Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Outrage Exhaustion: A Public Service Announcement for the Permanently Appalled

At some point—no one knows exactly when, science is still running the numbers—those of us who are paying attention are supposed to reach outrage exhaustion. That mythical state where the brain, overwhelmed by the daily firehose of constitutional arson, international lunacy, and state-sanctioned cruelty, simply shrugs, powers down, and says, “Huh. Guess that’s a thing now.”

We are not there yet. But we are so tired.

Take the grand plan du jour: abducting the president of Venezuela. Sure, he’s a bad guy. That’s not really in dispute. But since when did “bad guy” become the legal threshold for “extrajudicial kidnapping by a foreign power”? Did we miss the memo where the United States officially pivoted from “rule of law” to “international snatch-and-grab, vibes-based edition”? Are we workshopping regime change like it’s a startup pitch now?

And just as you’re trying to process that, the conversation casually pivots to: “Also, we might take Greenland. With military force. Possibly.” Greenland. An autonomous territory. Of an ally. Because nothing says “stable superpower” like eyeing a NATO-adjacent ice sheet and muttering, “Mine?” like a toddler in a sandbox with a tank.

Meanwhile, back home, ICE—who were solemnly tasked with targeting the “worst of the worst”—have apparently expanded their definition to include “people who exist in public.” Or maybe “people who looked at us wrong.” Or maybe just “people.” Period. They’re shooting and killing American citizens now, which is impressive in a grim sort of way, considering that citizenship was once thought to be a relevant detail. Silly us.

And yes, let’s talk about race, because everyone else seems determined to. According to the unofficial-but-very-obvious policy vibes, being “not white” is suspicious. Except, whoops, sometimes being white doesn’t save you either. Because if a nice white 37-year-old mother can be killed and waved away as collateral confusion, then the message is clear: the rules aren’t racist or consistent—they’re just reckless, violent, and unconcerned with accountability.

Which brings us back to the exhaustion.

How many times can you wake up, scroll the news, and say, “Sure. Of course that happened.” How many “this would have ended any other presidency” moments can fit into a single week? At what point does the outrage muscle simply cramp, seize up, and refuse to lift another moral weight?

Because outrage used to be reserved for emergencies. Now it’s a subscription service. Daily alerts. No opt-out. No cooldown period. Just a relentless parade of things that would have once sparked national reckoning, now reduced to background noise—another item in the growing pile of things we are apparently expected to live with.

And maybe that’s the real plan. Not Greenland. Not Venezuela. Not even ICE run amok. Maybe the goal is to exhaust us into compliance. To flood the system until outrage feels pointless, protest feels quaint, and accountability feels like a nostalgic concept we vaguely remember from a civics textbook.

So when does outrage exhaustion kick in?

I don’t know. But if it ever does, it won’t be because the outrage wasn’t justified. It’ll be because there was simply too damn much of it—by design.