Humanity’s Values is a reader-supported publication. Please consider subscribing as a way of supporting the delivery of the content you’re appreciating. Also, feel free to share and expand the community of reflective critcism. When faced with the perception of overwhelming difficulties, potential responses to meet them become smaller and smaller, with the result being that simply doing anything, and by anything is meant the most emotionally salient, becomes increasingly easy to justify. This is why, beyond the proximal anonymity afforded by being online, social media interactions can be so toxic. Anger provides a really nice feedback loop where it certainly feels like you’re doing something because the fight/flight system(s) has gotten involved. But that same anonymity also makes every problem perceptually bigger than it actually is, not least because it’s “out there” and larger than life, but the internet is just so huge that voices, even small ones, take on an overly important weight.