Why I Quit Talk Radio (And What It Taught Me About Offense)

I used to listen to talk radio every time I got in the car. Didn’t matter which station, they were all doing the same thing: making me angry at people I’d never met, over things that had nothing to do with my actual life. I started sorting people into categories, A through Z, based on whether they agreed with me. My wife would get in the car, last about eight seconds, and ask how I could stand listening to it.

Here’s what I eventually realized: I wasn’t informed. I was addicted. There’s a difference.

We live in a culture that runs on outrage the way a car runs on gas. Clickbait headlines aren’t accidental, they’re engineered to make you angry enough to click. Social media doesn’t reward understanding, it rewards reaction. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, we’ve convinced ourselves that being offended is basically the same thing as being right.

It’s not.

I’m not telling you to stop caring about what happens in the world, or to pretend you don’t have opinions. What I’m saying is this: you don’t have to let other people make you angry just because being angry is profitable for them. Outrage sells ad space. Outrage gets clicks. Outrage gets votes. And most of the time, the people stoking it aren’t actually trying to help you understand anything, they’re trying to keep you hooked.

Here’s a secret about politics that might annoy you: I think the far right and the far left are, in a lot of ways, the same bird with two wings, both flapping in a direction that leads away from actual peace. I’m not telling you which party to vote for. I’m telling you that neither one has your soul’s best interest at heart, and neither one is worth losing your peace over.

Jesus talked about this same dynamic almost two thousand years before Twitter existed. In Luke 17, He said offenses, temptations, things that make us stumble, are sure to come. Not maybe. Sure to come. Because we live among imperfect people in a broken world, and someone is always going to say or do something that gives you an opening to be angry.

The question isn’t whether the bait will show up. It always does. The question is whether you’re going to bite.

I stopped listening to talk radio, not because the issues stopped mattering, but because I realized I was letting other people’s business model manage my emotional life. These days I try to ask a different question before I let something make me angry: Is this something that actually matters, or is this just bait?

Most of the time, it’s bait.