The Economics of Outrage: Why Bad News Wins

You wake up. You check your phone.
Another notification lights up the screen: “Breaking: Another disaster unfolds.”
You tap it. Then another story. And another.

Two hours disappear into a spiral of crisis, conflict, and catastrophe. Your body feels heavy: shoulders tight, jaw locked. You close the app, drained. Yet, tomorrow morning, you’ll do it all over again.

Why do we keep consuming content that makes us miserable? And why does every platform seem designed to feed us more of it?

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Your brain isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what evolution designed it to do.

Vervet monkeys in Africa have distinct alarm calls for different predators: one sound for leopards, another for eagles, a third for snakes. These calls are intentional and socially directed, given to warn friends of danger. The monkeys who pay attention to threats survive. The ones who ignore warnings become lunch.

Our ancestors faced similar pressures. Psychologists call this the negativity bias. Our brains prioritize negative information because, evolutionarily, missing a threat was far more costly than missing an opportunity.

Studies by psychologist John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago showed that our brains respond more strongly to negative stimuli than to positive ones, and that this response produces a greater surge in electrical activity. If your ancestor saw 100 ripe berries and one tiger, which should grab their attention?

The problem? We no longer live in that world. But our alarm systems haven’t updated. Every notification, headline, and trending topic triggers the same ancient circuitry. We’re vervet monkeys screaming “EAGLE!” at our phones.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about what he called “the dizziness of freedom”. It is that queasy feeling when you realize you could do anything, which paradoxically makes it harder to do something.

He used the example of someone standing at the edge of a cliff. You fear falling, yes. But there’s also a terrifying impulse. You could jump! The mere possibility creates anxiety.

Modern media feeds us an infinite number of possibilities for catastrophe. Every crisis becomes personal because it could happen to you. Climate disaster. Political collapse. Economic ruin. The algorithm ensures you never run out of cliffs to stand on.

But here’s the philosophical twist: Martin Heidegger drew a line between fear (which is always about something specific) and anxiety (which is a general, unsettling dread about existence itself). Doom scrolling transforms concrete fears into ambient anxiety. You’re no longer preparing for specific threats. You’re just... anxious. About everything. All the time.

The platforms know this. Anxiety keeps you scrolling.

A 2024 study analyzing nearly 100 million social media posts found that users are 1.91 times more likely to share links to negative news articles. Negative online news articles are shared more on social media. Another research on over 105,000 headline variations found that each additional negative word in a headline increased click-through rates by 2.3%.

On TikTok, news videos with negative sentiment generate significantly higher engagement: more likes, comments, and shares.

The algorithm notices. It learns. It optimizes for outrage.

A 2024 study of Twitter’s ranking algorithm found it amplifies emotionally charged, divisive content that makes users feel worse about their political opponents. Not because the engineers are evil. Because engagement is the metric, and outrage engages.

The 2024 Digital News Report found that 39% of people now selectively avoid news, up 10 points since 2017. They describe news as repetitive, anxiety-inducing, and disempowering. We’re caught in a feedback loop: the more negative content performs, the more gets produced, the more exhausted we become.

📜 Quote: “Anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.”

Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 1844

📊 Study: Psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman found that adverse events have twice the psychological impact of similarly sized positive events.

🎨 Artifact: The pull-to-refresh gesture. That downward swipe promises new content. It’s a slot machine in your pocket, optimized to deliver mostly bad news because that’s what keeps you pulling.

😂 Meme: “Me: I should go to bed. My brain: But what if you checked the news one more time to ensure the world is still ending?”

🤔 Prompt: What would change if you only checked news once a day, at a set time, from a single trusted source instead of letting it ambush you through notifications?

I’m curious: what’s the worst doom scroll you’ve had this month? The one where you emerged two hours later feeling hollowed out? Reply and tell me what pulled you in and why you couldn’t stop. No judgment, we’ve all been there.

Your brain evolved to scan for threats in a world with maybe three real dangers per week. Now it’s processing 3,000 crises per hour, none of which you can directly affect. That’s not information consumption. That’s self-harm dressed up as staying informed.

The platforms profit from your anxiety. Literally, more engagement equals more ad revenue. Every headline is engineered to grab your alarm system by the throat.

But here’s the thing: you already know this. Reading it won’t change your behavior. Next time you open your phone, you’ll probably still check the news.

So maybe the better question isn’t “how do I stop?” but “what would I rather feel?” Because the economics of outrage will keep running until we stop paying with our attention.

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