This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
Most people are pretty nice.
They really don’t want to offend anyone. They want to be liked and they want the people around them to feel good, because generally speaking when other people feel good, it helps you feel good, too.
And most people really especially don’t want to be the bad guy.
This is how people who take offense, whether they know it or not, take a position of power over people who are supposedly giving offense. The whole purpose of being offended is, often unconsciously, an attempt to force someone into feeling like the bad guy.
And we’ll go a long way to escape that awful feeling.
None of this is anything you don’t already know, but it’s amazing how easy it is to forget when we get caught up on either side of this particular power game. Our very susceptibility to it is what gave birth to the algorithmically driven outrage machines of social media.
You don’t even have to play! After all, nobody can resist a good underdog story, and so we sit transfixed as it plays out over and over: someone who we perceive as having less power takes offense as leverage over someone who we perceive as having more of it.
Meanwhile, we almost never see the offended party as the aggressor.
Being offended seems instead like a shortcut to victimhood, which is itself a powerful aggregator of social cache, which is the most powerful resource of all!
By now, we’re so well acquainted with how effective this tactic is, that we almost can’t help but take a little offense whenever we can get it.
Almost.
As for myself, regardless of whether or not any offense is ever intended, I will take none of it.
Why not?
Because I don’t want to be the bad guy, thank you very much.
Taking offense is a tactic of aggression