THINGS escalate fast on the internet. That’s no new observation - there are memes a-plenty making neat mockery of just how efficiently a discussion can spiral out of hand. We have the notion of Godwin’s Law as one example of the genre: it doesn’t matter what the issue, it will be only moments into the argument before someone chucks in a comparison to the Nazis. 

Have a firm opinion on cheese? Give it a minute and someone will be making reference to Hitler. Give it another minute and someone will be making a link to independence and asking why you hate Scotland.

This is a niche concern but one of the most comedically divisive issues on Twitter is what has become known with fond trepidation as “the shorthand discourse”. 

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Some journalists learn shorthand; some do not. You can probably live quite happily with those twin statements being the sum total of your knowledge on the subject.

And yet, and yet… every so often a journalist will tweet about how shorthand is a vital skill being put to death by lazy Millennials who don’t give two hoots about the fundamental tenets of the trade.

Or a journalist will tweet that Boomer old hacks are making fools of themselves by toiling over a notebook when a recording device will do the job for you. These dinosaurs can’t schedule a post on Instagram or cut a video for social. Won’t they look to their own skill set before coming for the youth?

I made the mistake once of expressing an opinion on The Shorthand Discourse. I thought wrongly — as I often do — that my position was fairly mild. 

Some journalists will find shorthand invaluable, some will never need it. I think a person can learn shorthand and also learn how to cut a video. It’s always better to expand your skill set rather than take to the internet to boast of de-skilling your profession, I’d gently offer.

Well. That way dragons lay. Very rapidly the old folk advocating for shorthand were accused of “gatekeeping journalism” and, worse, of ableism. No one had said that you can’t be a journalist without shorthand. That would plainly be untrue, given the great number of journalists working quite happily without it. 

However, there were tweets setting out real upset and sincerely felt “distress”. 

It’s easy to diminish and difficult to empathise with that seemingly hyperbolic level of reaction. It’s a standard part of current discussion, though, to find responses to even the most innocuous things set at that amped-up level.

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As therapy-speak has become increasingly mainstream, so too has the tendency to pathologise the most normal of feelings. Influencers, TikTokers, well-meaning magazine articles all encourage the use of phrases like “boundary-setting” or “toxic relationships” or, most commonly, “self-care”, not to mention “micros aggressions”. 

While all of this is designed to support self-improvement, pathologising normal feelings may just be having the opposite effect. It’s common to hear people talk of depression, anxiety or, again, distress when what they are feeling is the normal business of being alive. 

As Mr Rodgers might have said, sometimes people just feel sad, and that’s ok.  

By extension, things that people feel offended by are often expressed - using the language of therapy-speak - as causing literal physical harm. 

Issues that are frustrating or difficult or against one’s principles, are instead framed as being “unsafe”. Students, say, will talk about feeling “unsafe” with lecturers on campus who hold views they find unpalatable. 

Instead of meeting these opposing opinions with resilience and intellectual rigour, the dissenting view is described as creating an unsafe environment and that’s that - argument ended before it’s begun. 

In social science, one interesting area of study is the self-reported happiness levels of right-leaning and left-leaning people. Those who are politically conservative generally report being happier than those with progressive views do.

There are various theories for this. For one, it would make sense that conservatives are able to rationalise the existence of social inequality and feel less moved by its effects on other people’s lives because of a belief in personal responsibility: it’s not, say, the fault of the system that my neighbours are struggling financially, it’s that they don’t work hard enough.  

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In fact, studies find that consistency and coherence are important to a satisfying life. Progressive politics asks for change - change both in society and in the systems that support our society. 

Forever reaching for something different could undermine the liberal sense of stability while those on the right are happier because they believe in an unchanged continuation of the current order of things. 

Stability creates a feeling of comfort, which makes people happy. Conservatives are more likely to have a belief in God, a belief in a community focused around shared religious observances and a belief in the stability of marriage, which creates comfort and happiness.

There is a Catch-22 here, a paradox. To be happy, the theories go, an individual has to set aside their personal happiness and join institutions - religion, marriage - that call on them to prioritise others.

The paradox is that individual happiness comes from ceasing to focus on your own needs. But the paradox is also that this act of prioritising others is cited as working only for those on the right, not those on the left whose political stance is premised on prioritising the welfare of others.

Happiness and contentment link directly to politics. The ultimate aim of any political system is to establish and maintain a set up whereby the public are content with their lives, how they function, what they may achieve. It is better to have an electorate that votes to maintain a status quo they are pleased with than to have an unpredictable electorate who want to disrupt a government that makes them unhappy. 

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Therapy-speak is designed to create a way to frame our experiences and feelings in a way that ensures our happiness but instead has developed a narrative where discomfort is heightened to fear, basic dislike manifests in silencing other views and even simple issues result in challenges of bigotry. Instead of greater comfort, people feel under threat. 

The immediate problem is that it’s hard to argue for rationalism and against emotional sensitivity when you have a government using cruelty as a political device. It’s hard to argue that everyone is, in reality, safe when, plainly, certain groups are not. Only look at the Tory ploy to deal punitively with asylum seeking people and Labour’s failure to adequately counter it. 

Much therapy-speak emotional hyperbole is self-indulgent, some is not. There’s a clear distinction between fearing for your life and being a bit peeved that folk at work disagree with you. It can only be harmful to encourage people to feel unsafe and under threat without offering any tools to operate with compassion, understanding or nuance. It’s difficult for anyone - on the left or the right - to feel happy when even simple things are framed as being a threat to our physical or emotional safety.

It’s hard for anyone, on the left or right, to be happy in this relentless quest for grievance.