy,”
“I have been feeling like I might snap,”
“Other people have been getting on my nerves,”
“Things have been bothering me more than they normally do,” and
“I have been feeling irritable.”
“Frequency is scored between 1 and 6, from never to always, with individual items summed to yield a total score between 5 and 30, with higher scores indicating greater irritability.”
Then there’s a bonus question about whether or not you’ve yelled at an otherwise blameless and adorable animal who you love more than life itself, at which point you add an additional 100 points and go to jail for no fewer than 90 days.
Sure enough, the researchers found an association between social media use and irritability, even when subjects were just viewing posts and not participating, and even when controlling for things like anxiety and depression. They found that engaging in political discussions also increased irritability, although just following political news resulted in a slight decrease in irritability.
The biggest missing piece of this study is correlation. We don’t know if frequent use of social media MAKES people more irritable, or if irritable people are more likely to spend more time on social media. There might also be some third factor, like staying up all night to be on social media so you don’t get enough sleep, which makes you more irritable. That said, the authors hypothesize that it’s bidirectional: the apps are designed to make you keep using them, so it’s possible that you’re more likely to keep going back to something that is irritating the shit out of you, because the stupid electric meat that drives our bodies around spent most of its history evolving to survive tiger attacks instead of developing a reward center for doing things that are good for you.
I’m no fan of most evolutionary psychology, of course, because my ancestors on the savannah had to learn to fight just-so stories to survive, but I do think there’s something to be said for the idea that our brains aren’t exactly well “designed” to handle a firehose of bad news and worse opinions blasting us in the face 24 hours a day.
I’m very lucky in that my job is to learn new things and share them with you, and I get to do it more or less on my own schedule. But when it comes to dealing with that firehose, it’s tough, because it’s unfortunately a part of the deal. So after thinking about all of this, I’ve decided to try out two tactics: for a start, I’m only going to read social media feeds during work hours, for work. And secondly, I’m going to acknowledge that it makes me irritable and try to notice that happening, so that I can take a break and relax. By, you know, maybe playing with my dog for a bit like he’s asking, because he can probably tell when I’m stressed out.
