Volume CCLX — The Victimhood Economy and the Online Tribe - How suffering became currency, and how the algorithm turned wound into identity

She found them in the early hours of the morning. She'd been scrolling for an hour, not looking for anything specific. The way you scroll when sleep won't come and the room is too quiet and the thoughts won't stop. And then an account appeared in her feed.

Someone talking about exactly what she felt. The anxiety that never fully went away, the exhaustion that sleep didn't repair. The very specific weight of being in rooms full of people and feeling more alone than when she was by herself. Finally, someone who understood.

So she followed the account and through the account, she found others, a community, hundreds, and then thousands of people who said they felt exactly the same way, who had names for what she was experiencing, who validated every sensation she'd been trying to articulate to herself for years. People who told her she wasn't dramatic or weak or broken. She was heard finally in a way she'd never been heard before. What she didn't notice however, because the relief of being heard was too complete, was that the community had absolutely no interest in her getting better.

Better would mean leaving and the community needed her to stay. Something's happened to suffering in the last decade or so, something very specific. Suffering has always been a part of human experience. Psychological pain has always been real and always deserved compassion and genuine care.

What's changed is the social value associated and assigned to suffering. In the current cultural economy, suffering, especially and specifically the public performance and continuous articulation of suffering, has acquired a currency it's never previously held. It generates attention, it generates community, identity, moral authority. And the person who suffers most visibly occupies the highest position in a very specific social hierarchy.

And the person who then questions whether the suffering is being addressed in the most useful way available is positioned as a threat. This is the victimhood economy. The system in which wound becomes the primary unit of social exchange. And like every economy, it produces incentives.

It produces people whose social position depends on the maintenance of the wound. It produces communities that cannot afford for their members to heal because healing is departure. It also produces a cultural language in which every difficulty is trauma. Every discomfort is harm.

Every challenge is a threat to safety. And the person who says perhaps we could try something that might actually help is labeled as invalidating dismissive and even dangerous. The online architecture accelerated this beyond what any previous generation could have imagined. Before the internet, a person in genuine psychological distress had limited options for community.

People might say that's a bad thing because geography constrained them. But they would find a support group or a therapist or a few people in their immediate environment who understood. The community was small and the relationship was proximate. Proximity carries with it accountability.

It's harder to remain indefinitely in your wound when the people around you can see you, know your history, watch you change or not change across time. The algorithm however, doesn't carry that accountability. The algorithm is not interested in your growth. The algorithm is interested in your engagement and nothing drives engagement like the mutual reinforcement of shared pain and trauma.

Internal research from Meta leaked to the Wall Street Journal in 2021 demonstrated that the company was aware, Instagram was damaging the mental health of teenage girls specifically. Their own studies found that the platform intensified body image issues, anxiety and depression amongst adolescents and that the company continued to prioritize engagement metrics over the wellbeing of its youngest users. Jonathan Hates, subsequent analysis of the research, collected across multiple institutions and published in the anxious generation, traced the timeline very precisely. The sharp rise in adolescent anxiety depression and self harm across the English speaking world between 2010 and 2015, correlating not with economic conditions or political events, but with the mass adoption of smartphones and algorithm driven social media.

A person who's struggling psychologically goes online and finds within seconds a community of thousands of people who are struggling in exactly the same way. The relief for these young people is immediate and genuine. The validation is real, the sense of being understood, perhaps for the first time, is not manufactured. But these communities don't ask what the person needs in order to get better.

The community asks what they need in order to stay and what they need in order to stay is to remain in the wound because the wound is the membership card. The moment you begin to move beyond it, you move beyond the community and the community, the first place you ever felt genuinely understood is the last thing you want to lose. So the wound becomes the identity, the suffering becomes the self. In 20 years of sitting across from people in genuine psychological distress, the most consistent thing I observed was this.

The people who recovered were the people who could tolerate the discomfort of examining the wound honestly rather than continuously describing it. The examination hurts differently from the description. Description maintains the pain at a manageable distance. Examination requires you to go inside the wound to find what's actually there, to do the harder work of understanding rather than the easier work of expressing.

The victimhood economy and the online tribe reward description indefinitely. They've no mechanism for examination because examination might lead to recovery and recovery in this specific economy is a form of defection. Compassion is not validation. Genuine compassion looks sometimes like the refusal to confirm a person in a story that's keeping them stuck.

It sometimes looks like the willingness to say, I hear what you're carrying and I'm not going to pretend that carrying it indefinitely is the same thing as addressing it. That's the deepest form of love that you can show someone, to say, I see what you're going through. I understand how difficult this is for you and I'm here for you not to continue to reinforce the wound or what you continue to be stuck and be a victim of what happened but to help you through it. And remember, the wound is real and so is the suffering but the community is also real and the community wants the suffering to continue.

And none of that makes the economy that's been built around it healing. It makes it a cage with the door left open, comfortable enough that most people never try the door and framed as sanctuary so that anyone who points at the door is accused of cruelty. If what you heard today resonated, then the work is already moving in you and I wrote a book that shows you where the work begins. It's called Before Approaching the Threshold, It's Free and the link to Access It is in the show notes.

Welcome to the Architect Speaks.