The Era of Anxiety - 1
The truth that 90s advertising and music videos preached was simple.
“Sex sells.”
Want attention? Give people stimulation. Desire is fast. Bodies do not need persuasion. Even for a moment, eyes stop. The market of that era understood human desire well, so it sold it openly. Not because it was more refined or more vulgar, but because it was the most immediate method.
Today we live in an age with the opposite kind of honesty. You no longer need to put raw desire on display to capture attention. There are more than enough other ways. And yet the market has discovered a new truth.
“Hate is the new Sex.”
Instead of desire, there is anger. Instead of sensuality, contempt. Instead of seduction, stigma. In some ways, this is even more efficient than it was in the 1990s. Desire depends on taste, but anger is universal. Desire requires attraction. Anger only requires reaction. Clicks, comments, shares, watch time. Platforms reward all of it.
But this shift cannot be explained by simply saying that “the world has become harsher.” There is a specific atmosphere to this era. Anxiety, deprivation, helplessness. As the future grows blurrier, people want explanations. The problem is that real hardship has become harder to explain. Why do housing prices keep rising? Why does work feel so unstable? Why do healthcare and education feel so suffocating? The causes are complex. Responsibility is scattered. Solutions are slow.
In that situation, what feels sweetest is not a long explanation but a short conclusion. Hate delivers that conclusion with clarity. “That is the problem.” The force of that sentence is stronger than we like to admit. Anxiety is vague. Hate is sharp.
That does not mean anger is wrong. Often, anger is justified. Society is genuinely unbalanced, and many grievances come from real disruptions to everyday life. The issue lies in the direction anger takes. Anger should move upward toward broken systems and structures, but instead it often leaks sideways. Rather than confronting the system above us, we choose far too easily to fight the person next to us.
Think about economy seats on airplanes. The debate over reclining is always heated. One person calls it a “right.” Another calls it “violence.” But the more intense the argument becomes, the more something else fades from view. The design decisions of airlines, their profit models, the gaps in regulation that produced this situation. Those issues are distant, complex, and unlikely to change quickly. The seat in front of you or behind you is close, and anger lands immediately. The structure builds the stage, but passengers fight the war. The moment is filmed, circulated on platforms, and judged in comment sections. Conflict becomes content. Content that hijacks attention and triggers dopamine.
Tipping culture follows the same path. In North America, tipping was once framed as a “gesture of gratitude.” Today it functions as part of wages. The problem is not the percentage itself, but the ambiguity of what tipping is. A payment screen flashes “Tip,” and the higher options sit there like default choices. Food prices have already risen. Taxes and service charges are added. And then another screen appears, quietly asking, “What kind of person are you?” In that moment, tipping stops being payment and turns into judgement.
Consumer frustration tends to point upward. The argument is not that servers are the problem, but that the system fails to guarantee a living wage. Many servers respond differently. “If you cannot tip, do not dine out.” The statement sounds aggressive, but it is also the language of people trying to survive inside the structure they were given.
What matters here is not who is right. It is the direction of anger. The roots of this conflict are embedded in the hierarchy above. Wage design, employer responsibility, regulatory failure. But the fight that actually takes place unfolds between customers and servers. In the brief moment when the bill arrives, people stop evaluating the system and start evaluating each other. “Why are you demanding so much?” collides with “Why can you not even pay this?” At this point, a familiar exchange often appears.
A: “Service isn’t charity.”
B: “If service isn’t charity, then don’t ask for donations.”
In other words, if service is not charity, then do not demand unpaid giving. The sharpness of this response lies in how it pulls the issue out of moral language and returns it to contractual terms. If tipping is a donation, it cannot be coerced. If it is wages, it must be clearly written into the structure. The problem is that tipping is spoken about as a voluntary gift while functioning in practice like an obligation. Few things are stranger than a donation that behaves like a duty.
This dynamic burns especially well on platforms. Videos criticizing excessive tipping provoke anger. Videos of servers pushing back provoke more anger. Comment sections quickly turn into moral courtrooms. Who is rude. Who is exploitative. Who deserves to eat out. Tipping stops being a policy issue and becomes a test of character. Anger turns into content. Views accumulate.
There is another subtle shift as well. Tipping culture is slowly spreading into Europe and parts of Asia. Even in places where service fees were traditionally included in prices, payment terminals now display a “Tip” option. People instinctively resist. This feels less like cultural exchange and more like importing a system that shifts insecurity and responsibility onto individuals.
Noise between floors is another face of the same phenomenon. The roots of the problem often lie in poor construction and weak accountability. And yet the conflict almost always plays out between upstairs and downstairs neighbors. One side asks, “Why are you stomping?” The other replies, “What are we supposed to do, we have children.” It is difficult to say either side is simply wrong. What matters is how proximity erodes humanity. A design failure turns into a moral trial between neighbors. Complaints that should rise upward spill sideways instead.
Anti-immigrant sentiment follows the same logic. Immigration is fundamentally a policy domain. Labor markets, housing, welfare, education, integration support. But what people feel is not policy language. It is the weight of daily life. Rising rent. Longer waits. Shrinking budgets. Rapidly changing neighborhoods. That lived experience cannot simply be dismissed as “prejudice.” The decisive moment comes when it stops being framed as variables and hardens into identity. “They are just like that.” Variables can be adjusted. Negative identities invite exclusion. At that point, the issue stops being policy and becomes war. War spreads easily. War creates quick bonds. War makes money.
International conflicts follow a similar route on platforms. War is so large and complex that individuals feel powerless. Powerlessness seeks action. Action looks for symbols. Sports and cultural spaces become moral testing grounds. Boycotts compress complicated reality into “for or against.” The compression is fast, but the cost is high. Stigmas form easily. Sides harden. Secondary hostility finds room to grow. Justice drifts toward a contest over who looks more “correct.” And that spectacle generates views once again.
Cancel culture is no exception. In principle, there are many moments when large structures should be held responsible first. In practice, what burns is usually a single individual. Individuals are easy to turn into stories. Easy to project anger onto. Easy to resolve with quick verdicts. Structures are slower, harder to narrate, and less reactive. In platform environments, justice often follows whatever target burns best. Not the powerful, but the combustible.
If the 1990s “Sex sells” described a market of desire, today “Hate is the new Sex” describes a market of anxiety. Desire sold attraction. Anxiety sells hostility. Desire whispered, “I want more.” Hostility urges, “I want to push someone out.” And that urge often feels like an answer. Anxious people want answers. But the answers that feel most convincing are often just the easiest ones.
That is why this era offers so many examples. Economy seat conflicts, tipping disputes, noise between floors, immigration tensions, boycotts, cancellations. They are all variations of the same pattern. A problem that begins in structure goes looking for a scapegoat. Anger aimed at the scapegoat turns back into content. Solutions drift farther away. Hostility moves closer. At that point, anger loses its direction. Anger that cannot rise upward stabs sideways and then recirculates as an apparent answer, creating the next scapegoat.
This is not an argument for eliminating anger. It is an argument for checking its direction when it spikes. Are you aiming at rules and design that can be changed, or at the nearest face? When fights end between passenger and passenger, when noise becomes a moral trial between neighbors, when tipping is consumed as a character test, the problem is never solved. Without that check, anger will keep getting spent as content, and nothing will actually change.
So ask yourself, once, honestly. Was the “like” you just pressed meant to redirect anger toward the right place, or was it simply another moment of being pulled along by it?