“Why Are People So Nasty and Mean Today?”
“Lately, I just don’t understand people. Everywhere I turn, it feels like someone is shouting, judging, mocking, tearing others down. Online, in public, even among people I used to respect. Everyone seems quick to attack, slow to understand. When did we become like this? Why is everyone so nasty and mean?”
Dear Aisha,
It’s a question I hear more and more—quietly, painfully—from people who haven’t hardened all the way. And your words carry the bewilderment so many are feeling: not just disappointment, but a kind of stunned ache. Like something basic about human decency has fractured, and you’re trying to figure out how we ended up in a world where cruelty passes as normal.
The truth is, it has gotten worse. You’re not imagining it. The meanness, the sarcasm, the hair-trigger hostility—it’s everywhere. And it’s not because people are inherently awful. It’s because we are collectively unwell.
When people feel powerless, unheard, or chronically afraid, their nervous systems shift into survival mode. And survival doesn’t prioritize kindness. It prioritizes defense. That’s what you’re seeing in so much of today’s nastiness: people living in a near-constant state of dysregulation, using rage, contempt, and superiority to shield themselves from vulnerability.
Because anger—especially when loud or sharp—feels more powerful than helplessness. Cruelty can make a person feel strong when they feel insignificant. Judging someone else is easier than confronting one’s own shame. And tearing down what’s different is faster than facing the slow, often painful work of self-awareness.
We’re also steeped in an attention economy that rewards performance over presence. Social media didn’t invent cruelty, but it amplified it. It gave people an instant stage for every impulse and turned snark into social currency. There’s a reward system now for being the loudest, the meanest, the most extreme. We’ve gamified contempt—and the cost is a slow erosion of empathy.
But the roots go even deeper.
For many people, emotional repression has been a lifelong condition. They were never taught how to express hurt in healthy ways, never shown that softness is strength. So when pain builds and has nowhere to go, it calcifies into aggression. The unhealed child inside learns to survive by lashing out—sometimes directly, sometimes subtly. Either way, it becomes a language of self-protection.
And it spreads.
Because when enough people act from a place of inner pain without accountability, it reshapes the emotional norms of a culture. We stop expecting kindness. We stop modeling it. We stop believing it matters. People start mistaking cruelty for truth-telling, or domination for leadership. Civility is dismissed as weakness. And a kind person starts to feel like a relic—naïve, out of touch, unprepared for the world’s sharp edges.
You’re not wrong to feel unsettled. You should be unsettled. This isn’t how people are supposed to treat each other.
But there’s something quietly powerful in your reaction. It means you haven’t adapted to the wrong thing. You haven’t normalized what’s inhumane. And that matters more than you know.
Because in a time when nastiness is contagious, so is tenderness. So is steadiness. So is refusing to meet cruelty on its terms. The world doesn’t need more people who are good at tearing others apart. It needs people who are willing to stay human, even when the atmosphere makes that feel foolish or unsafe.
That doesn’t mean being passive. It doesn’t mean absorbing abuse or staying silent in the face of harm. But it does mean resisting the temptation to mirror the very behaviors you hate. It means recognizing that someone else’s meanness is not a verdict on you—it’s a mirror of their own suffering. And while that doesn’t excuse it, it can help you from internalizing it.
The hardest part is that people like you—people who feel all of this—often wonder if they’re the problem. If they’re too soft, too sensitive, too affected. But you’re not broken for wanting a gentler world. You’re awake.
And staying awake in this climate is no small thing.
You don’t have to change everyone. You don’t have to explain kindness to those who have forgotten it. But you can choose to remain intact. You can choose not to weaponize your wounds. You can decide, again and again, to practice a kind of quiet integrity—not because it will make others follow, but because it lets you live in alignment.
Aisha, the meanness you see around you is real. And it hurts. And you’re not alone in feeling worn down by it. But the very fact that it bothers you is also a signpost. A reminder of your values. Of your emotional clarity. Of the part of you that still knows we can do better.
Hold on to that.
In a world of loud cruelty, staying kind is a radical act.
–RJ