The Coffee Drinkers Who Enraged Social Media
Yesterday I encountered the kind of article that would be inconceivable in a pre-social media era, when we were still stupid and petty but in a markedly different manner than we are now.
The headline was “Woman sparks backlash after revealing she spends each morning drinking coffee with her husband in their garden.” Other headlines I imagine they contemplated include, “Man enjoys sandwich, sends internet into a violent rage” and “Couple likes taking walks at sunset, are cancelled and become instant pariahs.”
Can you even imagine a headline like that in 1989?
The words that fueled an avalanche of international hate were, “My husband and I wake up every morning and bring our coffee out to our garden and sit and talk for hours. Every morning. It never gets old and we never run out of things to talk [about]. Love him so much.”
Even if this innocuous tweet came from someone famous and powerful, the rage directed towards it would still seem excessive and wildly off base. It would make more sense if Drake were the one tweeting that he liked to sit in his garden and talk with his partner for hours but even then it would be a non-story.
Who cares? Seriously, who could possibly care?
The fact that all of this vitriol is directed towards someone who is essentially a nobody makes the whole thing even more surreally misguided.
Social media is a frighteningly powerful anger engine. It takes our complicated emotions and ideas about the world and transforms them into pure, unthinking, violent rage.
That’s the essence of the backlash directed towards this woman and her husband. An internet that otherwise had no idea who this woman was, and could not care less about her and her life flew into a rage when she had the audacity to publish a tweet that, in the harshest possible light, could be seen as bragging unbecomingly about her idyllic existence.
People who responded to a woman saying she liked to drink coffee with her hubby in the morning with incandescent anger felt that she was being narcissistic and arrogant, smug and condescending.
How dare this vile braggart thrust her amazing, unattainable life in the faces of us, the poverty-stricken unwashed? Where did she get off talking about how she likes to relax for HOURS at a time doing nothing much at all with her dear hubby when some people work in a coal mine 20 hours a day and will never know the loving touch of another human being?
The rage directed towards the couple was ostensibly class-based. Rage-tweeter after rage-tweeter lashed out at these monsters of privilege for ostensibly being so rich and living such an incredible life of luxury that they don’t have to work or struggle or suffer while we, the masses, lead grim, joyless lives of unceasing labor.
Didn’t these evil motherfuckers have jobs? Were they born rich? Why did they get to spend their mornings gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes and lovingly sipping high-quality java? What makes them so special?
People apoplectic at someone having the audacity to publicly disseminate a sentiment like “I like having coffee with my partner in the morning” made a lot of assumptions about this couple, none of them flattering or kind.
They assumed the righteous armor of the armchair class warrior because otherwise their tweets would come across, rightly, as the product of petty resentment, unhinged jealousy.
Social media runs on jealousy and rage. If someone posts about something nice in their life that they like and are proud of, like a morning tradition of having coffee and chatting with the hubby for hours, then there’s inevitably going to be people responding, “How dare you brag about how easy you have it? Don’t you realize that other people don’t have what you have? Don’t you have any shame?”
I am as prone to jealousy and resentment as anyone else. I’ll go further and say that because I grew up in a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents and was abandoned by my mother and work in pop culture media, I am even more prone to jealousy and resentment than my peers.
Jealousy is a Pandora’s Box for me. Once opened it unleashes all of the evils in the world. If I allowed myself to feel jealous it would incapacitate me. I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else, let alone work and raise two neurodivergent boys.
As much as it is humanly possible, I try not to be jealous of other people. I try not to think about what they have and I do not. I try to focus on myself and the incredible challenge of just getting by from day to day. The only person I am even remotely jealous of is superstar. novelist John Green but that’s a story for another time.
I consequently feel, at most, mild annoyance at this couple and their hours of coffee talk each morning. Their lives have nothing to do with mine. My life has nothing to do with theirs. We come from different generations and lead fundamentally different lives.
I’m not going to waste mental energy thinking about the lives of these complete strangers, let alone envying them.
I encourage others to follow my lead. Don’t waste your time and energy being jealous of strangers on the internet. Save that time and energy for things that matter, like your family or your partner or your modestly read personal website.
Someone, somewhere is spending HOURS drinking coffee and chatting pleasantly with their partner because they’re attractive and 24 and childless and that’s the kind of thing you can do when you’re that age and don’t have much in the way of responsibilities. And that reflects on your life in no way whatsoever and honestly, it’s entirely on you if you think that it does.
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