The Age of Resentment

Over the past weeks, I’ve had a montage of conversations with confidantes around the theme of resentment. Not to my surprise but certainly to my chagrin, it turns out that some of my dearest friends have become resentful. Some suffer simmering resentment, others from resentment at a full boil.

Resentment seems to be the vibe du jour. To wit…

• We resent privileged people, in most cases even more than we resent ourselves for our wondrous privileges.

• We resent political elites. Don and Vlad and Bibi. The whole lot of ‘em, really. Strangely, we don’t seem to resent Xi, though I invite you to.

• We resent the titans of business. Musk and Zuck and Bezos. Look out Jensen Huang, you’ll soon face our collective antipathy.

• We resent that the wrong fucking guys keep fucking winning.

• We resent that they all seem to be guys.

It seems the terms of service have turned against us. And we resent it with all our might. We were promised individuality and delivered algorithms; promised community and delivered audiences; promised connection and delivered surveillance. And we feel like we coulda shoulda seen it coming. And thus…

• We resent ourselves for allowing ourselves to become slaves to screens, without which we feel lost in a sea of our own dreadful thoughts and feelings.

• We resent ourselves for our complicity in feeding the oligarchy.

• We resent ourselves for our commitment to social media, and the fact that we still, somehow, call it “social” despite how patently antisocial it is.

But it’s not just self-loathing…

• We resent that every opinion now feels like a referendum on our moral worth.

• We resent that we, you and I, are destroying the only planet we have.

• We resent being told to practice gratitude while inhabiting ecosystems designed to manufacture resentment. More on that later.

So yeah. All that and a bag of stale chips. The kicker? We resent that resentment itself has become one of our principal ways of making sense of the world.

I’ll go out on a limb and reticently suggest that the resentments listed above afflict the majority of Substack readers, certainly mine. But there is a category of more intimate, more pedestrian resentments that also bedevil us:

• We resent our inattentive partners.

• We resent our ingrate kids, to say nothing other people’s ingrate kids.

• We resent our incompetent, and/or malevolent parents, regardless of how old we are. By the way: I’m appalled by how many middle-aged folks are still engaging in emotional warfare with their (sometimes dead) parents.

• We resent our bigoted uncle and our impetuously woke neighbor.

• We resent our know-nothing bosses and our numbskull colleagues.

Perhaps worst of all, we resent that having it this good could feel this bad.

I’m just gonna come out and say it: We’re living in the Age of Resentment. Let’s finally call it for what it is.

Okay, fine. Fine! Our era is not unique in this regard. Every era has its resentments.

But the more I stew in it, the more I reckon that seeking to understand our era through the lens of resentment reveals penetrating insights.

Unless this turns out to be a mental nothing sandwich (it may be, you tell me), I plan to think increasingly acutely about resentment. You’ll probably read more from me on this.

But for now, do me a favor: reach out to me with your thoughts on resentment. Please comment. DM. Email. Call me!

Resentfully Yours,

DL

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