Turn off the Outrage Machine; focus on things you can control

By David McElroy · February 26, 2026

Every time you get outraged, someone makes money — and someone gains power.

Your outrage has a market value to a lot of people. News media, social media companies, politicians. They wouldn’t be crass enough — or honest enough — to put it that way, but it’s the truth.

Did you see what [Fill in the Blank] did today? Doesn’t that infuriate you? Isn’t it terrible? Aren’t you angry about it?

It doesn’t matter what the subject is. It doesn’t matter whether the report is fair or honest. It doesn’t matter if it’s completely made up. It doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong. All that matters is that you stay outraged — so the companies which make our mass media and social media can keep making money — and their political allies can use your outrage to seize more power over all of us

Why do you think you get these media services for free? It’s because you are their product. Social media companies and news media companies deliver your attention to advertisers. See? You are their product. As long as you’re paying attention, it doesn’t matter to them what you’re saying or thinking. They’re making money.

Outraging people about collective problems — things they can do nothing about — is popular, because it’s easy. I’m less interested these days in sparking political outrage and I’m more interested in talking about things individuals can choose to change by their personal decisions.

I come from a background in the news media, but I worked in newspapers at a time when the Outrage Machine hadn’t taken over. In the day of 24-hour cable news and social media which seems to suck some people in every hour of the day, that has changed.

CNN wants you outraged. Fox News wants you outraged. MS NOW wants you outraged. They all have a story to sell — and they relish an outrageous story the most because it attracts the most viewers. You might think the news outlet that agrees with you is preaching truth and it’s those other horrible people who are lying, but you’re missing the point. Yes, they have a point of view — because that’s popular with their target audience — but they don’t exist to make you happy.

They exist to sell ads and to make money.

There was a time — more than a decade ago — when I wrote stories here which outraged people. Why did I do that? Well, it’s what everybody was doing and it attracted the readership of people who agreed with me. It gave me a larger readership. It even had Rush Limbaugh and other national pundits talking about one of my stories back in 2012. It got me new followers.

Isn’t that what this is all about?

After several years of pursuing that path — from a broadly libertarian point of view — I realized that it wasn’t where I needed to be. I don’t believe it’s where you need to be either — as a content producer or as a media consumer. (I lost about 75 percent of my old regular readers after I quit writing about outrage all the time, but I know it was the right thing to do. I’m writing for an entirely different audience today.)

I try to ask myself whether there’s anything I can do about something. If something is within my control, it might be worth me spending time and effort on. If something is outside of my control, it’s almost certainly not worth my time or energy, even if it’s outrageous.

Can I do anything about the partisan political games in Washington? No, I can’t. As you were growing up, you were fed a lie. You were told that you had a responsibility to learn all you could about what’s going on in the world, because — you were told — you could change things.

You can’t change things in politics. Even if you could magically get Candidate A elected instead of Candidate B, it’s a lie that anything of substance is going to change. Politics is a waste of your time and energy. It’s nothing but entertainment — and you’re kept tied to it by the media keeping you outraged, so you will keep watching ads.

So what’s worth your time?

Those are the things I try to write about here, from the vantage point of one person struggling to make himself a better and more emotionally healthy person. You can control how you treat other people. You can control who you choose to love. You can control whether you pursue better mental health or not. You can control whether you choose to follow the crowd’s values or pursue values that will last and bring you real joy and happiness.

Learn to ask yourself my question. It’s simple:

Can I do anything about this thing?

You don’t have enough time in this life. It’s difficult to wake up and see the world around you honestly and it’s even harder to become emotionally healthy and mature. It’s easy to marinate in the emotions of outrage, but it’s useless — and it wastes the precious time you have left in this life.

Place a higher value on your time and your attention. You don’t have to be “productive” by the world’s standards, but you do need to know which things matter and which things don’t.

If you can change something — if it can contribute toward creating a better life for yourself and those you love — then it might be worth your time. But if you’re just outraged about something you can do nothing about, you are wasting your precious time.

Turn off the Outrage Machine. Pay attention to the things which are going to matter.

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I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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