There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that no amount of sleep fixes: it’s not tiredness from work. Not the “I stayed up watching rubbish television until stupid o’clock” kind either. It’s the deeper fatigue that comes from constantly seeing ugliness in human behaviour. Not ugly faces; just ugly actions, intentions and little moments where people knowingly choose cruelty, selfishness, dishonesty or indifference because it benefits them for five seconds. Lately, it feels everywhere.
You see it online first because the internet has become the world’s largest open-plan office for emotional vandals. Someone shares grief, and underneath it sits a man called Keith with a profile picture of his car announcing that actually the dog probably died because “pets die, move on.” Thanks Keith. Tremendous contribution.
Social media gave everyone a microphone, but unfortunately it also gave the emotionally constipated a performance venue that we cannot easily curate.
We now live in a culture where humiliation has become entertainment. Entire industries run on it. “Call out” videos, revenge gossip, secret recordings, fake outrage manufactured by people who would step over their own grandmother for engagement figures. The frightening part is how normalised it has become, but how the large platforms that enable this are continuing to hide behind Article 230.
People film strangers having breakdowns instead of helping them. Customers scream at teenage shop workers because a voucher expired. Monetisers stage generosity for views while treating actual people around them like disposable props. Companies post “mental health matters” graphics while quietly burning out staff behind the scenes with workloads last seen during the construction of the pyramids.
That’s the thing about modern ugliness: some of the ugliest behaviour arrives polished, articulate and social media-approved.. It often wears nice clothes, until someone calls it out. You’ll find it in offices where managers smile warmly in meetings before dismantling someone’s confidence in private. In friendship groups where one person is subtly excluded because insecurity needs a sacrifice. In relationships where affection becomes transactional. In businesses that speak endlessly about “community” while underpaying the very people holding the place together – corporate ugliness deserves its own wing in the museum, frankly.
There’s something uniquely bleak about a company calling employees “family” moments before announcing redundancies via Zoom. If a real family behaved like some corporations do, social services would intervene.
Then there’s public ugliness disguised as opinion: some people have confused honesty with brutality. They speak with unnecessary cruelty and then defend it with “I just tell it like it is.” No. You’re just emotionally undisciplined. A surgeon uses a knife too, but ideally with precision and purpose. The internet especially rewards this behaviour because outrage spreads faster than kindness. Anger is profitable for the platforms; kindness nuance is terrible for algorithms – so quiet decency doesn’t trend. Nobody goes viral for returning a trolley properly in a supermarket…
Yet ordinary decency is probably the only thing holding society together: the woman who notices someone sitting alone and includes them. The bloke who quietly checks on his mate after hearing “I’m fine” said in that very specific voice that absolutely means they are not fine. The colleague who gives credit instead of stealing it; the stranger who hands a lost wallet untouched to the police; the nurse who still speaks gently to you during her twelfth exhausting hour.
Civilisation survives because millions of people still choose beauty over ugliness every single day without applause and beauty, in this context, has nothing to do with appearance.
Some of the most beautiful people you will ever meet are exhausted carers wearing supermarket fleeces. They are bus drivers waiting an extra ten seconds for someone running. They are teachers buying classroom supplies with their own money. They are neighbours quietly mowing an elderly person’s lawn without posting it online with inspirational piano music. Beautiful souls rarely announce themselves because they don’t need it. On the other hand, ugly ones cannot stop advertising.
There’s also a strange loneliness in being deeply affected by ugliness when other people seem numb to it. You start feeling like you’re wandering through a world where basic empathy has become a specialist hobby. You watch dishonesty get rewarded, narcissism mistaken for confidence, loudness mistaken for leadership.
Meanwhile genuinely decent people often sit quietly wondering if they are the problem because they still care.- they aren’t but sometimes we need reminding of this. Sensitivity to ugliness is often evidence that your moral compass still functions.
Of course, none of this means humanity is doomed. If anything, the exhaustion exists precisely because people still recognise the difference between ugliness and goodness. If nobody cared anymore, none of this would feel painful. The problem is not that ugly behaviour exists. Human beings have always been capable of selfishness, cruelty and cowardice. History could frankly be summarised as “people repeatedly making terrible decisions with increasing technological efficiency.” The problem is volume amplified by our ability to view this every time we go onto social media: modern life delivers every ugly story instantly into your hand before breakfast. Corruption, bullying, scams, performative cruelty, public shaming, manipulation, violence, rage. You carry the emotional weight of strangers all day without even realising it.
No human nervous system evolved for this much exposure to other people’s darkness, which is why protecting your own soul matters now more than ever. Not through denial or fake positivity; no one needs another beige motivational quote in cursive font telling them to “choose joy” while the world burns around them. But by consciously refusing to become ugly in response to ugliness, that’s the real test:
Can you remain decent without becoming naive?
Can you stay soft without becoming weak?
Can you stay honest without becoming cruel?
Can you stay hopeful without becoming ridiculous?
That balance is harder than most people realise, because ugliness can be contagious. Spend enough time around bitterness and you start sharpening your own edges. Spend enough time watching cruelty succeed and cynicism begins disguising itself as intelligence. Eventually you risk becoming the very thing you were exhausted by in the first place.
Perhaps that is the quiet battle of adulthood: not becoming hard, performative, hollow and above all, not losing your ability to feel disturbed by bad behaviour; because the day ugliness stops bothering us entirely is probably the day something important dies inside society.
