PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store

I absolutely love how fired up the average YouTube commenter was about Honey... for about 72 hours. People completely unaffected in any way were demanding class action lawsuits, etc with seemingly no clue why they were even upset. Then the subject completely left their minds.

This observation is of course entirely anecdotal, but manufactured outrage is so fascinating, even if it currently eroding the very foundations of society.

Where a lot of online content to be consumed is about dopamine, a lot of other stuff is about spiking cortisol.

There's people on every forum (and regularly here) that suggest, sometimes explicitly, that we must have elevated anxiety and stress levels in response to specific presented content as a moral imperative.

I think cortisol makes the "content" feel more "important" or relevant at the present moment in time. 72 hours later assuming no other exploits our body systems adjust and the content isn't important. It's weird when we notice it, but most of the time our cortisol is being directed to another topic so we don't notice.

There's a ton written about our dopamine addiction and how it's exploited but not much about cortisol and our negative emotions are being exploited.

Many people say that overthinking, anxiety, and stress are moral imperatives as a response to something they don't like: content, political ideas, celebrities, technology companies, and many other things.

It is a completely ineffective method of making a change. I wish they'd stop spreading their anxieties online. I know it makes them feel like they're doing something, but one phone call to a relevant decision-maker is 100x more effective and 100x less destructive to those around them.

Is my anxiety warranted yet if I'm a trans person? Because I wish people would at least acknowledge reality, that there is a tangible threat of genocide around, that we're being targeted for easy rhetorical wins, that trans women are currently put in men's prison despite court orders prohibiting it - not despite but because they'll be raped and "v-coded".

What I mostly get is indifference or "didoing" ("it's not so bad") - and yes, that indifference spikes my anxiety. Because it feels like this is the same indifference that ultimately lead to "Didn't the Germans know what was happening?". The answer is, they didn't care to look.

There's no tangible threat of genocide though. Perhaps you've been overexposed to a social media bubble that's steeped in anxiety about this, despite there being no plausible prospect of such a horror occurring?

There's a very real prospect of criminalization and forced de transition, though.