“Not to bring this up again but…”—Gossip and the Art of Beating a Dead Horse
It’s a well-known fact that the human brain is trained to focus on the negative. That’s why news outlets report on all the atrophies of the world instead of highlighting the good (though it probably doesn’t help that the ratio of good to bad happening right now is quite disproportionate). It’s natural to catch the negative, and keep it in mind much longer than you would the positive. Ask yourself, for how long is it acceptable for something that bothers you to stay stuck in the web of your mind?
Do you remember that time when someone you knew did something awful to you or one of your friends? That person was likely ejected from your life or lost all the good impressions you had of them. You may have even discussed their actions time after time from every possible perspective. To the new people you meet, they eventually come to understand this person as an urban legend—out of sight, but forever haunting. At first, you’re upset: how could something like this happen? How could you be done so dirty? And your friends, they’ll obviously side with you, be upset on your behalf, whether they were initially involved or not. Call it gossip, call it justice—either way, it’s a dead horse reading for a flogging.
Now, I would like to be very clear here and say that gossip is a unisex activity. It’s a common stereotype that gossiping and intergroup hostility are activities reserved for women and girls, but that is simply not true. Listen to any group of men for more than thirty seconds and you will find them to be just as critical, impressively so. And no, genderqueer folks are not being left out of this observation either— people, regardless of identity, yearn to ruminate, no matter what.
Oftentimes, as previously mentioned, discussion of a matter that has already been laid to rest is often labelled as a superficial and brainless activity. Either that, or it’s seen as malicious and catty: here we go, speaking poorly of someone who did something wrong months ago, right? Not quite.
There has been an uptick in discussion about the concept of beating a dead horse lately on social media. Take for example this Tiktok that reframes gossip into analysis. It’s unclear what started this reframing, but it seems to be relatively new. The concept of gossip has now become an activity that entails thorough analysis and critical retrospective of something wrong. Instead of finding joy in someone’s previous mistakes and misgivings, and using those to bully them, groups of people are finding unity in trying to find answers that lie in memories. What really happened? Why did things spin out of control? What led to the events that happened? Gossip isn’t so much a shallow activity as it is proof of critical thinking in a social setting. In fact, it should be celebrated with the way it forces people to rethink their actions, challenge their beliefs on what their personal differences are between right and wrong, and consider what leads the people around them to engage in the behaviors they see as natural.
There is a fine line between being critical and bullying. No one should be advocating for retributive justice for actions that are dead and buried, but we as a community need to get comfortable with revisiting previous events with a more critical, careful lens when something unsavory takes place. It gets to a point where negativity grows overwhelming and can leak into vicious territory, but it’s important to use those critical thinking muscles that have likely been rotting and use them to better understand both the good and bad of the people around us.