What Is Happening to Us?

What Is Happening to Us? A reflection on why people feel so mean, so brittle, and so ready to blame

I keep hearing people ask the same question, usually with a kind of tired bewilderment in their voice: what is happening to us?

Not in the grand, philosophical, “pour me a red wine and let’s discuss the collapse of civilisation” sense, although I am not opposed to that conversation under the right lighting. I mean in the ordinary sense. The supermarket sense. The school car park sense. The traffic sense. The comment thread sense. The meeting-room sense. The moment where someone snaps at a receptionist, humiliates a waiter, abuses a stranger online, turns a disagreement into a blood sport, or speaks about another group of people as if they are a problem to be managed rather than humans to be understood.

There is a sharpness in the air. People seem more ready to bite. More willing to shame. More comfortable being cruel in public. More likely to confuse being blunt with being honest and being offensive with being brave. And it is tempting to say, “Well, people are just awful now,” then put the kettle on and retreat into whatever small corner of peace we can still control. But that answer feels too lazy. It lets us sound morally superior without asking the harder question: why are so many people becoming so emotionally available to meanness?

Because I do not think most of what we are seeing is strength. I think much of it is fragility wearing army boots.

People are frightened. They are tired. They feel less safe than they know how to say. They are living with a sense that the future has become less negotiable, less generous, less available to ordinary people. They feel their lives being squeezed by forces too large to touch: housing markets, banks, supermarkets, energy prices, corporate landlords, platform algorithms, political donors, global instability, climate anxiety, workplace precarity, and the quiet humiliation of doing everything “right” and still feeling behind.

Most people do not walk around saying, “I am experiencing democratic disenfranchisement under conditions of corporate consolidation.” Thank God, because no one needs that sentence shouted across the fruit section. But they feel it. They feel it when the grocery bill climbs again. They feel it when the rent rises but the wage doesn’t. They feel it when a young person works hard and still cannot see a doorway into housing. They feel it when every system seems to have an app, a surcharge, a queue, a chatbot, and nobody with enough authority to actually help.

And when people feel powerless over the big things, they often reach for power over the small things.

They control the moment. They control the tone. They control the person in front of them. They control the conversation by becoming aggressive. They reclaim a tiny scrap of agency by making someone else feel smaller. The anger is rarely proportionate because the moment is not really the moment. The moment is simply where the pressure finally found a crack.

This is why anxiety matters in this sad tale of modern life. Anxiety is fear attached to a future that has not yet arrived. It is the body rehearsing danger before danger has fully shown itself. It asks, what if I lose what I have? What if I can’t afford what comes next? What if my children struggle? What if I become irrelevant? What if the country changes in ways I cannot understand? What if I am left behind and nobody notices?

When anxiety is held well, it can become thoughtfulness, planning, action, reflection, even courage. But when anxiety has nowhere healthy to go, it derails. It hardens. It looks for a costume. And very often, that costume is anger.

Anger feels more powerful than fear. Anger gives us a target. Anger lets us point. Anger lets us blame. Anger lets us feel, for a few seconds, as if we are no longer the vulnerable one. But if we do not understand what is underneath it, anger becomes a public hazard. It leaks into traffic, into workplaces, into family conversations, into politics, into social media, into the way people speak to nurses, teachers, hospitality staff, call-centre workers, neighbours, partners, children, strangers.

And yes, some people need to learn basic manners. Full disclosure: I remain in favour of manners. I would support a national manners revival with biscuits, chairs, and perhaps a certificate for those who complete the advanced module on “not speaking to teenagers at checkouts as if they personally caused inflation because of their extravagant taste for smash avocado with poached eggs.” But what we are facing is not only a manners problem. It is a power problem. A belonging problem. A future problem.

This is also where leadership enters the room, and not quietly. Leaders matter because leaders set permission. When leaders sneer at empathy, people learn to sneer. When leaders reduce whole communities to threats, people learn to dehumanise. When leaders speak in blame rather than hope, they train the public imagination to look for enemies rather than solutions. It is true that certain political movements and media ecosystems have given people permission to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, cruel, conspiratorial and proudly ungenerous.

But if we stop at blaming leaders, we miss the deeper wound. Leaders can give permission, but permission only works when it lands somewhere ready to receive it. The bigger question is why so many people are ready to be recruited by blame in the first place.

The answer, I think, is that too many people feel they have lost authorship over their own lives.

They do not feel like citizens shaping a future. They feel like customers in systems they cannot leave, workers in economies they cannot influence, renters in markets they cannot survive, users on platforms designed to inflame them, voters asked to choose between parties that often seem more frightened of donors than of public despair. They are told they are free, but the freedom on offer can feel strangely hollow. Free to choose between unaffordable options. Free to compete in rigged markets. Free to express themselves online while algorithms monetise their outrage. Free to vote every few years, then watch the same interests somehow remain beautifully protected.

That kind of freedom starts to feel like being handed a menu in a restaurant where everything costs more than you earn.

So, when blame merchants arrive, their message is seductive. They offer simplicity in a world that feels impossible to understand. They say that your life is hard because of them. They say that you would be safe if they were controlled. They say that you would be respected if they knew their place. They say that you are not powerless; you are being robbed by those people over there.

And notice how often the target is not the most powerful person in the room. It is the most visible difference. The migrant. The queer kids. The woman with authority. The public servant. The person on welfare. The teacher. The young person who speaks differently. The neighbour whose culture feels unfamiliar. The cyclist, because apparently every civilisation needs a villain and sometimes it has a helmet.

This is the oldest trick in politics: take real pain and attach it to the wrong cause.

Housing is broken, so blame migrants. Wages are stagnant, so blame migrants. Public services are stretched, so blame the poor. Men feel lost, so blame women. Communities feel uncertain, so blame diversity. People feel lonely, so blame “woke culture.” Meanwhile, concentrated power sits quietly at the back of the room, sipping something expensive and enjoying the show.

That is not rebellion. That is misdirected grief.

And grief is everywhere. We are grieving futures we thought we were promised. We are grieving the idea that work would lead to security. We are grieving the loss of community spaces where people once practised being human together. We are grieving trust in institutions. We are grieving a slower life that may never have been perfect but at least felt more legible. We are grieving the possibility that our children may not inherit a better deal than we did.

But because grief is uncomfortable, many people convert it into contempt. Contempt is easier. Contempt gives you distance. Contempt says, “I am above this.” Contempt says, “They are the problem.” Contempt lets you avoid the more tender truth: I am scared, I feel small, and I do not know what to do.

This is one of the great emotional failures of our time. We have created societies with enormous complexity and very few shared places to metabolise it. The old rehearsal spaces for civic life have weakened. Local clubs, unions, churches for some, community centres, high streets, neighbourhood rituals, extended family networks, third places where you could be known without buying too much; none of these were perfect, and many excluded people who deserved better. But they did give humans somewhere to practise belonging.

When those spaces disappear, the need does not disappear with them. It goes looking elsewhere. Often in this modern times, it goes online, into algorithmic tribes where people can feel connected through shared contempt. These spaces offer belonging without patience, identity without responsibility, certainty without wisdom, and power without tenderness. They teach people that cruelty is clarity and suspicion is intelligence.

That is why public meanness now feels contagious. People are not only expressing anger; they are performing it for an imagined audience. The person abusing someone in a comment thread is often not really speaking to that person. They are signalling to their tribe: see me, I know who to hate. It is not conversation. It is membership behaviour.

And still, underneath it, I think there is a longing to matter.

People want to feel their life has weight. They want to feel seen by leaders who do more than manage decline with a press release. They want to believe their children will have a life, not just a subscription plan. They want to believe effort means something. They want to believe fairness is not just a word we bring out before elections and put away once the photos are taken.

When that hope collapses, meanness becomes a cheap substitute for agency.

So, what do we do with that? We begin by refusing to excuse cruelty while still being brave enough to understand it. Understanding is not permission. Boundaries still matter. Harm still needs interruption. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, scapegoating, bullying and the casual public sadism now dressed up as “just saying what everyone thinks” must still be challenged. No one gets a free pass to wound others simply because they are frightened.

But if all we do is scold the symptom, we will keep producing the disease.

A decent society must make decency easier. That is not soft thinking. It is structurally serious. People are more generous when they are not terrified. They are more curious when they are not humiliated. They are more tolerant when they do not feel erased. They are more future-focused when the future does not look like a locked door with a surcharge attached.

This means the work is bigger than telling people to be nice. “Be kind” is lovely, but it becomes ridiculous when laminated in a workplace where everyone knows the manager is the actual hazard. We need more than slogans. We need housing people can afford, wages people can live on, services people can access, public institutions people can trust, media systems that do not profit from panic, and leaders who can tell the truth without feeding the worst instincts in the crowd.

We need leaders who can paint pictures of hope. Not fantasy. Not “everything is wonderful” nonsense delivered by someone who has not bought their own groceries since 2009. Real hope. Adult hope. The kind that says: yes, this is hard; yes, the systems are strained; yes, change is frightening; but here is the path, here is the work, here is what we owe each other, and here is how we move without turning on the vulnerable.

Because hope is not mood lighting. Hope is direction.

At the human scale, we also have work to do. We can slow down before we snap. We can ask what fear is sitting underneath our anger. We can refuse the cheap pleasure of humiliating someone. We can stop mistaking cruelty for courage. We can be firm without being vicious. We can set boundaries without needing enemies. We can remember that every person we meet is carrying some private version of pressure, and while that does not excuse bad behaviour, it might help us respond with more wisdom than the moment deserves.

We can also choose to interrupt the scripts we are being handed. When someone tries to sell us an enemy, we can ask who benefits from our anger. When someone points us toward a vulnerable group, we can look back toward the system. When someone tells us cruelty is honesty, we can ask why their truth needs a victim. When someone tells us there is no alternative, we can recognise the oldest language of power: resignation.

Because we are not helpless. Not entirely. Not yet.

And perhaps that is the most important part of this learning journey. The fact that people are asking “what is happening to us?” means something in us still notices the bruise. We have not yet become so numb that meanness feels normal. We still expect better from one another, even if we are tired. That expectation matters. It is a small sign of moral life.

So, back to the original question: what is happening to us?

We are frightened. We are tired. We are being squeezed. We are being sold enemies because too many powerful people do not want us looking at systems. We are watching anxiety come out sideways as anger. We are watching people who feel powerless try to feel powerful by being sharp, suspicious and cruel. We are watching public life reward emotional discharge and call it truth.

But that is not the whole story…

We are also capable of noticing. We can pause. We can refuse the script. We can rebuild agency where people feel helpless, belonging where people feel abandoned, and hope where leaders have offered only blame. We can make public life less poisonous one interaction at a time, while also demanding systems that stop producing so much fear in the first place.

Maybe the first act of resistance is deceptively simple: refuse to become mean just because the world feels unsafe. Refuse to let anxiety turn you into someone else’s wound. Refuse to hand your humanity over to the loudest bidder.

That will not fix everything. But it is a place to begin.

My Rambles with Shane Warren — sometimes a critique, sometimes a confession, always an invitation to think differently. If we are brave enough to strip away the gold-plated gospel and return to the radical root, perhaps we’ll find that the real miracle was never in the mansions or the jets, but in neighbours who refuse to abandon one another. That, to me, is where faith and resilience actually lives.

www.shanewarren.com

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