Grievance Is a Business Model

There is a thriving industry you have almost certainly encountered, whether or not you have a name for it. It speaks to men about how women have wronged them, or to women about how men have failed them, and it does so with apparent sympathy, fluency, and conviction. It names your pain accurately. It tells you it is not your fault. And then it points that pain at a target — the other sex, or feminism, or men as a class — and invites you to stay, watch more, buy the course, join the community, share the video.

I want to name this industry plainly, because naming it is the first defence against it. It is the grievance business, and it runs on a simple model: human pain is abundant, attention is valuable, and the most reliable way to convert one into the other is to give a hurting person an enemy. The people doing this are not your allies in a struggle. They are vendors, and the product they are selling is your own resentment, sold back to you at the price of your attention and, often, your money.

Why grievance sells so well

To see why this works, you have to understand what grievance does in the attention economy, which rewards engagement above all else. And grievance is one of the most engaging emotional states there is.

A satisfied person disengages — they feel resolved, and they leave. An aggrieved person cannot let go. Resentment is sticky; it loops, it rehearses the injury, it seeks confirmation, it wants the next video that explains once more why you were wronged and who did it to you. So content that generates grievance outperforms content that generates peace, reliably, at scale. A creator who soothes you and sends you off to live your life has lost a viewer. A creator who inflames you, validates you, and hands you an enemy has secured one. The incentive structure does not reward the people helping you heal. It rewards the people keeping the wound open, because an open wound keeps you watching.

This is why the grievance merchants are so fluent at naming your pain. The accurate diagnosis is the hook — it earns your trust, makes you feel finally understood. It is what comes after the diagnosis that betrays the game: not a path towards resolution, connection, or peace, but a target, a grievance to nurse, a reason to come back tomorrow for more of the same.

It runs in every direction

The crucial thing to understand — and the thing the grievance business desperately needs you not to notice — is that the identical model runs on all sides at once.

There is an industry telling men that women are the problem, and an industry telling women that men are the problem, and they are structurally the same business. They use the same techniques: name the real pain, validate it, supply an enemy, monetise the resentment. They feed off each other beautifully, because the grievance peddled to one side becomes evidence for the grievance peddled to the other — every inflammatory video aimed at men supplies ammunition to the creators inflaming women, and vice versa. The two industries appear to be at war, and are in fact business partners, each generating the raw material the other needs. The men's-grievance creator and the women's-grievance creator are not enemies. They are colleagues in the same trade, and the customers of both are the marks.

And the cost of this falls on exactly the connection both sides claim to want. Every hour spent marinating in why the other sex is the enemy is an hour that makes actual connection with an actual person harder — more suspicious, more defended, more primed to read the worst into the human across the table. The grievance business does not just take your attention and money. It degrades your capacity for the very thing that would actually address the loneliness underneath the grievance.

How to tell an ally from a vendor

So how do you tell the difference between someone genuinely trying to help and someone selling you your own resentment? There is a fairly reliable test, and it is worth carrying around.

An ally points you towards resolution; a vendor points you towards an enemy. An ally, even when they accurately name a wrong done to you, ultimately wants to leave you more capable of connection, peace, and agency — better able to live and love. A vendor wants to leave you more aggrieved than they found you, because your grievance is their revenue, and a resolved customer is a lost one. Watch where the content leaves you. If you finish it feeling clearer, calmer, and more capable of dealing with actual people, that was probably help. If you finish it angrier, more certain the other half of humanity is your enemy, and vaguely wanting more of the same, you were just sold something — and the thing you bought was your own resentment, marked up and handed back.

The grievance is real; let me be clear about that, because this is not a claim that nobody has been wronged. People of both sexes carry genuine injuries from how the modern world handles love and connection. But your genuine pain is exactly what makes you a valuable customer, and the people monetising it are not on your side just because they saw it clearly. The deepest act of resistance available to you is almost embarrassingly simple: refuse to be a customer. Notice when your resentment is being cultivated rather than soothed, and close the tab. The grievance business cannot run without your attention — and you can stop supplying it the moment you recognise what it is actually selling.