The other thing about rage as an addiction is that it likes to cloak itself in feelings of righteousness. Like, yeah, there’s the stereotypical white male gamebro who needs to invent/buy into elaborate conspiracy theories about how Cultural Marxist SJWs are trying to replace the white race by doing an all-female Ghostbusters remake or whatever in order to justify the amount of time and energy that they put into hating it; or the Twitter dogpiler who needs to conflate “having bad opinions about cartoon series” with “being a pedophile” so that they don’t feel like a bully; but there’s also self-abusing by looking up hateful, bigoted opinions that pertain specifically to people like you so that you can sputter and rage and feel attacked and reinforce your sense of identity because look at the assholes who are attacking you!
What you need is a sort of cutoff frequency in your own brain; just little voice that says, “That’s irrelevant; move on.”
I also think that you can’t underestimate the value of rage as a sort of community building exercise. It neatly divides the world into an in-group of righteous folks just like you who are just minding their own business and an out-group of evil villains who are trying to destroy you / the things that you love for nefarious purposes. In an era when communities of all kinds have eroded away under neoliberal atomization, even this illusory, self-destructive feeling of Belonging can be intoxicating.
