A Society Out of Patience
Exhaustion, anger, and the quiet loss of restraint
I recently watched a confrontation unfold on an airplane. What started as a territorial dispute over an armrest escalated into an argument, and then into a fist fight. Before we even left the gate, both women were escorted off the plane in handcuffs.
Several people had their phones out. Even those who didn’t were watching. But what struck me most was how little reaction there was from my fellow passengers. Nobody cheered or gasped and no one stepped in to break it up. The collective vibe felt closer to irritation than shock: “Thanks a lot. Now the flight is going to be delayed.”
I don’t think any of the passengers approved of what was happening. It was that caring required more emotional energy than anyone had left to give. Two grown adults being arrested on the runway should have felt alarming. Instead, it felt routine.
If you haven’t seen something like this in person, you’ve almost certainly watched similar videos. And these are mild altercations compared to some other situations captured and posted.
What troubled me wasn’t the violence. It was how acceptable it felt.
My mother used to call it “good manners.” Now, we’re more likely to call it civility. Either way, the idea was never that it came naturally. Being decent to one another required effort. It took time, attention, and an emotional margin wide enough to absorb irritation without passing it along.
Civility isn’t a moral achievement so much as a byproduct of surplus. When you’re rested, secure, and not under constant pressure, kindness becomes the default. When you’re physically, financially, or emotionally exhausted, it becomes work. The moments we’re defensive, dismissive, or unkind are rarely the moments when things are going well.
Our surplus seems to have disappeared. We’re operating closer to the edge now, with very little margin for patience. In that state, anger and outrage don’t feel like choices. They feel like the only responses left.
Social media platforms have been designed to exploit this. When our energy to resist is depleted, the systems we use every day reward the hottest takes, the fastest judgments, and the most emotionally charged reactions.
It takes effort to slow down, to verify, to respond generously. When the cost of resisting negativity feels higher than the cost of participating in it, most of us do what tired people do. We take the path of least resistance.
The collapse of expertise is a parallel decay. People aren’t just skeptical of institutions telling them what’s “true.” Increasingly, they’re openly disdainful of the professionals who work inside them.
This goes beyond the familiar mistrust of government secrets or conspiracy theories. It reflects a deeper loss of faith in leadership, science, medicine, and even religion. Authority itself has become suspect. As a result, people turn online for guidance on matters that once required training and experience. They take legal advice from Facebook groups and accept medical diagnoses from AI.
Degrees signal allegiance to a corrupt “university-industrial complex” instead of proof of expertise. Higher education, once framed as a path to opportunity, is now widely viewed as a marker of elite insulation from the consequences everyone else lives with.
Ironically, much of what makes modern life tolerable—medical advances, technical infrastructure, scientific discovery—came from the very institutions we now dismiss. If we abandon formal education entirely, defund research, or treat expertise as manipulation by default, it’s worth asking what replaces it. Where do future breakthroughs come from once we’ve burned the bridge back to the systems that produced them?
The gap between the wealthiest citizens and everyone else is wider than at any point in my lifetime. The exact statistics almost don’t matter. What matters is the lived experience of fighting harder for fewer resources, year after year, without relief.
When people believe effort will be rewarded and the rules apply evenly, civility becomes the default. That isn’t the system most people feel they’re living in now. When institutions appear to serve a narrow, insulated class, trust erodes. Exhaustion follows. When fairness disappears, so does the surplus required to be generous with one another.
If we extrapolate this out by gazing into a future mirror, we see a society where authority still exists, but legitimacy does not. Rules remain on paper, yet compliance becomes optional, negotiated moment by moment based on convenience, resentment, or urgency.
In schools, parents bypass administrators and ignore policies they no longer respect. In hospitals, patients treat care like customer service, directing frustration and abuse at exhausted nurses who no longer command trust. Traffic laws become suggestions as hurried drivers run red lights because the system feels unworthy of cooperation. Housing codes and safety regulations erode into personal preferences, their consequences deferred to the next homeowner.
Meanwhile, fewer people are willing to invest a decade of their lives mastering complex fields, knowing their expertise will be publicly dismissed by social influencers and podcasters. Over time, advice is no longer heard as guidance. It’s interpreted as control. We’re headed into a not-so-distant future where all expert advice is treated as manipulation by the system.
If we assume this trajectory continues, the question becomes less about reversing it and more about reclaiming agency within it. When authority loses legitimacy and every claim to truth feels suspect, deciding what to trust becomes a personal burden rather than a shared one.
One response is a kind of decentralization. If large platforms manipulate attention and emotion, some people choose to stop being the product. They step away from closed systems in favor of tools that are transparent, inspectable, and harder to capture.
Moving from Windows or iOS to open-source software like Linux isn’t a political statement so much as a refusal to outsource control.
When social platforms like X feel engineered to provoke rather than connect, some migrate toward open protocols like Nostr that don’t depend on centralized moderation or algorithmic outrage.
Restoring self-sovereignty doesn’t have to be an ideological battle or culture war. Opting out of exploitive systems can become a quiet reallocation of attention and energy, rediscovering our collective human spirit.
The two women who threw punches on the plane almost certainly have people who love them, and people they care about. They’re not people who resolve every disagreement with violence. Most likely, they understand what “good manners” are.
What they appeared to lack in that moment wasn’t decency, but surplus. Their physical, emotional, and spiritual energy had already been spent elsewhere. When the dispute over the armrest began, there was nothing left to absorb it. Civility requires margin, and margin is exactly what many people no longer have.
What happens when anger becomes the only language we still share?