The Grievance Era
I did a post yesterday on everything that’s now in some way “currency,” i.e. being busy, being stressed out, being performative, being a hustle-monger, etc. One that I probably missed is “grievances.” The idea of grievances is friggin’ massive these days. Trump basically shaped the current Republican party around grievances related to the 2020 election and the Mueller investigation. The “leftists” have their own grievances, often around semantics and stuff that was tweeted 11 years ago. Modern work has its own share of grievances, especially around appearing in the office vs. not appearing, although you could also argue that’s an “old-school” thing vs. a “new-school” thing, i.e. existing world vs. encroaching world. The battle of old and new obviously creates grievances, though; you could probably argue that most grievances come from “my way of life might be changing too much for me to be comfortable with.” Think of our stereotypes around the old and screaming at clouds from their porch.
Obviously, people have bitched about things and change for generations. Maybe millennia. So none of this is specifically new, nor is the principle of this particular short article. However … does it seem like it’s happening more nowadays in some way? Perhaps. Here are some of the potential arguments towards that end.
