I believe a certain kind of content is growing in popularity on social media, and I’d call it “selling rebellion.”

The formula is straightforward: it makes people believe everyone around them is constantly disrespecting, manipulating, controlling, undervaluing, or using them, then gives them increasingly aggressive rules for how to react.

If your friend didn’t reply quickly enough, cut them off. If your partner disagreed with you, then they are toxic. If your manager criticized you, it means they don’t respect you. If your family questioned one of your decisions, they are trying to control your life.

Content like this may seem encouraging because it offers simple explanations for complex emotions, and it can make a person feel strong, independent, and validated in a 60-second video.

Yet genuine relationships aren’t like short-form content.

People fail to understand one another. They are liable to make errors. Their communication is often poor, and they at times let us down even though they are not toxic, abusive, narcissistic, jealous, or manipulative. Although boundaries are necessary in healthy relationships, communication, patience, accountability, compromise, and the capacity to tolerate disagreement are also necessary.

What concerns me is not people being taught how to look after themselves or how to leave genuinely harmful situations, since that is important; the issue arises when every unpleasant interaction is treated as proof that someone should become more suspicious, more confrontational, or more detached from the people nearby.

The creator receives the views, likes, comments, and followers, while the audience puts the advice into real life and has to live with the consequences.

That is why I believe it is important to become much more critical of the advice we encounter on social media. Before putting anything we hear online into practice, we should ask ourselves whether it helps us better understand our relationships or merely teaches us to see enemies everywhere.

Just because something feels empowering doesn’t mean that it is healthy. While some of the most widely shared advice provokes the strongest emotional response, it is not the advice that helps us lead a better life.