Is Mean the New Peptide?
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Joel SteinWed, May 6, 2026 at 11:00 AM UTC
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Is Mean the New Peptide?GRAFISSIMO/GETTY IMAGES
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I was once called in to audition for a role on Breaking Bad. As I sat in a hallway outside the casting director’s office, the actor Matthew Lillard introduced himself to me. When I nervously confided that I’m not an actor and didn’t know what I was doing, he gave me some advice—to react naturally in the moment—which seemed very generous, considering we were up for the same role. I didn’t land the part of Gale, the nerdy meth-making assistant, but I did get an enduring appreciation for Lillard as a nice guy.
I had thought this was a universally held opinion. Then, late last year, the director Quentin Tarantino went on Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast and said that Paul Dano was “weak sauce. He’s a weak sister…the weakest male actor in SAG. The limpest dick in the world.” This is objectively untrue, since I am in SAG. Tarantino also added, “I don’t care for Owen Wilson. I don’t care for Matthew Lillard.” A few weeks later, at the AARP Movies for Grownups Awards, George Clooney defended the talents of all three actors, adding, “I don’t enjoy watching people be cruel.” This might technically be true, due to the “watching” part, but Clooney did begin a Covid-era Zoom interview by asking me what had happened to my career that led me to write for the AARP magazine.
It might be a stretch to say that Americans, as a people, have ever really been known for being nice. They owned slaves. They picnicked at hangings. Still, in terms of personal interactions—what some readers of this magazine might still call decorum—Americans have gotten meaner. Cruelty has been so normalized over the last decade that if 1970s NFL star Mean Joe Greene played today he would be known simply as Joe Greene. How did this happen?
The first thing I want to blame, because it requires no intellectual effort, is social media. We’re all riding a dopamine roller coaster up to acceptance and down to exclusion, causing a certain desperation to be noticed. “The online world has normalized a level of cruelty we wouldn’t have accepted 15 years ago,” says Ryan Martin, a psychologist (known as “The Anger Professor”), author of How to Deal with Angry People, and a dean at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. Ever since Richard Hatch broke the etiquette of Survivor in 2000 and won the game show by being hated, we have celebrated not being here to make friends. “There’s a tendency toward selfishness,” Martin says. “Sometimes it’s couched in therapyspeak—‘prioritize your own needs’ or ‘you don’t owe anyone anything’—and inherent in that is that you don’t have to be careful with people’s feelings.” You know things have gotten bad when therapists say there’s too much therapyspeak.
But it’s not just social media. Martin’s studies have shown that when there’s a high level of stress in society, people are more likely to act unpleasantly. Eras of existential political disagreement tend to be tense. One thing I learned from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is that if you accidentally bump into someone outside a Barcelona tapas bar during the Spanish Civil War, you’re likely to get your boquerones blown off.
If we see ourselves as characters in a Mad Max movie, it follows that we celebrate the drivers, commentators, and politicians with the longest middle fingers; we no longer want our leaders to be good role models but avatars of our anger. When Josh Safdie, the director of Marty Supreme, asked Kevin O’Leary to act in his movie, he unwittingly gave him the same rationale that the producers of Shark Tank had used: It was because O’Leary could be an asshole. Which O’Leary saw as a compliment.
“We’re more self-righteous about our anger, so we have the right to be mean to people,” says Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes, which was the basis for the movie Mean Girls. Wiseman was recently working with a group of middle school girls who pushed another girl out of their social circle for the crime of being too “pick-me.” When Wiseman explained how painful banishment can be, they were unable to see any point of view besides their own. “They said, ‘I am triggered by this other girl being upset by what we did to her.’ That’s weaponizing therapy talk. Which people are really good at, especially in the United States.”
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But it’s not all mean girls right now. In other ways we are also, oddly, awash in earnest kindness. Even critics are nice. I’ve known former New York Times restaurant reviewer Pete Wells since we were both in our twenties working at Time Out New York, and he’s disgusted by current criticism. “Most of them get called influencers, and they are almost relentlessly positive. When a critic says some place is not all it’s cracked up to be, there can be a little bit of pearl clutching. ‘Why is he so mean?’ People have lost the sense that negativity can be anything but haterism,” he says.
That happy talk, ironically, is enforced brutally. “The nastiest response I ever got from a review was after I reviewed Guy Fieri’s restaurant. There was an online fan community that sent misspelled and profane emails. You see critics edging around what they want to say so they won’t have to deal with the rabid mongrel hordes.” On the most recent season of The Traitors, contestants hesitated to go after Donna Kelce (who was indeed a traitor) because they feared that her future daughter-in-law’s fan army would attack them. If we can’t speak truth to Donna Kelce, what hope have we against the likes of Quentin Tarantino?
Actor Matthew Lillard was another subject of Tarantino’s disdain. Our writer, however, has found him to be a perfectly nice guy.Kristina Bumphrey - Getty Images
Alexandra O. Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves, argues that fake kindness and performative cruelty are symptoms of the same disease. “People think that being brash and telling hard truths is brave. People celebrate that, because they’re rightfully tired of the suffocating political correctness and politeness that says we’re going to paper over a difference and talk about the weather. They’re equally dehumanizing.”
Alison M. Cheperdak, founder of Elevate Etiquette, says increased anxiety has led us to these behavioral extremes. Instead of confronting a boss, people escalate by filing a complaint with HR. Instead of addressing an issue with a business owner, they leave a nasty review. Even bosses are afraid to talk directly to their workers, which is how Cheperdak gets a lot of her consulting work. “It’s easier to have me come in and say, ‘This is appropriate business attire,’ ” she says, than for an employer to risk seeming critical. We have Uber-Eatsed and texted and selfied and deinstitutionalized and materialisted our way into not knowing how to behave.
The solution, however, is to not participate in the mainstreaming of cruelty. Wiseman suggests that next time you’re on a text thread where someone slams a teacher or kid, express some empathy for the slammed. I have tried this. It does not work. My wife calls it “not being on her team.”
Hudson has a better solution, one I think I can pull off. “Unoffendability is the superpower of the 21st century,” she says. If Quentin Tarantino badmouths him, “Matthew Lillard can choose not to care.”
A few months ago, and a decade after our first meeting at that audition, I saw Lillard at a book party. He was as nice as I remembered. So I emailed him and asked him for a comment for this article. He never got back to me.
This story appears in the May 2026 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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