Outrage is necessary in our times, or was it just a layer that social media uncovered for us? Or is it something we can ignore for our own betterment? I don’t know. But in recent times, there has been outrage over anything and everything—things that are not truly outrageous and could simply be ignored instead of being turned into national issues. Yet here we are, discussing a joke.

I won’t go on giving you gyaan or knowledge about what a joke is or what a silly joke is—one that you can ignore and move on from in life. I am here simply to understand better: what is this outrage that everyone claims is an important part of their daily life? I want to make the case that outrage is not as attractive as it seems, especially over things that are not even real issues in the first place. Humans are naturally expressive, but we cannot seem to stop and reflect on how social media exploits us.

What I have learned in this whole process is that regardless of your political or social standing, you must be outrageous enough to stay relevant to the crowd on your side. It doesn’t make sense, but then again, outrage itself doesn’t make any sense. Why am I stressing this? Because people in our country often lack the awareness of when to express their anger and when to suppress it. There are no real "free speech" flags that both sides claim to carry. The online space is not the real world we expect it to be, nor is it a place for meaningful debate or detailed discussion.

The real question is: what are the issues that truly deserve our outrage? That is something we should decide for ourselves, but we rarely do. Instead, we get carried away by the attention we receive online—sometimes even negative attention feels attractive enough to justify participation in these cycles of outrage. We willingly board the train of online attention because that is how social media functions, how it has always functioned. But in doing so, we often forget that we are enrolling in a game that was never meant for us. It’s idiotic at some level, yet we crave the attention that social media provides—an ecosystem designed to feed on our reactions.

Anger is the real driving force behind our outrage—that’s how it works in a space where we turn emotions into business. I may not be the right judge of this, but the anger reflected in our social media presence is the same hate that continues to grow in our offline lives. We are not becoming better individuals in our real lives; instead, we channel our anger in ways that even our family or friends might not recognize. A person’s anger is not always a reflection of who they truly are, but their judgments—how they choose to express and act on that anger—shape their online presence. What we fail to realize is that this online presence is an illusion. In reality, we are like people shouting on an empty street, searching for something to satisfy our needs but finding nothing.