By Brian French
The Business Model of Manufactured Crisis
We live in an age of manufactured crisis. Every day brings a new emergency, a fresh catastrophe, an unprecedented disaster that demands our immediate attention and emotional investment. The truth is far more mundane: for most people, most days are unremarkable. We go to work, care for our families, pay our bills, and navigate the ordinary challenges of being human. But there’s no money in ordinary, no clicks in calm, no ratings in reasonable. And so we’ve built an entire industry around convincing us that the sky is perpetually falling.
The outrage industry operates on a simple principle: your attention is valuable, and fear is the most efficient way to capture it. Whether it’s news networks, social media platforms, political organizations, or financial commentators, the business model is identical—keep you watching, scrolling, donating, and sharing by convincing you that this moment, right now, is uniquely terrible and requires your constant vigilance.
Political Theater: When Every Election Becomes Armageddon
Politics has perfected this art form. Every election cycle becomes an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, with one side cast as saviors and the other as existential threats to democracy itself. Nuance is discarded in favor of hyperbole. Compromise becomes betrayal. The opposition isn’t just wrong—they’re monsters, fascists, communists, or whatever historical villain seems most inflammatory. This isn’t political engagement; it’s emotional manipulation dressed up as civic duty. The exaggerations know no bounds because measured disagreement doesn’t drive fundraising emails or viral tweets.
Consider how news networks structure their programming. They don’t simply report on opposing viewpoints—they feature them for hours, carefully selecting the most extreme or inflammatory representatives to parade before their audience. The goal isn’t understanding; it’s provocation. Viewers are meant to feel angry, threatened, superior, vindicated. Each segment is engineered to elevate blood pressure and reinforce tribal loyalties. The network that should be your window to the world becomes a funhouse mirror, distorting reality to keep you angry enough to keep watching.
Weather Apocalypse: How Snow Became a National Emergency
Even the weather has been weaponized for drama. A winter storm that previous generations would have handled with snow shovels and common sense now triggers wall-to-wall “weather alert” coverage, complete with reporters standing in blizzards to demonstrate that yes, snow is indeed falling. Ten inches of snow in the Northeast—a region that has experienced winter since the glaciers receded—becomes grounds for interviews with FEMA officials and breathless speculation about supply chain disruptions. The Weather Channel doesn’t just report weather anymore; it brands and names winter storms like they’re blockbuster movies, complete with promotional graphics and ominous music.
Economic Doomsday: The Crash That’s Always Coming Tomorrow
Economics journalism follows the same playbook. The market crash is always imminent. The recession is always just around the corner. Trade with China will destroy us. AI will eliminate everyone’s job in three years. Crypto is either going to make everyone rich or destroy the financial system—possibly both simultaneously. These aren’t sober assessments of risk; they’re attention-getting headlines designed to make you click, watch, and worry. Yes, economic changes happen. Yes, technological disruption is real. But the constant drumbeat of imminent catastrophe serves the outrage merchants, not the truth.
The Health Cost of Constant Crisis
The cost of all this manufactured drama isn’t abstract. Living in a constant state of outrage, fear, or heightened alertness has real physiological consequences. Your body responds to perceived threats by releasing cortisol and adrenaline, hormones designed for short-term survival responses. But when the threats never stop coming—when every day brings a new crisis that demands your emotional response—your body remains in a state of chronic stress. This isn’t harmless. Prolonged cortisol elevation is linked to weakened immune function, increased inflammation, cardiovascular problems, anxiety, depression, and cognitive impairment. We’re literally making ourselves sick by consuming a steady diet of outrage.
The cruel irony is that the entities profiting from your fear and anger don’t actually care about your wellbeing. News networks aren’t concerned about your cortisol levels. Social media platforms aren’t worried about your anxiety. Political organizations aren’t losing sleep over your blood pressure. They have quarterly earnings to consider, engagement metrics to optimize, and donation goals to meet. Your emotional state is simply a means to their end.
Welcome to the Tune-Out Society: A Better Way Forward
So what’s the alternative? Welcome to the tune-out society—not a retreat from reality, but a recognition of the difference between what matters and what’s manufactured. This doesn’t mean ignorance or apathy. It means becoming a more discerning consumer of information and a better steward of your own attention and emotional energy.
Start by recognizing the patterns. When you encounter news or commentary that makes you feel intensely angry or afraid, pause and ask: who benefits from this emotional response? Is this information genuinely useful, or is it designed primarily to provoke? Does this actually affect my life in a concrete way, or am I being invited to feel outraged about something distant and beyond my control? Most importantly: is the framing reasonable, or is it designed to eliminate nuance in favor of drama?
Practical Steps to Reclaim Your Peace
Diversify your information sources, but not just politically—diversify by medium and pace. Read long-form journalism that has room for complexity. Seek out sources that explain without sensationalizing. Follow people who think carefully rather than react quickly. Set boundaries on your news consumption. You don’t need to know about every crisis, controversy, or conflict in real time. The truly important information will reach you without your needing to mainline breaking news alerts.
Understand that you’re allowed to care about some things and not others. You’re allowed to have opinions without having them about everything. You’re allowed to acknowledge complexity instead of picking a team. You’re allowed to say “I don’t know enough about this to have a strong view” or “this doesn’t affect my life in any meaningful way” or simply “I’m choosing not to engage with this.” These aren’t failures of citizenship; they’re acts of self-preservation.
Rediscovering Reality: Life Beyond the Outrage Machine
Cultivate direct experience. Spend time with people who disagree with you politically and discover they’re not demons. Engage with your actual community rather than online arguments about national issues you can’t influence. Pay attention to what’s happening in your own life, neighborhood, and city rather than treating every distant controversy as your personal emergency. You’ll often find that reality is more complicated, more interesting, and less apocalyptic than the outrage merchants would have you believe.
The outrage industry depends on your participation. It needs you to believe that every moment is critical, every issue is existential, every opponent is evil. It needs you angry, afraid, and unable to look away. But here’s the secret they don’t want you to realize: you can simply opt out. You can choose not to be played. You can reclaim your attention, your emotional energy, and your physiological wellbeing from entities that view them as resources to be extracted.
The Liberation of Letting Go
Life for most people, most of the time, is not dramatic. It’s not an endless series of crises requiring constant vigilance and perpetual outrage. It’s ordinary, complicated, sometimes difficult, occasionally wonderful, and generally manageable. The outrage industry wants you to forget this, because calm, grounded people who trust their own experience don’t make good customers. But you have permission to remember it. You have permission to turn down the volume on the manufactured drama and tune back into actual reality.
A New Way of Being: Choosing Clarity Over Chaos
Here’s what happens when you step away from the outrage machine: you start to notice things. The sky looks bluer. Conversations become more genuine. Problems feel more solvable. You realize that your neighbor who votes differently isn’t your enemy—they’re just someone trying to figure out life like you are. You discover that you can be informed without being consumed, engaged without being enraged, aware without being anxious.
The world has real problems that deserve serious attention. Climate change is real. Poverty exists. Injustice happens. But you can’t address these effectively when you’re exhausted, anxious, and emotionally manipulated. Real change comes from people who have the clarity to think clearly, the energy to act purposefully, and the emotional bandwidth to work with others—even those they disagree with.
The Power You Didn’t Know You Had
The first step toward genuine engagement with the world is recognizing when you’re being sold a performance of engagement instead. The second step is having the courage to walk away from the outrage merchants and their cheap drama. And the third step? That’s where it gets exciting. That’s where you discover you have more power than you thought.
You have the power to ignore the algorithm. You have the power to refuse the bait. You have the power to say “this doesn’t deserve my energy” and mean it. You have the power to invest your attention in things that actually matter—your family, your community, your craft, your growth. You have the power to be happy in a world that’s trying very hard to convince you that happiness is irresponsible.
Building Something Better
And here’s the beautiful part: when enough people opt out of the outrage cycle, something remarkable happens. The business model starts to fail. The merchants of fear lose their audience. And in that space, something healthier can grow. Media that informs rather than inflames. Politics that solve rather than divide. Communities that connect rather than fragment.
You don’t have to wait for permission to start living this way. You don’t need anyone’s approval to prioritize your mental health over someone else’s profit margins. You can start today, right now, by simply deciding that your peace of mind is worth more than their engagement metrics.
Your Life, Reclaimed
Turn it off. Log off. Tune out—but tune into something better. Tune into the laughter of your kids, the conversation with your partner, the satisfaction of work well done, the pleasure of a good book, the connection with actual humans in actual spaces. Tune into sunsets and inside jokes and meals shared with friends and the quiet pride of keeping your commitments.
The outrage industry will survive without you, but that’s not your problem. Your question is simpler and more profound: can you thrive without it? Can you build a life based on what’s real rather than what’s manufactured? Can you find meaning in the ordinary rather than constantly chasing the dramatic?
The answer is yes. Thousands of people are already doing it. They’re not plugged out of reality—they’re plugged into a better version of it. They’re informed but not obsessed. They care but don’t catastrophize. They engage but don’t exhaust themselves. They’ve discovered that life is actually pretty good when you’re not constantly being told it’s terrible.
This is your invitation to join them. To reclaim your attention, your emotional energy, and your right to live without constant artificial drama. To discover that you can be a good citizen, a caring person, and an informed individual without sacrificing your sanity to the outrage machine.
The sky isn’t falling. It never was. And once you stop staring at screens telling you otherwise, you might just look up and see how beautiful it actually is.
