Everyone just wants to be oppressed now
There’s a strange tension in our current cultural moment where the traditional markers of success (stability, competence, resilience, etc.) are increasingly treated with a degree of suspicion, while the narration of personal struggle has become a primary form of social currency. I started thinking about this shift deeply a few months ago after encountering a post1 suggesting that many people no longer prioritize freedom because they would rather be recognized as oppressed. While the phrasing was somewhat dramatic, the underlying observation stuck with me because it highlights a significant modification in our cultural incentive structures. We have inadvertently engineered a social environment where the appearance of being marginalized comes with distinct, tangible perks. When you look at this phenomenon through a systems lens, it stops looking like a mass moral failing and starts looking like a rational response to a new set of market dynamics.
People are simply responding to the signals the system is sending them.
To be clear, I’m not referring to individuals who are actually navigating the heavy realities of injustice, but rather the shifting economy of how we discuss identity, pain, and power. What likely began as a necessary correction to elevate underrepresented voices has mutated into a status game that rewards performance over substance. There is a pervasive, unspoken suggestion in our current discourse that moral authority is derived not from what you have built or the competence you have demonstrated, but from the specific intersection of identity markers you can claim. The system currently weights the optics of oppression heavier than the evidence of capability.
It’s become increasingly common for people to preface their opinions or work with a detailed inventory of their identity qualifiers. We see essays, presentations, and social media posts opening with a list of personal traits that align the speaker with struggle, almost as a prerequisite for having a valid perspective. While this is often framed as providing necessary context, functionally it serves as a form of insulation against critique. Once a person has established their position within the hierarchy of harm, challenging their ideas becomes a socially risky endeavor that borders on taboo. This dynamic creates a protective moat around their arguments, effectively shutting down the feedback loops that are essential for intellectual and personal growth.
This posture is not limited to individual interactions because institutions have rapidly codified these incentives into their own operating systems. We observe this calibration in hiring processes, publishing deals, academic fellowships, and the algorithmic preferences of social media platforms. Identity has become a convenient heuristic for insight, a shortcut that bypasses the harder work of evaluating merit.
We have built systems that prioritize the aesthetics of marginalization over the content of character or output, and this is where the social fabric begins to fray.
When you incentivize the display of pain, you create a market for it, and people will naturally supply what the market demands, even if it means remaining in a state of fragility longer than necessary.
It’s important to recognize that this behavior is rarely a conscious manipulation, but rather the result of a powerful behavioral feedback loop. When an individual expresses strength, independence, or stoicism, they are often met with skepticism or indifference in the public square. Conversely, when that same individual publicizes a narrative of trauma or vulnerability, they are flooded with validation, attention, and social affirmation. The result is a culture that disproportionately rewards fragility while offering little currency for resilience, leaving people with very few reasons to do the hard work of getting stronger.
