Please stop falling for grifter rage bait: it will only ever make you unhappier

People make money off your distress and anger

Grifting is as old as the hills: for as long as humans have been making pointy sticks, they’ve been prodding at and manipulating each other for their own gain. There are right wing grifters, left wing grifters, whacky homophobic grifters, and unhinged LGBT grifters. There are women grifters and there are men grifters. Black, White, Asian and Arabic grifters. A rainbow of grifters, if you will. The one thing they all have in common? Deliberately pissing you off for engagement so you share, like, and read their content, and make them money. So all I’m asking you to do is not fill their pockets. Don’t reply. Don’t engage. Don’t respond. Don’t blindly believe they mean anything they come out with.

Of course this is making you unhappy and isolated; it is supposed to

I’m not talking about satirists: I write satire all the time. I’m very sarcastic and sharp in my criticism. I make fun of everyone who can be amusingly ridiculed. I like to think I’m extremely funny. But I always label it as satire. I’ll always finish an article saying I’m taking the piss or mocking something. But the difference between grifters and satirists is that they aren’t trying to say anything or parody anything: they just care about getting that like, share, click, or comment. They don’t believe or really care…