Yet they were all written in 2014, when Slate published a year-end package that it called “ The Year of Outrage .” It included an interactive calendar noting what Americans had been outraged about every day of that year.

Charles Duhigg: The real roots of American rage

Remember when NBC was under fire for broadcasting a comedian’s light mockery of Pearl Harbor survivors? And when a costume that the recording artist Macklemore performed in struck some as anti-Semitic? And when Jennifer Lawrence made a rape joke? And Ira Glass’s dig at Shakespeare? And a Washington Post contributor’s remark on marriage and gender violence? And Raven-Symoné’s comment about her racial identity?

Yeah, me neither.

As I perused the Slate calendar, I started to suspect that most of the items of outrage are forgotten even by many of the people who expressed outrage at the time. Yet four years on, outrage is still regularly pegged to matters as trivial as an aquarium’s tweet about an overweight otter, to cite a recent example.

“All of this raises a question: If nothing comes from the outrage, what was the point?” Jamelle Bouie asked in 2014. “It feels good to express disgust, of course, and when that comes with social affirmation—favorites, retweets, followers, blog posts—there’s an incentive to show more anger. But I think there’s more to it than that. In a world where prejudice and privilege still rule the day, it’s cathartic for a lot of lefties—even straight white dudes—to show outrage, even if it leads to nothing in particular.”

He went on to characterize the costs and benefits of that mode:

By raging against something … you can voice your anger at the status quo, which, in the past year especially, seems to have frozen in place. And with a simple retweet, you can signify just what camp you’re in. In a sense, for the social-media left, cultural outrage is a substitute for politics. You may not be able to move the Democratic Party toward a more populist agenda or stop the Republican takeover of state governments across the country or protect abortion rights or even make media more inclusive. But you can punish social transgressions and in doing so, affirm the values that are missing from so much of the digital and analog worlds. The problem, unfortunately, is that this doesn’t give you a material win. It doesn’t ameliorate any actual injustice. And it might, in the end, harm efforts to make change. If outrage stands in for activism, if we’re focused on the moral temperature of Internet individuals, then we’re distracted from the collective action—and collective institution building—that makes real reform possible.

There are other costs, too. Some of the “guilty” are over-punished for some social transgressions; even many innocents live in fear of online mobs.

And when so much is treated as outrageous, a culture loses the ability to focus on the ills that matter or even to easily describe why they are truly outrageous. For example, I’ve argued for many years that more outrage is warranted in response to U.S. drone strikes that kill innocent civilians. Circa 2009, one could convey the horrors that affected certain villages in Yemen or Pakistan by talking about the awfulness of “feeling unsafe in one’s home,” or “the erasure of a marginalized community.”