Cheap Catharsis

Catharsis usually comes at the end of something.

A tragedy builds tension before releasing it. An argument ends with something finally being said. A difficult project ends with the satisfaction of finishing it. Even crying tends to require something to cry about.

The exact meaning of catharsis in Aristotle's Poetics has been argued over for centuries, but the basic idea has survived remarkably well. Something builds up, something happens, and something is released.

What happens when the release no longer requires very much to happen?

We have become exceptionally good at manufacturing catharsis.

Someone is angry about politics, so they find a video expressing their anger more eloquently than they could. Someone wants to change their life, so they watch a video about changing it. Someone sees an injustice, posts about it, watches thousands of other people condemn it, and feels that something has been done.

Something has happened, of course. Expressing an emotion can have value. Finding other people who share it can have value. Understanding a problem can be the first step toward solving it.

But none of those things is the same as solving it.

That distinction becomes interesting when the emotional reward arrives before the material one.

Traditionally, we might imagine:

problem → struggle → resolution → catharsis

Increasingly, we can produce something closer to:

problem → expression → catharsis

The struggle becomes optional.

The feeling of progress

This is especially visible in self-improvement.

There is a particular satisfaction in deciding that tomorrow will be different. Buy the notebook. Make the schedule. Watch the video. Read about the perfect exercise routine. Download the app.

For a moment, the problem feels smaller.

But planning to exercise and exercising are different activities. Understanding why you procrastinate and doing the thing you have been avoiding are different activities. Watching someone describe the person you would like to become is not becoming that person.

Yet the first activity can produce some of the emotional satisfaction we associate with the second.

The same pattern can appear in politics. Outrage has a beginning, escalation, villain, audience, and release. A person can spend an evening participating in the emotional arc of a political event without doing anything that changes its outcome.

Again, that does not make expression worthless. Politics requires speech. Social movements require communication. People sometimes need to be angry together before anything changes.

The question is what happens when expression becomes good enough at satisfying the desire to act.

Catharsis used to be expensive

Maybe the important change is not catharsis itself, but its price.

A novel might take days to finish. A political organization takes work to build. A difficult conversation requires confronting another person. Completing a project requires completing a project.

The internet can produce an emotional arc in minutes.

There is always another confession, denunciation, motivational speech, comeback, apology, exposé, transformation, or perfectly phrased explanation of why you feel the way you do.

We have made catharsis abundant.

Usually, making something abundant is good. Cheap food is better than expensive food. Cheap information is often better than expensive information.

But some things derive part of their function from being attached to a cost.

If satisfaction once followed effort, separating satisfaction from effort may change the incentive to make the effort.

That possibility is what interests me.

Is catharsis supposed to do something?

Perhaps this gives catharsis too much credit. People have always enjoyed stories in which other people solve problems. Ancient audiences did not leave a tragedy and immediately fix their lives.

Entertainment is allowed to be entertainment.

Venting can also be useful without producing measurable progress. Not every emotion needs to become an action item.

The problem would arise only when the feeling of resolution begins substituting for resolution itself.

If complaining about a problem makes someone more likely to address it, catharsis has helped.

If it leaves them feeling as though they already have, something stranger has happened.

Maybe this is one reason modern life can contain so much visible anger, self-analysis, political expression, and discussion of change while still producing a persistent feeling that nothing is changing.

Or maybe cheap catharsis simply makes feelings visible that were always there.

Either way, we have become very good at producing the feeling that normally comes at the end of a struggle.

It is worth asking what happens when we no longer need the struggle to get there.