Infinite Jesture

Your online activism is making you (even more) depressed.

Not to be a too much of a bully but the most mentally ill women I know are currently whiling away their late twenties and early thirties performing sorrow and rage for their followers on Instagram. “Canva and its consequences have been a disaster for (the female population of) the human race," etc., I suspect you know women similar to the ones I’m speaking about. They seem to do little else but repost doom packaged as awareness and care. It’s always the most horrifying thing you’ve ever read, but juxtaposed against an eye-catching and usually trendy backdrop. In a sense, I get it: there is a very human drive to be politically conscious, and, historically, even a psychological benefit to it. As recently as 2009, psychologist Tim Kasser and colleagues released a study in which they found that students engaged in community-based activism reported higher life satisfaction and a stronger sense of purpose. Much has happened since then though. Mostly, the internet.

A mere sixteen years later, activism has shifted to a largely-online milieu. Rather than being associated with a renewed vigor and collective joy, this new kind of activism is increasingly linked to a boom in anxiety, helplessness, and depression. In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt notes that all of the psychological payoff realized by Kasser in his 2009 study is lost in the act of the scroll, leaving only an ambient despair and algorithmic outrage. (All by design, by the way, in order to keep us scrolling.)

We’re sick, we’re atomized, we’re starved for genuine connection. We’re suffocated by constant awareness about every horrible thing happening in the world, and yet rather than getting out from under it, we double down on exactly what is making us ill. More scrolling. More infographics. More “add post to story.”

Ever read Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism? Ever pretend to read it? Ever heard someone talking about it? I want to say that this is exactly what he was referring to in that book: welcome to the era of the Laschian Narcissist.

Nearly five decades ago, Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism, observed something increasingly prescient: modern liberalism has a habit of doubling down on whatever is making it sick. It diagnoses a cultural illness—think alienation, loneliness, performative selfhood—and then prescribes more of the same as its cure. Once you recognize the pattern, you can’t stop seeing it play out over and over again. For politically-aware digital natives such as you, me, and the girl sharing nonstop pastel platitudes, this looks like mistaking exposure for empathy, awareness for agency, and posting for participation. It’s not that these women on Instagram don’t “actually care,” it’s that we’ve all been conditioned to believe that constant performance is a form of care. On the surface, it is, but if you keep pulling on this thread, this means there is a moral value in remaining perpetually online, perpetually enraged, and perpetually “informed,” even if it leaves us all brittle and despairing. Actually, especially if it does. The anguish is a feature, not a bug, and it is this system that we must reject if we desire to keep our humanity intact.

In a way, Lasch is the Nostradamus of millennial and gen-z self-hatred: his narcissist is not the self-loving egotist defined by pop psychology, but the insecure, emotionally-famished foid trapped in a cycle of visibility and self-flagellation. The woman who, though she would never admit this to herself, let alone anyone else, has little to no identity apart from how she is perceived. Online activism is a perfect vehicle for this pathology: it “rewards” the most distressed, the most devastated, the most perpetually triggered with a small dopamine release. There is social capital in having your nervous system publicly fray day in and day out. This is because, in true Laschian fashion, the culture doesn’t just tolerate this dysfunction—it moralizes it. It turns burnout into virtue, exhaustion into status, and suffering into the highest form of political engagement. (Especially if the suffering belongs not to the sharer or the viewer, but to some distant other.) You must feel bad all the time to prove that you care. The ultimate aspiration is to somehow overcome the guilt of your privilege, but instead of actually doing something about it, you take a shortcut. The thing is though, the shortcut is not a consciousness-raising exercise: it’s self-harm with a moral alibi. And in the background, quietly and efficiently, the machine hums — profiting off every anxious impulse we mistake for action.

If Lasch diagnosed the disease, Silicon Valley monetized it.

The woman I’ve described—brittle, burnt out, locked in a cycle of psychic overexposure—she could not exist outside of an environment that’s been engineered to profit off of her misery. The more triggered and terrified she is, the more tethered to her feed she becomes. Some will say that this is an unfortunate side-effect digital culture. To me, it’s not. It is digital culture.

In a primal sense, online engagement lights up the same systems we once relied on to spot threats or chase sex. Outrage is virtually indistinguishable from arousal, and of course we’ll relentlessly pursue anything that feels good, even—and often, especially—if it hurts us. (That’s masochism, baby, and it’s having a moment right now.) While the malady of terminally online activism is bipartisan, it seems to have a particular hold on left-leaning women. This is because, in addition to women being the more empathetic sex, social psychologists have long observed that liberal-leaning individuals tend to have more expansive “moral circles,” meaning they feel more morally obligated to people and causes far beyond their immediate communities.¹ It’s noble, in theory. But in practice, it creates a vulnerability: a person whose empathy extends to the entire globe becomes, paradoxically, easier to emotionally manipulate than someone whose empathy is located closer and is, in that way, much more tangible.

The feed knows this. It doesn’t just show you horror, it shows you horror that matches your moral identity profile. It doesn’t just trigger you, it tells you that staying triggered is how you prove your virtue. It shows you OTHER things that should and will trigger you as well. You learn that opting out is a betrayal, and disengagement is a sin. A kind of holy compulsiveness sets in: the more distressed you are, the more you post; the more you post, the more the algorithm learns how to distress you; the more distressed you are, the more you double down in an attempt to claw your way back to some semblance of moral equilibrium. It seems normal because others are doing the same, all for fear of not being seen engaging in this new kind of ritual act of group initiation.

The feed becomes your confessional, then, your reality. It begins to resemble Bosch’s Harrowing of Hell with a modern aesthetic. You can’t look away. You can’t stop sharing. You can’t stop shouting into the void, even as it devours you. What’s worse than being devoured? Others thinking that you’re not “a decent fucking person,” okay?

The ultimate irony is that while we’re tied to the mast of these platforms, screeching about wealth inequality and whatnot, a billionaire proprietor is quietly profiting from our outrage. We track the flight paths of their private jets, rage-post about the emissions, and share infographics decrying carbon footprints —all while using platforms whose server farms burn untold megawatts to serve us those very infographics. The platforms we use to “raise awareness” are funded by our attention, and that funding buys the very jets we claim to despise. (Or, more tragically, the bombs.) We decry monopolistic power, but our dissent is the content. Our tap, tap, taps are the currency. And they become richer than we will ever be; not in spite of our outrage, but because of it. Meanwhile, our mental health and grip on reality quietly disintegrate in the background noise of a feed we can’t stop refreshing.

For all its performance of urgency, online activism is confoundingly weightless. It has the texture of generosity, but not the gravity. It asks nothing of us, aside from an expectation that we stay angry. We perform politics in 24-hour cycles, reposting statements from strangers we've never met about places we've never been (and will probably never go), speaking in the voice of a collective that doesn’t exist outside of the screen. We become “meme ideologists,” the nuance of true care is replaced by catchy talking points and emotive sloganeering. We can summarize our beliefs in statements that would be better suited for t-shirts. What we consider the profound is really just clever marketing. Under it all, the gestures are empty. Perhaps we know it, and this is why we feel empty too. But we passed the off-ramp several miles ago, and the brakes don’t work anymore.

The communities we build online are transient: we can leave as easily as we can join, and thusly, our presence is not as easily recognized or missed as in an irl community. There is no camaraderie built during a sweaty march, gathering with friends to make protest signs, no breaking bread to celebrate a win or mourn a loss. There’s just you, your phone, your feed, and the ambient dread of not doing enough—or worse, not being seen doing enough, because without the relational aspect of activism, that’s all that’s left. Our echo chambers already agree with us, but we keep speaking into them because… well, that’s all there is. Because.

We’ve lost the tactile, relational, embodied forms of action, the kind that used to make people feel stronger, more connected, more hopeful. Now we’re simply overwhelmed. Overwhelmed people don’t change the world—they scroll through it. Helplessly. Hopelessly.

To log off would not be to admit defeat, but to engage in an extreme act of defiance. It’s a refusal to participate in the emotional strip-mining that has become commonplace, something that might resemble activism and community-building but is really a poor simulacrum of it. Lasch warned us that modern liberalism moralizes dysfunction: it takes what’s breaking us and rebrands it as virtue. A near-endless stream of exposure, outrage, and performance. So what if we shut off the fire hose? What if the real act of care is not staying informed, but becoming unavailable and allocating our care to something else? What if the radical choice is to redirect that energy away from the algorithm and into your actual life? Volunteering with people who have no clout. Giving without expecting anything back. Not for optics, strategy, or a crumb of dopamine, but rather, because you can. It still matters, and this might be how we finally “suck out the poison.”

When you stop performing participation and actually start showing up again, the world is still here. Gorgeous, indifferent, and free. Not curated, not collapsed into content. You can—dare I say it—touch grass at a local park where no one cares about your hot take. Perhaps you can make a friend there who will bond with you over an issue you both care about, and you can do something about it IRL. Lasch wrote that the narcissist is trapped in a world of mirrors, incapable of real connection. How fitting that our phones act as mirrors both literally (made of glass) and symbolically (via the algorithms our activity shapes)?

Just because you care about something doesn’t mean everyone needs to know. The instinct to announce, to prove, to perform—that isn’t care. It’s conditioning. It’s the residue of a system that taught us our inner lives only matter when they’re made legible to everyone else. That your values don’t count unless they’re stamped, shared, and publicly witnessed? Reject it. It’s making you sad.

The pressure to perform our empathy, to externalize every moral impulse, isn’t just exhausting—it’s anxiety-inducing. It keeps us in a constant state of vigilance, scanning for the next crisis, the next carousel, the next moment we’re expected to respond to correctly. In a world obsessed with proof of virtue, the most radical thing you can do is care quietly.

So: call your senator. Make the meal. Show up to a march or something. Do what you need to do to live your values—but let go of the “pics or it didn’t happen” rule: it did happen, you were there, and that’s simply enough.

xo, e.m.

1. “The Moral Circle: Expanding or Contracting?” (Waytz, Dungan, Young, 2013)