I don’t think they do. I think (maybe like us) the stress and cortisol and need to be “informed” becomes a habit. I forget the science but it’s much easier to create a bad vibe than make someone feel good, and playing on fear and anxiety keeps people glued to the news.

They are addicted to the feeling of power they get when sneering at something/someone. Whenever they say “clown world” they feel like Jim from the Office staring directly at the camera–as if they are in the know, the most informed ones, the superior ones. That plus the comment sections of these videos give them a rush from both them posting and getting likes, and seeing their existing views get articulated by others–that rush of validation is hard to come by IRL.

They aren’t necessarily miserable in the traditional sense, in the first person, as long as they are not directly doing introspection or evaluating how far detached from everyday people they have made themselves. Usually the craving for these feelings of superiority/validation comes from them trying to mute some deeper insecurity and inadequacy they are avoiding facing up to at all costs.

For instance a lot of judgmental puritanical people are also frightened of the possibility that they can’t hang with the cool crowd and cannot make themselves likable in social settings, so adopting the worldview that those who can are actually just “mainstream,” sheep or forbearers of civilizational collapse enables them to cast themselves as righteous/principled for not participating in the worlds that they’d felt excluded by in the first place.

The harm these people are ultimately doing though is what is known as “self esteem debt,” mentally placing themselves on pedestals they did not earn through any real-world action, and having to retreat to ever more demented circles and echo chambers to sustain the feeling of being on the right side of something–leaving their own self development stagnating, letting their insecurities compound rather than be unpacked.

I have a weird personal theory about this. Have you ever gotten angry at an imaginary argument? If you stop to analyze your own emotions in that moment, you might find that it surprisingly feels good. There’s a rush to anger, a feeling of power and excitement, and I think some people like to feel that rush, so they consume stuff that makes them angry. Conservative media appeals to this feeling.

They are not happy, and they make it everyone else’s problem.

Spoiler, they don’t, they’re the least happy people you can imagine, while most people keep their sad and angry weirdness to themselves chuds and other reactionaries are leaking it all over the place so they can be seen, so at first glance it looks like a strongman act and a better way of handling irony poisoning, especially to Murikkkans and others that love humor outrage at the cost of others, when really its not much healthier than bottling, if not worse since they harm others aside from harming themselves. They just lack social awareness to see how fool they’re acting and it doesn’t look badass, its like a baby having a tantrum because they were told no. The baby feels no shame for their tantrum.

personally, i think they just watch movie headshots and best kills compilations on youtube all day

It is platonic bdsm. Sometimes the hurting is validating.

They’re not happy. But so aren’t most people not consuming this crap either. Humans/animals aren’t meant to be happy constantly, otherwise we wouldn’t strive for more and thus proliferate the species.

I’m going to take a more positive view on anger here, but it’s far more negative of conservatives tbh

Anger is a genuinely helpful driving force, especially when struggling through inflation, various traumas, the constant death of people due to Covid, etc. “When hope abandons you and joy fades, anger will keep you warm”.

The problem is that these people are cowards. They know deep in their gut who they should be angry at (those with immense power over the conditions they’re in) but they’re afraid of getting on their bad side punished for it, because they’ve internalized that being angry at authority is wrong.

So they have to constantly dope up on hate-cope to keep their main drive to keep going, going. While it is absolutely not a good idea for us to hate scroll (constant adrenaline and cortisol leads to huge health issues) we generally don’t need to do this. Just walking down the street or glancing at Facebook can give us dozens of things to be genuinely angry about. So we have kind of a natural, functional anger generation loop while conservatives have to basically supplement it with unhealthy amounts of hate inducing media.

why does it say there’s 24 comments when i can only see 3

Death to America