A long time ago, I read Waiting for the Rain by Charles Mungoshi, one of Zimbabwe’s prolific writers. The novel wrestled with the pain and dislocation born from the clash between old and new ways. The educated young man determined to go overseas, and the family elders convinced that his duty was to remain and carry the family forward. It was, and is, in many ways a story about waiting and the tensions that emerge when different visions of life collide.

Years later, it feels as though we are living through another kind of waiting, one peculiar to the age of social media: waiting for offence. Every time I log on, even as someone who is far from the most active online, I encounter the same pattern. There is a certain clique with a certain temperament, always poised to be aggrieved. Nothing is too small or too ordinary. Even children going to a school prom can become the subject of unsolicited cultural warfare.

What strikes me about this is that the offence often seems to exist before the event itself. People are no longer merely reacting to what happens; they are arriving already prepared to be scandalised. Some seem less interested in understanding the world than in finding fresh material for indignation. Joy must be interrogated, innocence must be politicised, and ordinary moments must answer for themselves before a court that has already reached its verdict.

What I keep returning to is how unlike Mungoshi’s waiting this is. Lucifer did not choose his position. The boarding school, the colonial gap it opened between him and his own people, the expectations pressing in from every side: none of that was his design. He was held in place by forces he did not build, and the waiting was what that felt like from inside. You finish the novel with grief for him, not judgment. You do not blame a man for being pulled apart by something larger than himself.

And yet I see it every time I log on. A photograph of children dressed for their school prom, and within the hour the comments fill with people who did not arrive to see the children. They arrived to find what was wrong with them. The dress. The posture. The hair. Each comment landing with the confidence of a person who came already knowing what they would find.

I have been trying to work out whether they are genuinely angry. It matters, because genuine anger has a source. Even when the target is wrong, you can trace the line back to something real in the person’s experience, and a person in genuine anger is, in principle, reachable. But what I observe does not look like anger so much as habit. And behind the habit there is a mechanism most of us understand better than we admit. These platforms do not reward measured responses. They reward reactions, and the strongest reactions travel fastest. A comment that says the photograph is lovely gets a response from the family. A comment that says the dress is inappropriate gets a response from everyone. The person who learns, consciously or not, that outrage returns attention will produce outrage. Over time the production becomes automatic. They are not performing anger. They have been trained into its shape.

I say this carefully, because I am not sure I am entirely outside it. I have felt the pull of a sharp reply in a thread. I have read something and wanted to say, with some precision, exactly how wrong it was. The difference I would draw is not virtue. It is that I came to the feed looking for something else, and the irritation surprised me. For the person harvesting offence, the irritation is the destination. They would not know what to do with a scroll that offered nothing to correct.

I find myself asking what it does to a person, to live in that posture. To wake up each day prepared to be offended is to train the mind towards fracture. It sharpens the eye for error while dulling the capacity to simply see what is there. Over time it becomes a habit of perception, a lens through which even the most innocent gestures are stripped of their innocence and recast as provocations. The mind will faithfully find what it has been trained to seek.

There is something else that sits beneath this, something quieter and more difficult to name. The person who waits for offence begins, slowly, to lose access to proportion. Everything arrives at the same emotional volume. A child’s dress, a political decision, a genuine injustice, all flattened into a single register of reaction. Once that flattening happens, discernment weakens. And when discernment weakens, even serious issues struggle to receive the attention they deserve, because they compete in the same space as trivialities that have been inflated to match them.

In that sense, the cost is not only personal, it is collective. A society that cannot distinguish between what matters and what merely irritates becomes unstable in its priorities. Energy is spent, loudly and publicly, on things that pass, while deeper problems remain, requiring the kind of patience and sustained attention that outrage rarely provides.

What troubles me is that this habit disguises itself as vigilance. It presents as awareness, as moral clarity, as a refusal to let anything slide. And there is, within that, a kernel that feels right. A society benefits from people who are attentive, who question, who refuse to accept harm quietly. But vigilance without proportion becomes something else entirely. It becomes suspicion as a default setting, and suspicion has a way of remaking the world into something far harsher than it is.

I return, then, to a simpler question, one that feels almost out of place in the current climate: what would it look like to let a moment remain what it is? To see children at a prom and allow that to be enough. To encounter something unfamiliar and approach it with curiosity before critique. To hold back, not out of silence, but out of a deliberate choice to understand before responding.

This is our new waiting: not for rain, not for change, not even for justice. Waiting for the next excuse to be offended.