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You open Instagram. A teenager, iPhone in hand, blue debit card blazing on-screen, approaches a middle-aged man. The man is seated, swiping idly through his phone.
The iPhone-bearing teen touches his device against the phone of his unsuspecting victim, and the “ca-ching!” of a successful Apple Wallet transaction chimes out sonorously through the halls of the mall.
“Thank you, bro!” says the grateful teen, swiping quickly from the screenshotted blue card to the image of a $100 receipt on his screen. He shows it to the man.
The older man fumbles momentarily for words and then mutters something inaudible. Suddenly, he stands up, evidently agitated, and steps heavily toward the boy.
The video quickly begins to unravel. Hands are thrown back and forth, both individuals tussling, shouting, grabbing, and pushing. The conflict descends, in a dizzying sequence, to the floor. Then the video ends, having lured and immersed victim and viewers into an unsatisfying, unsettling wave of rage.
Ideally, at this point, you close Instagram and ask yourself, “How did we get here?”
The answer just so happens to be the Oxford University Press 2025 Word of the Year: the well-known, yet elusive contemporary phenomenon referred to as rage bait.
Rage bait is defined as: “Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.”
Rage bait takes many forms online.
One example is a video that gained traction earlier last year. A pair of hands feverishly tosses McDonald’s fries and burgers into an over-oiled pan, while the caption “Preparing Dinner for My Husband After His 12-Hour Shift” floats on the screen. The goal is to send viewers rushing to the comments section, where they will call out the atrocity and subsequently boost the creator’s content into algorithmic omnipresence. As evidenced by Oxford University Press, this isn’t some niche trend. Rage bait has permeated virtually every type of content, from relationship advice to child-parent interactions to politics.
The most unfortunate party to this widespread phenomenon is not the adults that view this content, nor even those that create it. It is children. Before discussing the plight of the children of planet earth, 2026, however, let’s take a brief moment to examine the perspective of a fictional child from Asteroid B-612.
The little prince, from Antoine de St. Exupery’s 1943 novella of the same name, is a remarkably precocious individual. The story of his journeys proceeds across a slew of fictional planets with a dreamlike sweep and majesty, from one forlorn character to another. Yet there is perhaps no moment so fascinating as the prince’s encounter with the lamplighter on the fifth planet.
Upon arriving at the planet, the prince is stunned that “there is just enough room…for a streetlamp and a lamplighter,” who is tasked with lighting and extinguishing a single streetlight at the appropriate times each day. To readers, this profession, at least under these circumstances, is absurd. The prince, however, offers a different perspective:
When he lights his street lamp, it is as if he brought one more star to life, or one flower. When he puts out his lamp, he sends the flower, or the star, to sleep. That is a beautiful occupation. And since it is beautiful, it is truly useful.
Now that is a truly child-like perspective. But I tend to think the prince would have a less optimistic outlook if he observed the monotonous habits of teens today.
A 2024 Pew study, conducted in the United States, revealed that at least half of American teens were active on Instagram, TikTok, or Youtube on a daily basis. The result? Day after day, hour after hour, they are being exposed to videos whose sole intent is to enrage.
Not only is such content addictive, but it is beginning to bleed out into real-world behavior. Take the teenage trickster, pinging his phone off that of his fellow mallgoer, insisting that a successful, if unconsenting, money transfer had occurred. This is simply rage bait that has spilled off the screen and into a real-life interaction. And this video is not an anomaly—there are hundreds just like it, many with millions of views. Rage bait is thus not a purely online phenomenon, bearing purely online effects; it is beginning to flood social interactions and to become, for many children, an acceptable and popular way of gaining attention and confidence.
There is, however, a viable response to this issue.
Much of the wisdom of the Catholic Faith and Tradition, which has been handed down across millennia, is characterized by beauty. Like the wise little prince, all the saints and sages of the Church have recognized the indispensable role of beauty. Augustine even addressed God by this very title: “O Beauty so ancient and so new!” (Confessions, Book 10, XXVII).
One theologian, in particular, who understood the role of beauty was Hans Urs Von Balthasar. “Beauty” he writes in The Glory of the Lord, “simply forms a halo, an untouchable crown around the double constellation of the true and the good…” In the same treatise, he states: “Beauty is the word which shall be our first.”
If beauty is the first stepping stone toward goodness and truth, and even the very thing that holds the two together, should it not characterize and fill any Catholic pedagogy, even at the earliest stages?
Now, to be sure, most kids won’t sit and contemplate beauty in a heartbeat. Nonetheless, the tastes and interests of children are merely beginning to develop throughout their educational years. The goal then for educators is to give great and beautiful art, literature, and music the opportunity to reach a child. Addictive online content like rage bait necessarily escalates to mimetic action particularly because of its shock value.
According to Benedict XVI, beauty “gives man a healthy ‘shock,’ it draws him out of himself, wrenches him away from resignation and from being content with the humdrum.” While online rage bait leads to enraging actions, beauty, according to Benedict, opens for man “the eyes of his heart and mind, giving him wings, carrying him aloft.”
Like Eli teaching the young Samuel to recognize the voice of God in the quiet calling of the night, parents and teachers alike have the chance to show children how to find God in something beautiful. All it takes is some time and some patience, and they will respond to it. After all, Antoine de St. Exupery didn’t carelessly make his hero a child. The little prince is wise precisely because he can see things that the adult characters miss. In the tiresome task of perpetual lamp lighting, the little boy sees a man illuminating the sky for others. He is a child with an eye for the beautiful, and this has transformed his perspective.
We would do well to form children like the little prince: children that recognize beauty where it is present. Such minds, carefully and generously formed by beauty, will have little interest in the vapid nonsense of our day.
Educating the young, and doing so with the great works of music, art, and literature, is a beautiful task.
“And since it is beautiful, it is truly useful.”
Photo by John Tuesday on Unsplash
