When my son was about two years old, he had a pair of Elmo shoes. He didn’t just like these shoes. He NEEDED these shoes. Unfortunately, two-year-olds have the annoying habit of growing, and eventually his beloved Elmo shoes didn’t fit anymore. This shouldn’t have been a major problem. He had other shoes. Perfectly good shoes. Shoes that fit his feet and performed all the basic functions one might reasonably expect from footwear. But those shoes had one rather significant design flaw.
They did not have Elmo on them.
I even found another pair of the Elmo shoes and ordered them. Having learned my lesson, I bought not only the next size but the size after that too. I had solved the Elmo shoe crisis for the foreseeable future. There was just one problem. They hadn’t arrived yet.
For those few days, every single time we needed to leave the house, we experienced what can only be described as the complete and total collapse of civilization. The other shoes were unacceptable. Explanations were useless. The fact that the new Elmo shoes were literally on their way meant nothing. There was crying, yelling and the kind of full-body despair that only a two-year-old can produce over something an adult knows will be completely irrelevant in approximately four days. There was also absolutely nothing I could do to make those shoes arrive any faster.
I’ve been thinking about the Elmo shoes lately because I wonder if, collectively, we’ve been throwing a tantrum of our own. For the last several years, we have been loud. Really loud. Everything requires an immediate reaction. Everything requires an opinion. We’re angry at strangers. We’re angry at companies. We’re angry at people we’ve never met because of something they said to someone else we’ve never met. Thanks to the internet, we can now invite thousands of people into our outrage before we’ve even had time to decide whether we’re actually outraged. Two-year-olds would be impressed.
The thing about two-year-olds is that they don’t simply have a feeling. Everyone around them is going to have that feeling too. If a two-year-old is unhappy in the grocery store, congratulations, aisle seven is now unhappy. They are loud, absolutely certain of their position and generally uninterested in additional information that might complicate it.
They are also remarkably ineffective problem solvers. I cannot think of a single problem in the history of humanity that has been solved by a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. My son’s screaming certainly didn’t make UPS arrive any faster. It didn’t make his feet smaller. It didn’t transform the perfectly acceptable shoes sitting in front of him into Elmo shoes. All it accomplished was making both of us miserable while we waited for the exact same solution that was already on its way.
That doesn’t mean the feeling underneath a tantrum isn’t real. To my son, losing those shoes was devastating. He didn’t have the perspective to understand that this was temporary. His world was very small, Elmo was apparently very important, and the problem felt enormous.
Adults aren’t really so different. There are legitimate reasons to be angry. There are injustices that deserve attention and problems that absolutely need to be solved. Anger itself isn’t the problem. Sometimes anger is exactly what gets our attention and tells us that something needs to change.
But somewhere along the way, I think we started confusing expressing outrage with accomplishing something. They’re not the same thing. Being louder doesn’t necessarily make an argument better. Humiliating someone doesn’t necessarily change their mind. Yelling at people who already agree with us doesn’t accomplish much at all. And forcing everyone within earshot to participate in our anger may feel satisfying in the moment, but satisfaction and progress aren’t synonyms.
Lately, though, something feels different. I think we might be tired.
That’s what eventually happens to a two-year-old. They don’t necessarily stop because you’ve persuaded them that the blue shoes are perfectly adequate. They don’t suddenly appreciate your careful explanation of shipping logistics. They simply cannot maintain that level of outrage forever. Eventually, they wear themselves out. Maybe we are wearing ourselves out too.
Not because everything has been fixed. It hasn’t. Not because there aren’t things worth caring deeply about. There certainly are. Maybe we’ve simply discovered that living in a constant state of outrage is exhausting, particularly when so much of that outrage doesn’t seem to accomplish anything.
And maybe getting tired isn’t entirely a bad thing. Because eventually my son stopped screaming about the Elmo shoes. The world became quiet again. And, sure enough, the new shoes arrived. Not because he screamed. They were coming anyway. There will always be things worth fighting for, speaking up about and trying to change. But maybe we could spend a little less time proving how angry we are and a little more time asking what might actually help.
Because two-year-olds are exceptionally good at making themselves heard. They’ve just never been particularly good at solving the problem.
💤 Charlotte