Outrage: The Stories That Distract Us From What Matters

In 2016, someone tried to steal parts from my car.

if it had been a random theft in a dark parking lot, I’d probably have forgiven them. But, this was an authorised Honda service centre, in broad daylight, with my car in their custody after an accident. We caught them mid-act, our car parked in a neighbourhood notorious for spare parts black markets, bonnets open, a spare battery sitting on our front seat. The records showed the car had never left the service centre. The receipt they hurriedly produced had the wrong vehicle number. The service manager, when we confronted him, was rude. Dismissive. Told us we didn’t understand their processes.

I came home and I wrote about it.

The post went viral. It was not viral by today’s standards, where viral means millions. Viral by 2016 blogger standards, which meant it travelled far outside my usual audience, got picked up in automotive forums, shared thousands of times, and for a brief window, became the thing people were talking about. People walked up to me in events and told me they read the post. That was 2016 vitality at its peak. People shared their own horror stories. Others advised me to sue, file police complaints, demand a new car entirely. The service center eventually reached out.

It was the most-read thing I had written in years of blogging. And something about watching that post travel made me sit with a question I hadn’t expected.

Because here is the thing about outrage. It feels like action. It feels productive. You are furious, you say so, other people agree, the agreement multiplies, and for a moment it feels like something is happening. Something is being done. You participated. You were on the right side. The feeling is real and it is satisfying and it is also, almost entirely, about you.

The post about my Honda experience got more engagement than anything I had written in twenty two years of blogging. Twenty two years. Posts about motherhood, about books that changed how I think, about navigating work and identity and the particular exhaustion of being a woman who refuses to stop. All of it, collectively, travelled less far than one post about a service centre trying to steal my spare parts.

That told me something. About how we consume stories. About what we reward. And about what outrage actually is, underneath the righteousness.

Outrage is escapism.

It gives you a clear villain, a clean side to be on, and a feeling of having done something, without requiring you to do very much at all. You share the post. You type something emphatic in the comments. You feel briefly and satisfyingly certain. And then you move on, because the next thing to be outraged about has already arrived, and it is just as clear, just as clean, just as ready for you.

Meanwhile, the actual difficulty of your day is still sitting where you left it.

This is what I think we don’t say about outrage. That it is, at least partly, a way of not looking at something else. The person who spends forty minutes furious about a celebrity’s opinion is not thinking about the email they’ve been avoiding, or the conversation they need to have, or the thing they promised themselves they would start this week and haven’t. The outrage filled that space very efficiently. It felt like engagement. It was in fact, the opposite of engagement. It was a very loud, very satisfying way of standing still.

And we have become extraordinarily good at finding things to be outraged about.

Someone shares a personal experience and it becomes a commentary on society. Someone expresses a preference and it becomes an attack on everyone who doesn’t share it. Someone makes a joke and it becomes evidence of their fundamental character. We have shortened the distance between noticing something and being offended by it to almost nothing, and we have built entire social structures around rewarding the speed of that reaction. The first person to be outraged gets the most attention. The most outraged person gets the most agreement. Nuance doesn’t travel. Fury does.

Being offended has also become its own kind of role. It comes with immediate social validation. You noticed something. You said something. You are the kind of person who cares, who pays attention, who won’t just let things slide. It requires no follow through and produces an immediate sense of moral clarity, which is an extremely comfortable place to stand. Much more comfortable than sitting with the actual complexity of a situation, or your own role in it, or the fact that most things worth caring about don’t have a clean villain and a satisfying ending.

The things that actually need our attention don’t look like outrage content. They are slower. Messier. They don’t resolve in a news cycle or a comment thread. They require sustained attention and the willingness to be uncomfortable for longer than feels good. They also, often, require us to examine something about ourselves, which is the part we are most eager to skip.

So we reach for the cleaner story instead. The one with a clear wrong and an obvious villain and a crowd already assembled. We arrive, we participate, we leave. The next one is already loading.

I made a quiet decision after the Honda post to not chase the feeling it produced. To not reach for outrage as the tool whenever I wanted to be heard. Because what I noticed, watching that post travel, was that the people who arrived for the anger, didn’t stay. They came for the fire. When the fire was out, they left. The people who stay are the ones who came for something else entirely.

I still have strong opinions. I share them. But there is a difference between an opinion and an outrage, and the difference is not in the strength of the feeling. It is in what the feeling is doing for you. Whether it is moving something forward or filling a space where something harder should be.

The question worth sitting with is not whether your outrage is justified. It probably is. Most outrage is, at least partially. The question is what it is replacing. What you are not looking at while you are busy being furious about this. What is sitting quietly on the other side of the comment section, waiting for you to finish.

Because the thing that actually needs your attention is rarely the thing that arrived loudest. It is usually the thing you have been successfully avoiding for quite some time.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.